Carnaval Des Perdus

You are signified by The Fool. Innocent, and young. Change lies at your feet.

Years pile into decades and fact becomes history, becomes rumour, becomes story, becomes history again. People wonder, how can the cabin be so desolate. The land around is vivid. Apples like rubies in its orchards, wildflowers in its grass. Animals drowse and graze in its meadow sunlight.

It’s humans who can’t flourish there, though many try. They unwind the nets of ivy thrown about its walls. Fix the crumbling chimney, and fresh-paint the rooms. Only to vanish. Shrivel up and blow away like any other dandelion seeds. So word spreads the place is death.

But now a light burns, and I can’t turn away.

I lay my fingertips on the windowsill. and all around me, moths beat themselves to powder on the dust-smoked glass. The candle burns on, careless of their countless tiny deaths. The door stands open and, unthinking, I cross the threshold.

You are covered by the Two of Swords. Blinded, the goddess kneels before the crescent moon, wielding twin blades she cannot use. Your trouble is stasis, the death of choice.

Shadows, thick as oil, and a voice behind the golden point of candle flame.

“What pretty eyes you have.” She steps into the light. Skin like cobweb stretched over the bone. The moth-wing flutter of her pulse against my cheek as she takes my face between her hands.

“Such a shame not to be using them,” she says, dust-scented breath stirring my hair. Glint of bone-white fingernails in the candlelight, the last thing I see before she buries her thumbs in my eyes.

Pain upon pain. Spilling over my limits and coiling back around to crush me like the muscled bands of a snake. The drip, drip, dripping noise of my blood falling from the tips of her fingers.

“Now we shall see,” she says.

As you are now, you are the Nine of Swords, reversed. A mind in torment, asleep on a bed of knives, your heart in your hand.

Graze of cold air over my skin, my clothes are gone, and scratching at my wrists feels like the bind of thick ropes. Splinters pierce my back. The air smells like spun sugar.

Music, and a drumroll of stamping feet. Then, a voice. Such a voice. Booming, rolling with echoes and whispers, like the surge of some growing madness.

“Indeed, my friends, he’s a most dangerous man. But here tonight the aim is not to maim and murder. It is to entertain!” The final word punches to a shout and a crowd I can’t see careens into screaming cheers. Through it all comes the ringing scrape of metal over metal.

Fear fills my blood with lightning and I pull at my ropes until the warm damp of blood soaks the fibres. The clash of metal comes again and the crowd simmers to a hush.

Whip of something through the air. Thud of impact vibrating the wood at my back. The crowd soars, drowning the air in riot. I can’t breathe for the press of noise invading me. Crawling in my ears and shivering through my bones. Chewing up my thoughts as I wait. Wait for the man to throw his knives again. For the spearing agony of a blade in my chest.

You are crossed by the Five of Swords. The snake makes his nest among blades. Your challenge is a difficult opponent.

“Come now, dry those eyes.” Even gentle, the voice is dreadful. As if the shrieking terror of every abandoned soul is being forced to clothe itself in words.

Silk against my fingers, a handkerchief pressed into my hand.

“I have no eyes.”

“Are you sure?” A hand, guiding mine. I press away my tears, blinking.

Shine of a gold lapel pin. A snake, one ruby eye gazing from a bed of black jacket.

“Don’t mind the doorkeeper. She likes her jokes.”

“Please, let me go. There’s been a mistake. I don’t belong here.”

I look into his face, and the world around me winks away. The eyes. Pits of black smoke where the eyes should be. The head tilted, a half smile shapes the lips.

“Did you see the candle?”

My voice fails. I only nod.

“Then there’s been no mistake.”

Death lies beneath you. The moth bares its wings, the smiling skull of its back; one cycle ends, another begins.

Flying. Or falling. The midnight silk sky of a big top tent, studded with gold sewn stars. Beneath me, nothing, a yawning drop to black sand and baying onlookers.

Callused hands grip my wrists, swing my weight. Toss me away.

Flying. And falling.

Snatched from the air. Swung, caught by my feet to hang upside down. Dropped, caught and dropped again. Flung and turned and swung. Dropped and twirled and tossed away.

Flying. Falling. Flying again.

You are crowned by the Knight of Wands, reversed. What you know is that you are alone.

I stand alone, barefoot among smaller tents. The bones of a white satin corset press into my ribs, a feathered bustle pricks the backs of my legs.

Everywhere stripes and fairy lights and colours. Red and white, gold and black.

Music - there’s always music - but faded now, as though I stand out of time. Forgotten.

A chance. And I run, trusting my way to luck. I reach the farthest tents, and face the stretch of grass between me and my last hope: the cabin.

I step into the open.

“Where are you flying to, little bird?” He is there, a motley crowd at his back. An audience. Always an audience. They spill from him like water, encircling me.

Bars sprout from the grass like weeds, reaching for the sky. Curving to twine themselves together above my head.

A cage.

A single bar snakes downward to curl around me, lifting me as it circles back on itself until I’m seated in a gently swinging hoop.

The Ringmaster smiles, the music rises. And the hoop begins to turn.

I dance, my limbs no longer my own. My spine curves, my fingers twirl. I pose and sway and spin. I try with every fibre of my being to turn to stone, as tears cling to my lashes and escape down my cheeks.

Still, I dance.

Behind you; The Chariot, a loss of control.

I perch, side-saddle on a painted horse, my reflection keeping pace as the carousel whirls. My hair in pigtails tied with pompoms, ruffs at my neck and ankles. Mismatched gloves reach past my elbows, the left white, the right black. Bells on the fluffy ballerina skirt and the cuffs of the capped sleeves. A half mask in the shape of a rabbit. Hiding my face.

More costume. More trappings. Less of what’s mine, and me.

The music leaps and capers, battering my senses. Rising, racing itself. Faster and faster as we fly around our circle.

I look into the blur beyond the carousel. I take a breath, and leap.

The ground slams every gasp of breath from my chest. Momentum tumbles me through the dirt to land at his feet, standing as if waiting for me.

“Oh, little bird. I gave you back your eyes, and still you don’t see.”

Before you lies The World. As above, so below.

He raises a hand, and everything stills. Silence, deep and absolute, shrouds the carnival like a settling avalanche.

As one, every bystander and carnival-goer, every barker and kinker and roustabout, freezes over like an ice sculpture. Even the animals quiet in their cages, the tigers stop pacing, the horses fall silent. Elephants let their trunks hang like slack ropes.

My skin crawls. I ache for the lost music. I look to the Ringmaster.

“Everything here is mine.”

And every living thing turns its head. Even the ones looking away, owlishly twist their faces toward me. Nausea bubbles my stomach, reaches up my throat. Time seems to drift and fade as they stare and stare and stare.

For the first time, I see them. Truly see them. A woman with the broken, bloody nubs of severed wings. Children like mist, carnival lights winking through their pearl-grey shapes. A harlequin with an axe buried in her heat, blood blending with the red of her costume. The tigers, white bone breaching their patterned skin. The horses, fire dripping between their teeth. Carnival guests with snakes in their hair, black claws at their fingertips. A man with the jutting jaws of a wolf. A contortionist peers at me from beneath many boneless legs.

A scream blossoms against my ribs, crowding the pound of my heart. I hold it back, pressing it down, curling my will around it until I can breathe again.

The Ringmaster snaps his fingers, and life floods back into the carnival. I am almost grateful as, behind me, the music of the carousel twinkles awake.

Your house is The Tower, lightning-struck. Destroyed.

A red sequin tail-coat, a braided leather whip in my hand. The kindling eyes of a tiger following my every move, and between us the hoop for it to leap through. Despair, like black barbed wire, tightening on my heart.

But an idea, waiting in those yellow eyes. A hopeless, helpless idea.

I gather my despair, and roar it at the tiger. Mouth gaping, teeth bared, I howl it at her. Long and guttural and furious.

She comes for me. Her teeth meet in my neck, my blood in her mouth and spraying the black sand. There’s no pain. Only relief, deep and sweet.

My heart slows, struggles.

The voice drips acid in my ears.

“Oh dear, little bird, what have you done.”

Your hope is the Four of Cups. Your fear is the Four of Cups. The lady, turned from the offered chalice. Seeking solitude, afraid to be alone.

Mirrors. Mirrors on all sides, and my reflection. Doubled and doubled, repeating endlessly in all directions. No costume this time. Only a plain black slip, and the light low and red making hollow pits of my eyes.

Something behind me, in my reflection. A girl in a blue frock. I turn but find nothing there. I look to another mirror, but still she stands behind me. She seems to be singing, but I can’t hear the words.

Another mirror, a new reflection. A girl in jeans and t-shirt, kissing a boy with red hair. She ages before my eyes and the boy changes with her, becomes a different boy. Then another, and another.

More mirrors, more reflections. The girl is a woman, and the boy has become a man. He disappears.

Alone, the woman reads, and cooks. Runs and works and sleeps and eats. She swims and sings and drinks. Sometimes she laughs. More times she cries.

She drives a silver car. She drives it in a town. She drives it on a country road at night. She drives it into a tree.

The girls and women, every one of them, is me.

I stand alone again, no reflections beside my own.

“Now, little bird. Now do you see?”

Your future is The Devil. However loose the chains he binds you with, still you are bound.

I turn the final card in my fingers. Ageless, ancient, pale fingers.

A scream, and a figure running through the grass toward the fairground lights.

I lay the final card into the pattern. Caress the painted skeletons, one crowned with horns, the other grinning above the golden chain around its neck.

Despite myself, I look.

A young man this time. And behind him, the cabin. The candle in the window.