Tonya, tall, slightly overweight, face soon forgotten, name unknown to all around her. Lank brown hair, dull brown eyes, hides a potential unknown even to herself. Huge feet plod down a dark hall. “Wake UP!!!” her undistinguished voice calls. Picking out clothes for the day, she sees her manly hands, lets one crystal tear, her only treasure, fall. Swearing to herself again that it will be the last one she loses. One last look in the mirror, her whole heart and soul wishing for the magic to be real, for the lost, hungry eyes in the plain face to change…
“Cathrine” the name whispers across her mind. The Lady of Dreams, Nobility, Great Lady, graceful in movement and words. Long fire red hair. Eyes, two luscious jade pools deep enough to drown in, hands with no scars, no manliness, and no rock hard calluses. Fingers dance gracefully over the needlepoint, lady’s art. Honey skin, soft as the day it came into the world, never mistreated by cheap clothes, or harsh bargain bin soap, unlike…
Tonya slips into the dollar store shirt, pants, and shoes. Under cheap threadbare material, her chest tight with uncertainty, heaves in breath after breath. Trailer park air smells of beatings, arguments, fights, garbage, hunger, and human desecration, waits for her out side the door. Must she walk in the mauling, bruising, tormenting mass? Cheeks red, head low, Tonya wades out of the trash into the cleansing rain. She walks away, the rain dissolving her colors into a uniform gray.
Timothy wakes, trying figure out what this means. He has had dreams of Lady Cathrine in the past but this is the first time there was modern connection. His dreams of the Lady are normally violent and full of passion, at 15 years old he doesn’t know what to think. He is in love with the Lady of his dreams, yet he knows she means him harm. What could this mean? Is his mom right, is the Lady an enemy of a past life? Still wondering he gets up and gets ready for school.
At the breakfast table he asks his mother what this could mean, she has a powerful gift as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Sharply she replies, “Don’t think about it today, you have a major test. I will read the cards to see what this means.”
Timothy begins the long walk to school, trying hard to follow his mother’s advice. The closer to school he gets, the more he feels that his dream was important. He wonders if this means he will meet the Lady as she is in this life. The girl in his dreams looked to be around his age, maybe that is a sign that their paths are to entwine yet again. This time maybe better than the last.
He walks through the large double doors, and tries to become invisible, as he does everyday. The large school has no place for one like him, a dreamer, a weakling. As he heads to his locker he sees Mike, the staring quarterback, heading his way. “S**t,” a barely voiced whisper, and Timothy is off. He uses his small stature to its fullest advantage, weaving and dodging teachers and students alike.
Suddenly he runs into a wall of flesh. Well over 6 feet tall, and not so much fat as well fleshed. He slowly looks up to see who it is that will stuff him in a locker this time, he sees cheap shoes, loose fitting much worn blue jeans, and blue tee-shirt with a small hole at the bottom. When he sees her face he is in shock, it is her. “Watch where you are running little man,” she says as she pushes him aside.
He is rooted in the spot wondering what to do next. Roughly pulled out of his thoughts by pain, he realizes that Mike caught him today. As he is shoved toward the locker room, the students part like the red sea. His eyes search out someone, anyone, to save him this time. No one looks his way, not even the teachers…it is just boys being boys. Not a soul sees the terror in the victim’s eyes.
The smells of dirty socks and sweat make the air heavy and almost unbearable. Mike pushes Timothy into a group of waiting jocks. “So munchkin what do you have for us today? No money. Boys we need to show him.” Now the pain pushes everything from Timothy’s mind. When he begins to think they will never stop, he is pulled to his feet and shoved in a cramped locker.
Hours later, or so it seemed, the locker was unlocked and Timothy was released. As he walked to class he worked the kinks out of his legs and started getting feeling back in them. His head hanging low he slowly entered his English class. Mrs. Miller stared as he made his way to her desk with his note. “So you just can’t stay out of trouble can you? This note doesn’t not excuse you from the test you missed, nor I am inclined to let a troublemaker retake the test. This will be your third zero this semester.”
Trying not to cry at the thought of the trouble he would be in when he got home, he made his way to his desk. Sitting and staring not worrying about what he was missing, he daydreamed through the rest of the class.
Brought out of his deep musings by the bell, he gathers his books and papers and heads out the door. He made it through the rest of his day in hell, as he always thought of school, by thinking about what it meant to him to have met the girl from his dreams. By the time the last bell of the day had rung, he had no conclusions only more speculations.
He walked into his house, to the storm that he knew lay ahead. His mother pounced on him as soon as he made it through the front door. Head held high Timothy said, “Mother I failed the test, and I don’t want to hear about it.” Trying to edge past her, he almost didn’t hear, “I don’t care about that.”
Those few words, stopped him dead. His mother always cared about his grades, which have been steadily falling since the beginning of the year. Thought rolled through his mind, avalanching, rolling worries, about his family. Did something happen to his aunties or to his grandmother? Even worse did Dad show back up? Eyes wide with fear he grabs his mother by the arms and almost screams, “What happened?”
She leads him into the small cramped living room. Full of memories and pictures, this room always gives Timothy the chills. In this room more than 2 years ago he first told his parents about his dreams. His mother took it well, but his father… that was another thing entirely. Never pleased with a small, sickly son he couldn’t deal with the fact that his son inherited at least a small portion of what he considered an evil, devil given gift. That night he almost beat his son to death, and in the morning he was gone.
Timothy has never missed the man, the sperm donor, that is his father, but has always feared his return. As his mother lead him around the dark blue couch, he saw the cards laid out on the table. Now his fear shot through the roof, she never let him see the cards. She always just told him what they told her. He knew the layout and what they meant even before she opened her mouth.
“Mother, why do they show death? And just who’s cards were you reading?”
“Honey, these are your cards. I told you I would read them today. They really scare me.” She sat them both on the couch and took his hand in hers. Timothy knows that the cards can be deceiving, and more so if the one for whom the cards are being read is not present. Fear thrilled through his veins, because he knew this time she would read his cards with him this time. Leaning over he hugged his mom close, forgiving her in that moment for all the troubles of his life.
“Timothy, you must sit across from me and do what I ask you to do with the cards.”
He slowly rose and moved to the seat across from the her, the chair that is normally reserved only for her clients, and older family members. As he settled in, he realized this chair is most uncomfortable. The fear of the cards begins to pale to the thought that his mother was going to do a full real reading on him, the first one ever. In his odd family that was a sign of moving from childhood to adulthood. He shivered and thought that of all the bad things that happened today, this could possibly be the best or the worst of them all.
His mother had been getting the cards ready while he was thinking. She had such a look of sorrow that he wanted to tell her that this wasn’t necessary, just to wipe that look from his mother’s dark brown eyes. He wished he could fix everything to make her happy. She handed him the deck, “Shuffle them and think only of your dream last night.”
He shuffled the deck three or four times before handing the deck back to his mother. She took the deck from his hand and slowly set out the cards in the Celtic Cross Spread. He automatically felt a shiver down his spine as the Major Arcana cards kept coming, even he knew that was not a good sign. By the time the Death card was flipped up he thought his heart would stop right there. Even though he had never seen his mother’s cards, he had watched his grandmother read cards his whole life. The death card, he knew, did not always mean physical death, yet he seemed to see it in his future.
When The Tower was shown he knew real fear, The Tower is change but not orderly change. It is failure and catastrophe. His mother was silently crying by now. Here was the last card, Minor Arcana, the only one out of the ten, The Queen of Cups inverted, a false love or deceitful friend. In light of his dreams of Cathrine and his convection that Tonya was the reincarnated version of her, this chilled him to the bone.
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