"Give Me Something Otherworldly to Believe In" by Alicia Bones
My friend reads oracle cards every morning. They tell her the direction to take with her day: live with light, hunker down, eat a tuna fish sandwich, think for 10 minutes about who your mother wishes you were, call your ex-lover, bury a dime on the side of the road, pluck a red bud stem and wear it behind your ear, quit your job, dance in the street beside the little girl who seems like the child you want, tell your coworker he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, worry all day about that strange thing you did in college, wonder for an hour if you’ve ever been the person you imagine you are. She believes in the cards she pulls, or the cards that fall out when she’s shuffling. That’s how oracle cards work, she told me, they guide you where you need to go. I don’t believe in anything, but I’d like to. A year ago my friend ate that tuna fish sandwich though she is allergic to fish, and her lips swelled up fat and pink and burst a line of blood in the middle, and a man on the street, a debonair man with a purposeful stride, told her he’d dreamt of a bee-stung woman the night before, a plump, laughing woman standing in the middle of the field getting stung all over with bees but feeling no pain, or showing no pain, and he knew his dream had been a sign. Though my friend was thin and serious, an accountant of a sort though she had a different job, and allergic to fish, an unpoetic ailment, the debonair man decided she was the woman sent to him in his dream, and he made her his wife, and she called me to say that yes, the oracle cards have guided me where I’m supposed to be, and then they were married. But six months later they were divorcing, and on the day the papers were finalized she called me to say her oracle card that morning told her to plant seeds, and even on the worst day of her life, that card had been right too, she said. Each time she tells me what’s happened to her, I’m more convinced I’ve been wrong all my life.
Alicia Bones is a Seattle-based writer and college instructor. Her work has been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Paper Darts, Fairy Tale Review, Pidgeonholes, Necessary Fiction, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere.
