The Magician
A short story
In a change to the normal newsletter, I have decided to share one of my short stories here. It is part of a series I wrote based on the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot. I hope that it might be nice enjoyed with a cuppa. I’ve recorded it too so I can pretend I’m on The Writer’s Voice podcast (without the high-tech recording equipment) and so you can listen rather than read if you prefer.
THE MAGICIAN
“Manifest and it will be yours,” the shop assistant told me, her face so earnest that I almost believed her.
I had made the mistake of telling her that I couldn’t afford the dress she was declaring was perfect for me. It was true that the price tag had made me choke, but the bit I omitted was that we both knew it looked awful on me, hugging me in places that I hadn’t been hugged for years. It turned out, not only had I not manifested the money for the dress—a divorce and subsequent therapy bills will help to keep you broke— but apparently, I had also failed to manifest the body.
The shop assistant fiddled with a small set of chalky blue beads around her delicate wrist. “I manifested these,” she told me. “I saw them in that shop.”
She stopped fondling the bracelet to point longingly at a small store filled with esoteric knickknacks, probably all mass produced in China, across the other side of the thoroughfare. The window was lined with candles and crystals in a rainbow of gaudy shades.
“It was £15, which would have left me broke for the rest of the month. It was only the 11th and I don’t get paid ‘til the 30th. Anyway, the guy who works in the shop let me take a photo. I put it as my screensaver. Every day, I imagined myself wearing it.” She looked up at me, her hazel eyes glinting, as if to check I was noting down the fine details of her magic.
“I came into work the next Saturday,” she continued, “and the shop had a big sign up saying 20% off all jewellery,” her eyes were wide now, like she still couldn’t believe her own power. “I ran straight in on my lunch break and bought it.
“So, you saved £3?” I said, having quickly done the maths in my head.
“Yes,” she replied with such delight that I couldn’t help but soften my scorn.
I smiled. I wished for a moment that I lived in her world.
“You should check it out.”
She was talking to me like we were peers, like she couldn’t see the age gap, like she didn’t notice the layers of derision and jadedness that I applied unconsciously mixed in with the make-up I used to cover my wrinkles and my disappointment.
“Honestly, don’t leave the shopping centre without popping in.”
She was determined in a way that made me want to both avoid the shop altogether and also made me curious to take a look in. I passed her the dress that I had draped over my arm while she spoke, trying the whole time not to let the hem touch the faux-marble floor.
“You’ll be back for this,” she said. “I know it.”
I wanted to say that if I was going to manifest anything it would be the chance for some kind of meaning to come back into my life, to remember what it feels like to be connected, even the tiniest relief from the numbness of the anti-psychotics I swallowed down daily. Luckily, before I could let my seething longing seep into the pristine walls of this shop of aspiration, a new customer had come through the door and the shop assistant turned her charms in their direction.
As I left, I checked the time on my phone. One-thirty, still too much time to kill until my date. I gave in and walked over to the shop.
Upon entering, I was overwhelmed by the scent of sweet, dusty incense. It clagged in the back of my nose like a bad sinus infection.
“Hi there, welcome to The Crystal Cave,” a male voice called.
I turned to look for where the voice was coming from but found no one. I moved in a circle, unsure whether it was some weird joke, someone laughing at me. A head popped up from behind the counter. The man, roughly my age with a crisp white beard, dark eyes and grey hair just a little bit too long, had his hands full with packets of what looked like crystals.
“Sorry, you must have thought that God was welcoming you into the shop,” he said with a giggle, high-pitched, childlike.
He laughed again and I gave the kind of polite titter that I afforded to men who told bad jokes, a tic I inherited from my mother.
“Is there anything in particular you are looking for?” the man asked, wiggling himself out from behind the counter.
“Just browsing, thanks,” I said, bracing myself for the sales pitch.
“Great! Well, enjoy,” he replied, taking me off guard. “Take your time, see what you resonate with.”
He shimmied back behind the counter. The sound of rustling, zip-locks opening and closing and the man apparently talking to himself travelled just below the deep hum of new age chanting coming from the speakers.
My eyes moved over the shelves, flitting from Japanese cats to Egyptian ones, from Indian mirrored purses to Middle Eastern shisha pipes. An eclectic pic ‘n’ mix, a sacred cacophony. What did I resonate with? How long it had been since I’d asked myself that? So caught up in surviving, gasping for air, hoping my heart would keep beating, sometimes longing for it to stop, I’d had no time to wonder such a thing. I had been someone because of someone else for so long that I had no idea who I was, let alone what I resonated with.
“I found it,” the man’s voice startled me.
I turned to find him shuffling around the shelves towards me, holding the prize possession aloft. As he neared, he thrust a stone in front of my face. I stepped back, my hand subconsciously moving to my bag. I peered at the stone from a safer distance.
“Isn’t it amazing? Tiger’s Eye!”
He held the crystal in the way someone might hold a new-born chick, cupping it gently with his hands.
“It’s...er...it’s very shiny,” I said, my eyes flicking to the door, willing someone else to come in and take the attention away from me.
I couldn’t see what was so incredible about this stone. It looked like a stripy toffee for all I could tell.
The man peered at me, a glint from the crystal seemed to flicker against his eyes. He put the stone in my hand, its smooth coolness a contrast to my slightly sweating palms. The crystal pulsed against my skin. The throb of it increased. It felt like something living in my palms, that warm baby chick. My hand jumped, I almost dropped it.
“You can feel its power, can’t you?” he said, his question rhetorical, he could see the throb.
I tried to focus on the stone but the light had changed. My palm now appeared ravaged by the beams of a burning midday sun, the stone scorching my skin as it bubbled with the ardour of the Earth’s core. I shut my eyes shielding them from the light. The sensation in my palm increased. I felt a jagged aliveness that I didn’t want to stop, like when, after the first seconds of breathlessness, a cut finally spurts blood and the sting burns and you know you exist, because you bleed, because you feel. It moved around my palm, the burn creeping from the skin, deep into the veins, the sinews of my hand. Just when I couldn’t take it anymore, the sensation stopped. A gentler throb slithered up my arm, tickling into my armpit, my breath caught, unsure if I was feeling pleasure or pain. It kept moving, wandering down my left breast, winding its way across my hips, moving down my body, swirling eventually to my groin. The long-arid desert erupted, an oasis, a fountain sprung forth with life, a moan escaped my lips.
“No, I can’t feel anything,” I said, shoving the stone back into the man’s hand.
Don’t forget to take your pills every day, Mum.
I mumbled a quick ‘sorry’ and turned towards the door. The man stepped into my path, blocking me from leaving, a lopsided smile moving across his lips. Had he heard me moan? Did he know what had happened? Just beyond the door, shoppers in their Saturday tracksuits wandered under the bright fluorescent lit hallways, gazing at mannequins in windows. The scent of tangerine wafted in from the Body Shop next door. What was happening?
“Sorry,” I stuttered. “Excuse me, I, I need to leave.”
I moved like a gazelle under the gaze of its prey, darting from side to side. The man became large, looming. The door right there, far from my reach. Then he started to giggle. He became smaller, the gap around him to the door now obvious, he was never blocking me. He shook his head, staring at the stone.
“Powerful blighter,” he said, tossing it lightly in the air and catching it.
I heard my own laughter mingling with his. I’d forgotten that sound. My laughter in harmony with someone else’s. I let it linger.
“Excuse me, do you sell angel cards?” The voice of a young woman who had entered the shop without either of us noticing cracked the energy.
The man passed the stone over to me and turned to help the customer, guiding her to a shelf piled with decks of brightly coloured cards.
“We have angel cards, oracle cards, tarot cards...even birthday cards if you want them,” he said, his cheerful tone and dad joke making the woman grin.
I felt awkward, unsure what to do next, like a guest at the party who only knows the host, and even then, barely knows them at all. I fingered the edge of a shelf lined with other crystals, uncertain whether to wait for the man to finish with the customer. Was there anything more to say? To do? Had my life become so small that a piece of stone could mean so much?
Pathetic. Life can feel like it has shrunk or has less meaning when a partner leaves. My therapist’s words made the blood rush to my neck. Label the pills with the days, Mum, so you don’t forget.
I dropped the stone and shuffled towards the door, mumbling a quick, “thanks very much,” and escaping out into the strip lighting. Pulling air into my lungs, I scurried along the central thoroughfare of the shopping centre. I reached into my bag and swallowed down my pills, not checking the neatly labelled days on the pack.
My date that night was mostly a blur. It was supposed to be a momentous occasion, my first date since it all happened, since my husband of thirty-five years had walked out, told me he was bored of our life. My first date since my reality got pulled out from under me. I spent the night distracted, thinking back to the feeling of that crystal in my palm, remembering the life it had shot through my veins, the throbbing it had left in my body.
My date wanted to talk about hobbies (his, golf, wine collecting) and favourite bands (I think he said Genesis or something similar, predictable for his age), but the irrelevance of such conversation thrummed and I could barely find the answers. I had been good at small talk once. Good at listening and smiling in the right places, my disinterest never making it all the way to my face.
Over dessert I asked him if he had ever heard of tiger’s eye. He asked if it was a band, which made me chuckle. He mistook my laugh for interest and placed his hand on mine. I felt nothing. I muttered a little explanation. It was a stone I had seen earlier that day at the shopping centre that I kept thinking about. I said it in the way a woman might be expected to talk about a pair of shoes. He smiled politely and then told me a story of taking his grandson to the zoo to see the tigers a few weeks before.
He wanted to kiss me when we said goodbye. I let him. His unknown lips felt strange. His mouth upon mine less powerful than a toffee-striped stone in my palm.
The next day, I returned to the shopping centre, loitered around The Crystal Cave. I fiddled with my hangnails as I sat on a bench, coming up with stories to explain why I had run off the day before. I had received an important phone call, I was meeting a friend and didn’t realise the time. I never made it inside to use them.
I went back every day for a week, circling around the shop like a midnight mosquito that never quite draws blood. I questioned what had happened. I doubted myself. Maybe it hadn’t been a tiger’s eye but some kind of practical joke, a stone with an electromagnetic charge placed inside, a magician’s trick. Had the man been playing with me? Why did I even care? All I knew was that it had sent a jolt of life through me, like a defibrillator on an ailing heart, and lord knew mine was struggling to find a beat.
Every day, I got in my car and drove the five dreary miles to the shopping centre. At night I dreamt of the crystal, of me and the man riding tigers, his long white hair loose and flowing. I woke up sweating, embarrassed. I googled tiger’s eye daily to read articles about its healing properties. The Tiger’s Eye encourages you to take risks, live boldly, fiercely, the internet told me. When had I last lived like that?
On the seventh day, I grew tired of my game. I couldn’t keep wandering under the fluorescent lighting, buying egg and cress sandwiches from Marks and Spencer to eat in my car before heading home, doing nothing with my days except staring in windows, listening to muzak. Live fiercely, I cajoled myself. I parked up and charged towards the shop.
As I pulled the door open the sandalwood hit me. I swallowed a cough and strode in.
A woman stared at me, a vague, uninterested smile barely showing on her lips.
“Morning, can I help you?” she asked, the words drooling out of the edge of her mouth.
“Erm,” I stuttered, looking behind her hoping the man would pop up and greet me. “I was in here the other day, there was a man working here.”
“Nope,” she replied, now scribbling on a piece of paper with a chewed-up Bic.
“Sorry?” I said.
“No men work here.”
“What?”
“No men work here. Isn’t really a man’s type of shop, is it?” she said and smirked.
“The owner then,” I felt desperate. “Is the owner a man?”
The girl put down her pen and looked up at me. Her heavily lined eyes hooded like a hawk.
“Nope, owner’s a woman too,” she said, her monosyllabic speech pattern giving the impression that words were at a premium, closing the door to further questions.
I slumped against the counter. The adrenaline that had built up for a week, drained out of me. I searched around me for any sign of the man I had seen with my own eyes, the man I had spoken to. This was the madness they warned me of. I called it grief, they called me crazy. They won.
The glare of the shop assistant burned into me. A shiver travelled from my throat to my toes. I pulled myself together, thanked her, mumbled something about being mistaken and walked out of the shop.
As I reached the car park, I turned. How could I be mistaken? I had felt that stone in my palm, solid, real. I was not mad, no matter what anyone wanted to believe. I was just sad, in pieces, finding a way to slot the shards of myself back together, a woman so defined as wife and mother that this new reality left me blurred at the edges, seeping like ink in the rain. I ran back to the shop, burst through the door.
“Do you sell tiger’s eye?” I asked, my voice surprising me with its volume and urgency.
The girl looked up.
“Weird you should ask,” she drawled, a tiny sprig of excitement bloomed among the dead branches of her voice. “We’ve been out for months. But when I opened up about a week ago there was this one piece of tiger’s eye on the floor. No idea where it came from.”
“Can I see it?” the words cracked as I spoke.
The girl shrugged, searched behind the counter and placed a small piece of shiny striped rock in front of us. The light above the counter flickered. I watched the stone for a while as if it might move closer to me. It didn’t.
I reached for the stone and placed it on my palm, holding my breath. It felt cold and hard, like a pebble from Brighton Beach, inanimate, dead. I cursed that shop assistant who guided me over to this store with her claims of manifestation and magic. I chided myself more for following the suggestions of a teenager whose eyes made me long to wipe my aged slate clean. Manifesting is for those with a future. Stupid old lady.
“Are you going to buy it?” the girl behind the counter drawled, clearly bored of me, wanting to get back to the tattoo of a large breasted goddess she was inking onto her forearm.
Then, there it was. I felt it. A pulse in my now closed fist. The feeling of blood coursing through me, vital, alive. The possibility of something, something other than this, cracked almost imperceptibly against the wrinkles and lifelines. My heart pumped with a shallow, ragged hope, as if it had been shocked back to life after too long without a rhythm.
A high-pitched, childlike laugh came from behind the counter. I looked up and was met by his eyes.
****
This story is part of a collection of stories inspired by the major arcana of the tarot.
“The Magician card is numbered One – the number of new beginnings and opportunities .... the master manifester.” Biddy Tarot.
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What a delicious concept! How many cards in the tarot? So much to love here: "sacred cacophony," "a tiny sprig of excitement bloomed among the dead branches of her voice." Sweet crystals in this jewel of a story.
Beautiful, emotionally rich storytelling! I especially loved listening to you read it :)