by Jordan Bell
It was never a good idea to snub fate before a girl had her first cup of coffee.
I checked the chain and cracked the door open enough to peek out.
…and then lowered my eyes to a small but burly man standing at my door in a top hat and tails, no taller than my belly button. He wore a blue orchid in his lapel, so blue and so purple it seemed to glow from within.
Once he saw me seeing him, the dwarf bowed with a flourish.
I shut the door.
Weird things happened in the world all the time. Weird, unexplainable things. They happened to my mother so often weird had become mundane. She knew a great many performers, all a bit odd, from palm readers to illusionists to cross-dressing acrobats. More than once we’d entertained a bearded lady in our apartment and I could remember one portly gentleman who wore fake fangs and insisted I call him Vlad.
But not me. Weird wandered around me. It got out of the way politely as I walked by. This was certainly the first time I’d ever been awakened by a dwarf dressed like he was taking me to prom.
I patted my wild red hair into some order, checked my t-shirt and shorts again to make sure I was half-way descent, flipped the chain, and opened the door once more.
“Good afternoon, fräulein,” he said, his accent a little forced, although I couldn’t tell if he was American trying to sound German or German trying to sound American. Either way, I’d not had enough coffee to deal with this. I rubbed my eyes.
“Afternoon?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Quite.” He checked his watch. “It is twelve twenty-six. And thirteen seconds.”
“Damn.” I’d slept like hell until dawn when I finally passed out. I’d missed the busiest time of day at the market, which meant rent was going to suck this month. I propped myself against the door and gazed down at my visitor, feeling tall for maybe the first time in my life. And likely the last. “I’m a little afraid to ask, but can I help you?”
“With any luck. Today I am but a messenger.”
“And tomorrow you’re the groom? Concierge? Stage magician?”
The dwarf looked scandalized. “I am absolutely not the stage magician.” He reached into his jacket and produced a piece of cardstock the size of a postcard, overlaid with vellum, although he looked at me as if I maybe no longer deserved it.
“Of course,” I said as sincerely as I could muster while standing in my pajamas in front of a dwarf in a top hat. “I should never have suggested it.”
He considered my apology and then offered me the card, albeit somewhat reluctantly. I took it from his gloved hand.
Handwritten across the vellum in blue formal script was one word. A name.
Corazon.
I stilled, the impact of the name heavy in my lungs. I ran my thumb along the letters, felt the indentation where the writer had pressed the nib of his pen.
It took all my will to hide the tremor in my hands.
The vellum concealed a postcard picture of a carnival tent, faded colored stripes caught in the wind. The ringmaster stood in front of the big top, head bowed, arms outstretched to the drawn tent flaps. She wore a red coat with tails and small black shorts that exposed long legs down to her high heeled boots that laced up to her knees. In one hand she held a cane. In the other, a top hat.
Alistair Rook’s Carnival Imaginaire.
The name meant nothing to me, though it felt like it should. It had presence, like a bass drum in my chest. I searched my memories for a scrap, a mention, anything, but there was nothing.
“What is this?” I asked, swallowing my unease.
He cleared his throat and nodded to the card expectantly. I turned it over.
I’ve unlocked the gates one last time. We have need of a fortune teller. Come home.
Rook
Come home.
“This is for Corazon? The fortune teller? Are you sure?”
“Ja.” The dwarf gave me a look of exhausted patience, having had his word questioned twice in so many minutes. “This is her residence, yes?”
Instead of answering, I asked, “What is Carnival Imaginaire?”
The dwarf squinted and leaned into the doorway to stare up into my face. His top hat cast his plump cheeks in shadow making him look oddly menacing for being three feet tall. Without thinking, I took a step back.
“Nein. Who are you, girl?”
Don’t tell him. Irrational paranoia held back the simplest answer in the world. He didn’t move and neither did I. I didn’t even breathe. He waited as still as if he weren’t real at all, this German dwarf who knew my mother’s name but didn’t know mine.
Against my better judgment, and when I couldn’t hold my breath a moment longer, I relented.
“Sera.” The name came as an exhale. I felt a little bit like the word had been pried from my mouth. “Serafine Moreau.”
He straightened. “Serafine Moreau, you will see to it that the Corazon receives this?”
I nodded. It was a lie I couldn’t speak out loud, but he seemed to accept it as a promise nonetheless.
The dwarf tipped his hat to me one last time. I watched him march to the end of the hall and disappear down the steps before I closed the door and returned the chain to its slider.
The exchange had barely lasted a few minutes but it felt later all the sudden, as if more time had passed than it should have. I shrunk against the door and stared down at the curving handwriting of this mysterious Alistair Rook, whom I’d never heard of, calling my mom home.
Impossible, of course.
The dead did not receive invitations to carnivals, mysterious or otherwise.
2
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My mother was not a witch, though it was sometimes hard to be sure about that, especially when you were sick and she showed up with a pot of soup the color of collard greens that smelled repugnant but she swore could cure anything. When you complained about the boggy stench, she’d say that’s how you know it works and insist you drink up immediately. When in less than twenty-four hours you miraculously recovered, it was hard not to think of the fortune teller as something other.
She may or may not have actually been clairvoyant. She’d read the cards and recommend blessed candles or cleansing crystals, but it was when she poured her client a cup of tea that the real magic would begin. In less than five minutes she’d have a grown man in tears, spilling his heart and soul, all his lies and secrets, shamelessly and without reserve into the gossamer folds of her skirts like a child. She had a way of helping you root out the ugly, painful, embarrassing truths and after it was all over you’d leave $30 poorer but completely reanimated in spirit.
She could have been a Romani princess, tough and sly and beautiful enough to enchant Gods. Fairy tale beautiful. That’s what I remembered so well, waist length raven hair so thick and soft it would take her an hour to braid it into submission. Those days she left it long and loose and wild she could have been twenty years younger, mad and passionate. When she painted her lips rich red and costumed herself in gypsy colors and layers that hugged her narrow body, she could have been Scheherazade of legend. When I was young, I believed she was.
Cora Moreau. The Corazon. Seer of Fortunes. Knower of Men’s Hearts. She carried many titles, each more fantastical than the last. To me, she was just mom, the woman who could use my middle name as a weapon of terror and who taught me to sew no matter how very awful I was at it.
No one called her a fake even if she plied her trade in street markets, our red and purple tent sandwiched between a man selling organic cabbage and a woman who made jewelry from thrift store cutlery. In my mother’s eyes, we lent legitimacy to the market, not the other way around.
Mystical? Maybe. A bit of a con artist? Absolutely. And my hero, even when I couldn’t admit it.
Whatever it was that she did, however she did it, made even the most cynical trade up their pricy therapists for a weekly confessional with the fortune teller.
She was the real deal.
Wh
en she died, there was only me.
At best, I was little more than a pretender. At worst…
Well. I certainly inherited none of her magic.
3
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For a fortune teller, my mother built her life on secrets. Secrets about my father. Secrets about why we moved around, how she knew when it was time to pack it in, and how she knew where we’d end up. Secrets about her family and her childhood. Secrets about her gifts. “Is it real mom?” I’d ask. “Do you want it to be?” she’d answer. This went on until I was old enough to know better. Of course it wasn’t real.
Except when it was.
And now it seemed she had another secret. Alistair Rook and his marvelous carnival. Come home, he’d begged. We’d never had a home in my whole 22 years. Our apartments were paid by the month, sometimes by the week. I remembered being a little girl throwing myself to her feet, clutching her ankles, sobbing that I didn’t want to move again. Sobbing that I had no friends and that I hated her for it.
Seven years old I knew how to hate my mother but not how to play hopscotch.
The idea that she had a home somewhere out there that she never told me about made me sick to my stomach and bitterly angry because she was dead and couldn’t tell me why she’d kept it a secret. The woman who was my hero and my warden. She couldn’t answer my questions, the ones that kept me from sleeping most nights. She’d taken all her secrets with her when she left.
But…maybe not all her secrets. The carnival was a real place and Alistair Rook, I suspected, was a real person who could answer questions. Who could tell me things she never had.
If I could find him.
Despite my fridge being empty and the very real possibility of my electricity being shut off looming over my head, I skipped working the market and went carnival hunting instead. Putting in hours making up card readings for desperate women wanting news of tall, dark, and handsomes wandering into their future seemed like a torture I couldn’t stomach. Not today.
I changed into boots, black pants, and a black short-sleeved shirt. Autumn had come when we weren’t looking, muscling in on the last days of summer to chill the wind and force the city into its warm clothes prematurely. I knotted my red hair out of my eyes, grabbed my lime green pea coat, and before I left the apartment, I paused at the desk by the door where I kept the red box that held her ashes and the few odd objects that reminded me of her.
One of them, a gold coin, sat in an ashtray with a few loose coins, a thumb tack, and a safety pin. It looked banal sitting there amongst her discarded objects I hadn’t bothered to throw out. It was the size of a quarter, a little thicker, with a heavily worn stamp on both sides. If I twisted it into the light a certain way, I could just make out the letter C.
I’d found the coin curled in my mother’s hand the day she died. It was the last thing she’d picked up, the last object she’d touched. I’d never seen it before and the police didn’t think it was significant. A fortune teller trinket and nothing more.
Before I could change my mind, I grabbed the coin and headed blindly into the city with it and the invitation in my back pocket.
Coincidences didn’t exist. Neither did accidents or serendipity or happenstance. Things happened for a reason and the only reason they didn’t happen when they were supposed to was because people were exceptionally good at getting in their own way. It wasn’t a coincidence that my mother’s death so paralyzed me from moving on to the point that I was unable to let go of our last apartment or her tent at the market. If I’d gone any day over the last two years when I’d thought it was time, when I didn’t think I could stand this accursed city a day longer, the dwarf would never have found me. The invitation would never have come to me.
I had to believe it was supposed to be mine. My lifeline. Which was also the reason I believed that even though I did not know where to find Alistair Rook’s carnival, I would find it.
At the bottom of my stairs, in front of the mailboxes, I found my first clue.
“Oh, Serafine!”
Ms. Elma Totenheim stood sentry beside the front doors, watching the people outside move along with their lives while minding the rest of us on the inside. She was almost a shut in except that she was too nosy to actually stay in her apartment. Elma made it as far as the mailboxes every day, collecting the ephemera of our lives with her hawk eyes and herculean patience. She knew all our arguments, sexual partners, and bad behaviors. She collected junk mail dropped on the ground or in the trash and ferreted it away when she didn’t think we were watching. She was an odd duck, but no more so than the rest of us.
My hand was on the door knob, half turned, so close to getting away without being sucked into a conversation I didn’t have time for. I turned towards her with a strained smile.
“Ms. Totenheim. Is today a good day?”
“It is a very good day.” She cleared her throat again and thrust her chest towards me. Her eyes darted to her left breast pocket.
I don’t know how I missed it when I ran past her, but pinned to her shirt was a blue orchid.
“Where did you get that?” I breathed. I knew the answer, of course. The petals seemed so unbelievably blue, galaxy blue, like star dust. An overwhelming need to run my fingers across their velvet tips had me gripping the handle of the door with all my strength.
Elma preened as if it were a diamond ring and not just a flower.
“A little man gave it to me. He was dressed so nice, like a real gentleman he was. Foreign, too. Nobility I think.”
“That was very kind of him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did he say where it came from?”
“Oh, no. He did say he’d never seen a lady with prettier eyes than me when he insisted on giving me his flower.” She swayed her shoulders back and forth, unable to take her eyes away from her gift. “Sweet man. I was a catch once up on a time, a real beauty they used to say about me. When I was your age.”
“Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
She thought about it. “No. He seemed to be in a hurry. Had a bunch of flyers to hang up.”
Flyers.
“Here? Did he hang one up here? Elma, think please. Did you grab it perhaps?”
“I am no thief!”
“No, you’re right.” I took a step towards her. She took a step back. “I didn’t mean that you were. I just thought, perhaps he gave you one special.”
Elma’s eyes stayed narrowed on me for a long time, as if perhaps I intended to steal her flower. Her hand fluttered along its edges, fully prepared to crush it in her fist before letting me make off with it.
Her vanity overpowered her suspicion. “Well, I suppose maybe he gave me one special. Stay here. You can’t come in.”
She disappeared back to her apartment and was gone for only a few minutes before returning with a postcard sized flyer clutched in her hands.
“This is it. Don’t know if it’ll do you any good.”
The postcard was a blue so dark it was almost black, the paper soft to the touch, like moleskin. Stars dotted the background, raining down around the imprint at the center - a silver crescent moon with a raven perched inside the bottom curve.
I turned it over and recognized the strong, cursive handwriting in silver this time. Alistair Rook’s Carnival Imaginaire. At the edge of the city, along the horizon, within your dreams. No children allowed after dark.
“Riddle nonsense,” I grumbled and handed the card back to her. She snatched it, worry furrowing her old, narrow face, clearly worried the devil girl from upstairs would steal her object. “That figures. I don’t suppose he told you where you could find his carnival.”
“His carnival?” She blinked. “There’s a carnival?”
“Nevermind. Look, if you see Maurie, you never saw me, okay?”
Her worry lines disappeared behind a smile full of crooked teeth. “That man is a louse. I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire.”
I decided Elma Totenheim wasn’t so bad afte
r all.
She watched me leave, noted the time and the direction I turned. I could feel her eyes on me, nose pressed to the glass of our building’s front door, too afraid to come in contact with the rest of the world and too afraid to let it pass by without her.
Besides, before that morning when the dwarf woke me from my sleep, I’d spent the last two years not all that different from Elma Totenheim. Static. Waiting.
4
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In front of my building I found a second flyer taped to a stop sign. I turned right, made it half a block, and found the crescent moon and raven drawn messily in the dirty back window of a taxi cab idling at the curb. I picked up my pace.
A set of stars drawn in chalk on the sidewalk at the corner pointed me to cross the street and I followed the signs, even the weird ones that might not have been anything except for the fact that I was looking for them. A moon sticker on a mailbox. A set of ravens stenciled on the side of a building. By then I was running from one to the next, touching them to make sure they were real and not some hallucination as proof I’d finally gone completely crazy. My heart skipped beats as I ran to catch up with the dwarf, chasing the symbols I knew had to be for me.
Breadcrumbs.
When I caught sight of a boy with a crescent moon stitched to his backpack heading for the el station, I darted out in the middle of traffic without looking first. A horn screamed when I skidded to a stop before a bus had a chance to smear me irreparably across the intersection.
There was no time to scream. I held up my hands, as if that could protect me from the bus rushing towards me, and froze.
An arm grabbed me around the waist and yanked me out from its inevitable end.
