Magical Flash Fiction – Tarot-a-Day: The Moon by Charley Barnes

Magical Flash Fiction - Tarot-a-Day: The Moon by Charley Barnes

The floor is cold underfoot and the only sound is the slow inhale, exhale of the body sleeping next to her. She didn’t get their name. She stands from the bed and pads from the bedroom into the open space of her living room, kitchen, dining area before hiding again in the other side of the house. Doors are too restrictive, but she pulls across the blind that seals this place off from the rest of the indoor landscape.

The moon is tumbling in through the uncurtained window. From the doorway, she watches as its light hits one mirror and darts to another then another then… like a wild chipmunk travelling a terrain. She moves to the window and looks directly into the white globe. She does this every evening now. Every evening, a different body left in bed; every evening, watching moonlight through the window. For weeks this has been the only way she can stand to see her paintings; through a lens of mirrors in a midnight wash.

She reaches up to unhook the latch from the window and pushes it open with her fingertips pressed to the pane. The air rushes in like a river dam breaking and she can smell the moon. Not the moon exactly, she knows, but the fresh trees and closed flowers she’s come to associate with these hours of the day.

From the open window she faces back into the room and the stained oak of the pane frames her too, from a frontward angle. She doesn’t know where to begin. But the tide of moonlight will wash out soon, and artistic as it might seem show knows she can’t hang self-doubt in a gallery. The brushes are lined in perfect parallels to each other and she picks the implement she had been using the night before.

She waters it down; dips into the paint; begins.

 

Card: The Moon
Keywords: vivid dreams; fears


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