The First Pull

The First Pull

Mira Chen had been pulling a single card every morning for forty-two days in a row, and on the forty-third, she almost didn't bother.

The ritual was small. Her alarm went off, she silenced it, she reached under her pillow for the deck her cousin had handed her last Christmas wrapped in tissue paper. She'd shuffle, cut the cards into two uneven stacks, and then slide the top card off. Look at it. Read the upright and reversed definitions into her head. Stare at the image of the Empress or the Magician or whatever long-faced royal came up that day. Then she would set the card on her nightstand, mute the meaning, and stare at the ceiling fan.

For forty-one days, this had not worked.

She had downloaded three tarot apps after that, because the apps had fancier decks and were easier to share on her private finsta. She had bookmarked a creator named Bren who pulled one card for the day and pronounced each card like a judge. She had followed two other creators, one who did "single-card yes/no" and one who did "POV reading: six cards, no skips, your week ahead." Mira had watched each video at least three times. She had screenshotted dozens of cards into a folder on her phone called `mood`. None of it had done anything like what the comments section said it would do. None of it had felt like the cards were actually looking at her.

The trouble was not the cards. The trouble, Mira would admit two weeks later to Mrs. Halloway behind the rough velvet cloth of the reading table, was that she was asking for too much in too small a container. A single card is a single word, and she was trying to stuff an entire novel into it.

She was fifteen. She was a sophomore at a high school with three thousand students where the odds of being invisible were excellent. The first line of the yearbook, if her yearbook ran a line for her at all, would probably read something like `Mira Chen, who has not yet decided what to be`. She had auburn hair her mother said she should wear down. She had freckles across her nose that she covered with foundation in seventh grade and wished she hadn't by eighth. She had been talking to her best friend Priya since fifth grade, and Priya was also invisible, but in a different way — Priya was invisible because she was so obviously bright the light bounced off her and skidded around Mira instead. Priya was going to run the school paper next year. Mira was going to keep watching and waiting for something that had no name yet.

What she had was a question.

What she wanted was an answer.

---

The Door Between the Laundromat and the Bakery

The shop had not been there yesterday. Mira was almost sure of that. She walked this block every afternoon, half the time with Priya, half the time alone, cutting through the strip mall on Habersham because it shaved four minutes off the route home. Yesterday she had passed the laundromat (washer #4 perpetually out of order, the same cracked plastic chairs by the window) and the vegan bakery (smelled like cinnamon and toasted oat) and between them, the usual advertising banner in the missing-window-unit cavity: a poster for a missing calico cat taped over a poster for a dentist who does Saturday appointments. She had walked past it exactly the way she always walked past it. Nothing had happened in the space.

This afternoon, the same space had a door.

Not a new door, exactly. It looked like a door that had always been there and was only just being polite enough to admit itself. It was painted the dark red of a librarian's reading lamp, and the small painted sign above it read:

THE WANDERING OWL

Below that, in smaller script, like a whisper following a sentence: *Readings, Repairs, and the Occasional Bird.*

Mira was not in the habit of going into strange shops. She was in the habit of glancing into them from the sidewalk, the way you glance into windows when you're waiting for the light to change. She had glanced into the laundromat a hundred times and never once considered entering. She had glanced into the bakery and ordered things. The doorway between had always been a rectangle of dull wall.

But today, she was carrying a flyer.

She had not stolen it from the bulletin board inside the school auditorium on purpose. Priya had pointed at it while they were walking past, Priya had said *weird, do you think they're serious, do you think Mr. Odell is going to actually direct it*, and then Priya had said *I think there's a part you'd be good at, Mira, I really do* — and on her way out of the auditorium Mira had felt the flyer fold into her hand like a paper crane. The school's spring play. *The Illusion*, a French farce about a man who pretends to be twins. Auditions Friday. Callbacks Saturday. Director: A. Odell. The flyer smelled like printer toner and faintly like chalk.

She had walked home holding it the way you hold a note from the doctor's office before you open it.

And so, when she walked past the laundromat and the bakery and noticed the door, she saw it as if for the first time because she was looking for somewhere to set the flyer down, somewhere that wasn't her chest. She read the sign twice. She could read it a third time if she wanted to. There was no clerk behind her saying *May I help you*. There was no bell, only the particular heaviness that comes from a door you have been standing in front of too long.

The door opened inward when she pushed it.

It smelled, immediately, of cedar and dried rose and a third thing she could not place — sandalwood, or radiator heat from the laundry next door, or both. The room was small. There were no overhead lights. Three lamps on three different side tables threw three circles of warm yellow. There were ceiling-high shelves crowded with things — not the orderly rows of a bookstore but the accidental forests of a curiosity shop. Glass jars with unlabeled stoppers. Stacked books with cracked spines. A stuffed owl under a glass dome, missing one amber eye. Velvet cloths in jewel colors folded over each other like a pile of sleeping cats. A wooden table in the center of the room, with a single chair on either side.

A woman was sitting at the far side of the table, hands folded over an old tarot deck, watching the door as if she had been expecting someone in particular.

Her hair was silver, not gray. Silver the way certain spoons are silver when you open the good drawer. Her eyes were brown and sharp and patient. Her hands looked older than her face. She wore a sweater the color of moss, and the sweater had a small hole by the left elbow that had been patched with a piece of dark green thread. Mira would later realize that she did not know the woman's name yet, and that she had not said anything, and that the silence between them had already lasted more than ten seconds.

"You're a long way past where I expected," the woman said. Her voice had the soft draw of someone who had grown up far south of where she now lived. "But you're not late."

"I'm sorry," Mira said, "I'm just — "

"You are not sorry. You are holding a flyer for something you do not want to fold up and put in a drawer."

Mira looked down. She was, in fact, still holding the flyer.

"How did you — "

"Come," the woman said, as if she had not heard. She gestured to the empty chair. "Sit. There is a stool for your jacket if you have one, and if you need a glass of water I will pretend I poured it for some other reason. I am Mrs. Halloway. This shop is mine. Tell me what a fifteen-year-old wants from tarot, and I will tell you what tarot might want from a fifteen-year-old in return."

"How do you know I'm fifteen?"

"You walk like someone who is fifteen and has decided, this year, that the world cannot hear her. Sit down."

Mira sat.

---

These Cards Have Been Waiting

Mrs. Halloway did not ask her to shuffle the deck right away. First, she asked Mira to put her phone face down on the table, which Mira did, reluctantly, the way you put a security blanket in a drawer. T