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13.4.06 Signs and Portents

She waltzed back into my life again on Tuesday, all nonchalant and "did ya miss me". It's her you have to blame for this rain - she loves a storm. So, later on, you will know how it began again: I found her at lunchtime, face down in the doorway of the Café of Crossed Destinies, wearing a familiar blue coat.

That's what made me stop and pick her up. Was it one of my cards? There's a pack on my dresser with the same blue pattern on their backs. It couldn't be mine; I hadn't been to the café in weeks. But, in the way that sometimes you feel like the universe is talking directly to you, I knew it was. I turned her over: The Queen of Spades.

Of course I took her home. You can't just leave her lying on the pavement, can you? That's asking for trouble. (But then, so is picking her up). Since that day, everything has been an omen, a harbinger of further messages. A gardener at my friend's door in Peckham, two lead-blue teardrops tattooed beneath his left eye. The Hanged Man? The loss of an old silk scarf, emblazoned with sailboats, like an ice floe breaking free from the glacier of my past and heading south to endanger the shipping. The Tower - that's not lightning, it's a square of ice-blue silk, fluttering in the breeze. And that breeze is cold with anticipation, of something taking form, something straining to pass through the tracing-paper walls of reality. Something that must be said or done, buzzing at the corners of my mind like a forgotten warning.

Or perhaps it is already here, has been done, the oil already spilt. I'm not sure. I feel lately - not quite as Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time - but certainly out of sync, as if sound has slipped three frames in advance of image. Sometimes, when the city noise falls quiet, I can hear tomorrow. "My, what a dull girl you've become..." What does she reach for, in her coat, the Queen of Spades? A change in the psychic weather.

I must escape this toxic town.

( 10:30 AM )

1 Comments:

We've just had some lovely weather.

By Rich Johnston, at 10:33 AM