Madame Spinarski

She sits, late nights, at an ancient spinning-wheel, twisting human hair into fine thread. Her hands a blur of motion and intent.

In a vast apothecary table she keeps tea leaves for reading, parts of swamp creatures, insect wings, toenails, eye lashes, scorpion stingers, ingredients for potions and tinctures used for the breaking of spells, cures for madness, birthmark removal and any number of human frailties.

Her parlor has no street entrance. Only a door and a window in an alley where the needy must transgress against sagely advice to find an etching, on the door, of a triangle surrounding an eye. Through the fogy window you will see her, crystal-ball-gazer, fortune teller, palm reader. Her face awash in the white light of the orb, future events passing in front of her ageless eyes. Her fingers somehow pulling smoke and knowledge from the ball.

In the moment before you collect the courage needed to knock, you will look back over your shoulder to see prostitutes and jazz musicians at home in this red lit alley where no respectable soul would dare be seen.

“Your need must be grievous,” she says in her gypsy accent, suddenly appearing at the wooden door before you. “to venture to a place such as this. Come, before you're seen.”

The door swings open wide and you are swept inside on feet that seem not to step at all. Smells of dust and tanned leather. Of messes and lichens, woodland creatures, all kept in isolation in various jars from the power of their pairings. One drop of snake venom, the difference between a love potion and the curse of eternal melancholy.

Headless mannequin line the walls, jewelry and woven garments hung about them. Strange metallurgy and lancets on shelves under glass. Artifacts of great power and importance. Paintings of hardship and suffering, of wandering about through dead, black forests, pursued by hellish creatures evoked by terrible minds. The sacrifice of infants and the appeasing of dark gods.

Candles flicker from every corner and perch, twisting shadows into grinning faces pulled like weeds from your fevered dreams. A small yellow bird in a wire cage. He flits and lands, flits and lands, cursed to never rest all his days.

You are sitting at a small, round, wooden table. Before you a cat, black as death. She is curled, body and tail around the base of the crystal ball. She is co-proprietor of this parlor. Her green eyes dismiss your troubles. Suggest that you should never have come.

The cat unfurls and slinks away into the deep as the glow of the crystal ball pushes back dark shadows and waves of white fill the medium's face. She is holding your hands, palms up, and reading important lines, her fingers cold as steel. You hear the canary hop and land again and again. You wonder what it was he did to deserve this.... and to whom?

Sweat breaks on your brow but cold air encircles your ankles. You are staring into her jade eyes. Eyes that express love, loneliness, tragedy. Emotions, one piled upon another. What does it mean? Shivers as the cat slinks up against your leg and the ball goes dark.

Madame Spinarski is staring deeply at your palms, her face impossible to read.

In her thick accent she breathes, “Well, well, isn't this most unusual?”

In the early, early mornings, before dawn, she takes the thread to her loom where warp and weft compile end by pick to form a simple garment that, when placed over the belly, induces fertility and casts a protective shroud over baby after conception.

© 2018 Phillip W Parsons

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Charles Miller

So what does the final paragraph have to do with the rest of the story? I love the story, but I don't get the final paragraph, which seems to go with another story.