Travel in Life

The Letters Under Glass

The man who had bought the dragon was walking beside the sea when he saw the fortune teller.

The promenade curved along the bay, with the ocean on one side and a row of temporary stalls on the other. Portrait painters had arranged samples of their work against the railings: children with enormous eyes, solemn dogs, husbands made handsomer than they were. Farther along, two landscape artists were painting the same headland in entirely different weather. In one picture it stood beneath a clear blue sky. In the other it was being destroyed by a storm that had not yet arrived.

The fortune teller sat between them beneath a purple canopy.

Her table was covered with dark cloth. Small brass stars had been sewn around its edge, and a crystal ball rested in the center on a wooden stand. Beside it stood a hand-lettered sign:

THE PAST REMEMBERED
THE PRESENT REVEALED
THE FUTURE CONSIDERED

The prices were listed underneath.

He stopped because the lowest price was not unreasonable and because he had nowhere in particular to be.

“Sit,” the woman said.

He paid her and took the folding chair opposite.

She was perhaps sixty, although the silver scarves around her head made age difficult to judge. Her fingernails were painted blue. Several rings clicked against the glass as she drew the crystal ball toward her.

“Place your hands on the table.”

He did.

“Think of nothing.”

“That may cost extra,” he said.

She looked at him over the ball.

He lowered his eyes respectfully.

The woman closed hers and moved both hands through the air above the sphere. She whispered something that sounded like a mixture of Latin, weather reports, and the names of vegetables. Then she reached beneath the table and produced a large white card covered in black letters.

The letters were enormous.

She placed the card flat upon the table and rolled the crystal ball slowly across it.

A black R swelled inside the glass.

Then an O.

Then half of something that might have been a B, although the curve of the ball stretched it until it looked like a pair of spectacles.

The woman murmured.

“Hocus pocus,” she said distinctly, and moved the ball again.

An E appeared, followed by a T, then another R.

She stopped and pressed two fingers to her temple.

“You are thinking too loudly.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not try to understand.”

That part was easy.

The ball passed over more letters. Some appeared upright, some sideways, and a few upside down. Once he saw an M so greatly enlarged that it filled the sphere like a mountain range. The woman inhaled sharply at this, but whatever the mountain meant, she did not explain.

She continued for several minutes.

At last she removed her hands from the ball and opened her eyes.

“It is finished.”

He waited.

She waited.

“Is there a reading?” he asked.

“You have seen it.”

“I have?”

“You may not understand immediately.”

She gathered up the card before he could look at it without the glass.

He thanked her kindly. She gave him a grave nod, as though he had survived something, and called to the couple waiting behind him.

As he continued along the promenade, he thought, Wow. That was an eye exam.

He bought a paper cup of coffee and watched one of the portrait painters make a small boy look like an elderly magistrate. By the time he reached the end of the promenade, he had forgotten most of the letters.

That evening, the dragon stood on the shelf near his chair.

It was small enough to hold in one hand, black-bodied, with red-orange membranes stretched between the bones of its wings. Its bright eye and open mouth gave it a fierce expression, although not a cruel one. In the lamplight, its painted scales looked almost warm.

He had bought it several days before from a roadside shop, for reasons he had not tried too hard to explain. The dragon was a dragon. That had seemed sufficient.

He made tea and sat down.

The room was quiet except for the sea, which could be heard faintly beyond the windows. Not the waves themselves, exactly, but their repeated arrival.

He picked up a book, read the same paragraph twice, and put it down.

The fortune teller’s letters had returned.

First the R.

Then the O.

He pictured the great mountainous M, the flattened E, and the sideways letter he had mistaken for spectacles. There had been a T, certainly. Perhaps an A. And something curved that might have been a C, unless it had only been the edge of the card.

He began arranging them in his mind.

Not because he believed they meant anything. They plainly had not. The card had probably been made for exactly that purpose: letters large enough to look significant when magnified, but scattered so that no customer could accuse the woman of making a specific promise.

Still, he moved them.

R. O. M. E.

Rome.

He had never been to Rome with the person he suddenly remembered.

That person had wanted to go. They had once stood outside a travel agency looking at a poster of the city. There had been a fountain in the photograph and a woman in a red dress throwing a coin over her shoulder.

“We could go in October,” the person had said.

They did not go.

Perhaps there had not been enough money. Perhaps something else had intervened. He could no longer remember the reason, although at the time it must have seemed decisive.

He moved the letters again.

T. R. E. E.

There had been a tree behind the house where they lived. A pear tree, although its fruit was small and hard and generally eaten by birds before it ripened. The person had tied a piece of blue ribbon around one branch so they could see which way the wind was blowing.

The ribbon had remained there for years, faded almost white.

He could see it now—not as a picture fixed in the past, but moving.

The branch lifted. The ribbon turned. The person stood below it with one hand raised, looking up.

He tried another arrangement.

M. O. R. E.

The word belonged to no particular memory. It became a sentence instead.

There should be more chairs outside.

That was something the person might have said. Or perhaps had said. In his mind, they carried two mismatched kitchen chairs through the back door and placed them beneath the pear tree. One chair had a loose cane seat. The other had a painted green back.

“Now people can stay,” the person said.

“No one is coming.”

“That’s no reason not to have chairs.”

He smiled.

The sentence had not been hidden in the fortune teller’s card. He knew that. The scene had not been waiting inside the crystal ball like a trapped photograph. He had supplied the tree, the ribbon, the chairs, the voice. Perhaps none of it had happened in precisely that way.

But as he sat beside the dragon, the person became present—not returned, not resurrected, not standing behind him in the room, but present in the strange way a voice can be present when one knows what it would say.

He could feel the person considering the dragon.

They would have picked it up without asking.

They would have examined the wings, tested its weight in one hand, and turned it over to look for a maker’s mark.

Then they would have placed it back on the shelf at a slightly different angle.

“It looks better facing the door,” they would have said.

He rose and turned the dragon toward the door.

The alteration was small, but correct.

Outside, the sea continued arriving against the shore.

He tried to remember the remaining letters. There had been another R, he thought, and perhaps an I. He could have made time if there had been an I, though he was nearly certain there had not been one. The word came anyway.

Time.

He saw the promenade again: the portraits, the two incompatible landscapes, the purple canopy, the woman’s blue fingernails clicking against the glass.

Perhaps she had shown him nothing.

That seemed likely.

She had moved a crystal ball over a page of oversized letters while muttering hocus-pocus. It had been, by every reasonable measure, an eye exam conducted by a woman dressed as a curtain.

And yet the letters had followed him home.

Now they had become a tree, two chairs, a journey never taken, and a person turning a small black dragon toward the door.

He felt a quiet fondness. Not grief exactly. Grief might have been somewhere beneath it, but it was not asking to be examined. The feeling was warmer and less demanding.

He sat with it.

For a while, the person he remembered seemed neither long ago nor far away. The words he made for them occurred as he thought them, and their imagined answers arrived in the same present.

He did not mistake this for a message.

It was a story.

But a story, he realized, was not necessarily a way of leaving reality. Sometimes it was how the mind gave scattered things enough form to be felt.

Before going to bed, he found an envelope and wrote several large letters across the back.

He chose them without planning:

S A E T R Y

He set the envelope beneath an empty drinking glass and moved the glass slowly over them.

The letters widened and curved.

They refused to say anything.

He laughed.

“Not here,” he told the dragon.

Then he switched off the lamp, leaving the letters on the table to wait until he remembered them differently.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.