by Milan Mosley
A friendship with a magical thinker has its own value. Even if his magic has no depth or charm and is used only to justify his gambling, he enchants you with the force of his belief. My magic man was a moonlight Tarot reader, and we would meet in a quiet rear booth at a cafe, the particular locale changing whenever the servers noticed that our patronage there was long and unprofitable.
After mining the mundanities of my daily life, he began analyzing my dreams, latching onto those striking pictures and strong symbols. Seeing the joy he found in weaving a thick cord from stray strands of half-recalled scenes and mutable characters made up for his readings.
I told him of a nightmare I’d had where my father took me to a great orchard of reedlike white birches topped with bushels of peaches that ran infinitely, the far reaches of the garden climbing up over the horizon to puncture the sun’s face. My father was lecturing me, the words inscrutable but the tone familiar, and when he reached that final punctuation, his voice lilted a little, indicating that the instruction was over, but a lesson still had to be taught. I knew, without any voiced command, that I was to pick a branch to be whipped with. I reached up towards the canopy, my arms stretching farther than possible. He grabbed my wrist as I brushed the lowest branch. That touch transmitted his sentiment clearly. I returned to the trunk of the tree, thin and white, and began to peel strips of bark from it. The first strip was string-like, and my father’s voice, now a disembodied low rumble, commanded me to try again. I dug my nails into the side of the trunk and sank them until my fingers were half covered and I pulled away a parchment-sized flank of wood. The low rumble came clearer now, as if I had placed my ear to listen to a conversation happening on the other side of a wall. I stripped another piece of bark that transformed in my hands into a hard black scab the size of a plate, its concentric ridges topped with orange rot.
The meaning was obvious, I said, as I frequently remembered picking my own branches from a rosebush in our garden. The dream being blatant didn’t deter him, and he was so excited by his reading that he incorporated astrology into our discussion, claiming that this surfacing of filial memory and the imagery of growth, in tandem with the new moon, meant that, without a doubt, he should short the Thai Baht.
During his analysis, I felt acid building in my stomach. I left before the food came. This sick feeling worsened through the night. I tried to recapture the memory I had described, but no such image came to me. One picture came: me trying to break the branches of a bush below the kitchen window, and placing the one that flexed the least in my Ma’s hands. But never the specific vision of the rose bush. I realized that I’d reduced that memory to a sensation, conjured it as a measuring stick against new nuisance or tragedy. The idea of trying to avoid the thorns on a rose stem motivated me to complete difficult tasks. I spent the following days trying to source the memory, and ended up calling Ma and getting her to list every shrub and flower she’d ever planted. When, after ten minutes, she didn’t mention a rose bush, I snapped at her. I believed she was withholding something, but the only rosebush she could place was the one that had been at the entrance of her church, which had been cut down when I was a child.
My friend lost more than a thousand dollars on his Thai gamble, and he seemed, for the first time, cynical. He dumped his deck onto the table, and it fanned itself across the space between us; the moon turned face up, the two of swords dove off the edge. As he gathered the deck, again he joked that maybe he’d divine as much meaning by interpreting this random scattering. Figuring I had no right to kill his faith by withholding, I told him that his reading hadn’t been wrong, only misdirected by my faulty memory. He was so bemused by my own desperation in revealing this that he tried to commiserate with me.
“When I was a kid, a woodpecker used to come up to my window every morning and just drill holes in the glass. He’d pick a different part to peck at each day. Woke me up at 5 in the morning, had me stumbling into school sleep-drunk. Got to the point that I would’ve done anything to stop him, but I knew my parents would be mad if I killed him, so I tried scarin’ him. Next morning I hear him starting up again so I throw open the curtains, make a whole bunch of noise, stick my tongue out. He doesn’t care. Keeps banging away, picking holes right in my face. Now I don’t remember exactly what he looks like. In my mind, his beak is curved and skinny like an Egret’s, his head’s red with spiky hair. Nothing that exists in the real world. I don’t remember what the curtains looked like either, or whether the floor was wood or if this was after they put carpet down. But I figure I don’t really need to know what it looked like, I just remember what happened.”
He then shuffled the deck and asked me about office politics and then about romantic fulfillment and laid the cards out in the Celtic cross and told me my fortune.
I examined all of the events I considered core to my person, moments I had unquestionably made myself to believe were motivating my actions. Most were hazy, and in accessing them I realized that the memories were being shaped by my descriptions of them; a 95 Buick LeSabre would change from slate gray to shale black, the blister on the hood from where the heat of the engine had boiled the paint away would move by increments until it had retreated entirely from the hood ornament and now almost braced the windshield wipers—but this was a consequence of neglect, those memories had been sediment for so many years.
I fell back on a well-worn story. I was visiting my Uncle in Bimini, and his son, who was much older though not by so much that I was justified in believing him. He told me the Bahamian police were rounding up tourists and executing them. He had a plan, however, and he would hide me until they were finished sweeping the neighborhood. I followed him into the kitchen, where he convinced me to stuff myself in the oven. I remember waiting for hours with the oven grate sinking into my knees, until the sun set and let moonlight into the kitchen that animated and lengthened the furniture’s shadows. All of this seen through a porthole by a child stupid enough to climb into an oven. The sight terrified me, and I looked away into the dripping pan at the bottom. The pan was primarily covered with black ash and desiccated meat, and little blisters of tinfoil dappled its surface. In the dim moonlight, it looked like the night sky over a planet going blind. My aunt found me kneeling there when she came to prepare dinner, and no achievement has ever unseated her image of the stupid child hiding in an oven.
I couldn’t find the falsehood in this memory, and that was enough to scare me. I took mental snapshots of everything, the dripping pan, the shadows of the furniture, my cousin’s gap-toothed grin, and nothing seemed obviously contrived, filled in by my imagination. I ran over the memory again and snagged on the image of myself climbing into the oven. The details shifted each time, whether the handle was curved black plastic or a thin aluminum rectangle, whether the numbers on the clock had been red or green, whether there was a clock at all, and if there had been, was I sure it was digital? I looked at my own stove and range. The oven was the same. But maybe it had been the same oven. I couldn’t prove otherwise.
Milan Mosley
Milan Mosley is a fiction writer and MFA candidate at The University of Florida. His writing deals with themes of grief, the fungibility of memory, and the decay of places. He is from North Carolina with roots in The Bahamas.
Headlight Anthology 