Harmony Neal
The Tarot Reader
Act I: Introduction
Ace of Mirrors ᴥ Magic for Beginners
A teenage girl sprays paint over a stencil of a unicorn. She carefully shades and shapes her creature, feeling that this act is rebellious, not because she’s creating street art, placing something beautiful where decay lives, but because she’s a girl and placing a unicorn among the stylized, scribbled names of boys she knows. She’s been influenced by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, but her secret heart likes stencils of animals best. She admits to being a Banksy fan, even if he tends dark and uses human subjects more often than not.
To the unicorn she adds the line “Don’t Forget Me.” She is almost aware of herself, almost aware of all of her possibilities, but she comes up short when she focuses on what is, instead of what could be: in the moments where she knows the world is her stage, but invisible signs all around read: No Girls Allowed!
The Tarot Reader sees her. She’s yet to reach deeper, yet to dive into herself, outside of herself. The Tarot Reader approaches in the head of a unicorn, holding a glass-encased candle, taps her on the shoulder, hands her one card. The girl takes the card, doesn’t know what it means, looks up to ask, but The Tarot Reader is gone.
She puts the card in her pocket, finishes the details of her unicorn, and goes home to Google the card, which is from The Multiverse Tarot, a hard to find deck. The image is part of the Uffington White Horse, which she has never heard of before, but discovers is a massive prehistoric white chalk drawing of a horse made in the English countryside. The internet claims that if a person stands in the horse’s eye and makes a wish, the wish will come true.
18 | Psychopomp Magazine