The sign read: Tarot Readings: Tonight $5. They had been walking with their arms loosely linked together, their legs sometimes brushing, along a street beginning to thin from its fevered Friday-night pitch. When she paused by the window to look inside, he stopped immediately so their moment of closeness would not be interrupted, and he followed her gaze through the opaque glass. "I want to have my cards read," she told him. He looked over his shoulder into the street. Fragrant spring breezes edged with a recent shower rustled his shirtsleeves and sent a refreshing breath down his collar. Lights from the unhurried traffic around them bounced red and white, across his face. He turned back to her and followed her smile past her curled lips to the tips of her ears and the curve of her neck. "Come on," she said pulling his hand. "Let's get our cards read. You want to?" Her voice set him back on his heels, and he thought of velvet wings slipping over his skin in the quiet of the night. "I'm not really the occult type," he said. "You're not afraid of a little late night divining are you?" "I'm only afraid of a stacked deck," he laughed. And he squeezed her hand in his before she slipped away to open the door. He followed her into a jaded pub where they found two or three people staring at them from their stools in the half-dark. The bartender barely stirred at the bar. A solitary man sat at a table below the front window. He was grinning through heavy lenses over a handful of large cards, sharing some joke with the dead air around him. Beneath him, the tabletop was covered with sequin-studded cloth, and the light of several candles twisted and shimmied together in the kaleidoscope of beams produced by the shiny discs. Crystals of varying sizes snaked around the candleholders, and a slender stick of incense sent perfumed fingers into the still air. A glass-eyed plaster bust of Tutankhamon stared through the smoke. "Can I get my cards read?" she asked the man whose head was nodding before the words left her mouth. "Yes, yes." His voice was low and grainy and seemed to waft from the diffused lights of the candles poking shadows at his upturned face. He wore a bad polyester dashiki, and a gold lame headband drew back his thick, black hair. "My name is Phoenix," he said and she took his white hand in hers while her date looked away to the bar and laughed quietly. "I'm Claire." "Hello Claire." Phoenix turned toward her companion. "Are you having a reading as well," he asked, pushing his glasses more firmly against his fleshy face. "No, no." The man spread his hands outward away from his body. "Come on Lance, it's just for fun," the woman said to him. He watched the flames dance in her eyes. "I don't think so," he said. "You go ahead." He pulled a chair to the odd side of the booth and sat down. After watching them for a moment he pushed himself back and asked her if she wanted a drink. "What?" "Do you want something to drink?" "No. No thanks." She turned back to the seer who was shuffling and dealing cards between them. He listened to her laughter while he sipped his bourbon, and he watched her, in the mirror behind the bar, removed from him by a generation of glass. He thought the evening had been going well. They'd started with dinner at his favorite Lebanese restaurant, followed by a walk up the block for dessert and cognac at the intimate grotto-like cellar of a nearby Italian place. He'd suggested a stroll through the late evening air to bring together the effects of the good food and drink. Everything had gone as planned. Well, this little foray into the mystic was definitely not in his plans. They should have been on their way home by now, taking advantage of gorged appetites and the proximity of his walk-up. There was a bottle of champagne chilling in his refrigerator, and he'd left the French doors open so the park would be visible from his balcony. He'd had a good feeling about this night. When he'd left for their rendezvous the early evening light lapped the fence-tops and iron stoops along his street, and he was full of the sound of her voice that had reached to him over the phone. He liked the way her newness made his skin jump. An unheard keening lingered after the call, pushing up under his skin, and dilating his senses as though he'd been invited by the supple chords to enter her world, to touch her silky lips and push his face into the warmth of her mouth. He drained the bourbon and returned to her side at the table. She looked up quickly when he sat down. An unsteady man paused to consider their busy table before he made his way to the bathroom in the back of the bar. "This is interesting." Phoenix said to the ladder of colorful figures on the cards below his face. "What's that?" asked Claire. "The Queen of Cups." She bit her lip and stared down at the figure of the queen, which winked in and out of the shadows of the candlelight. "Bad, huh?" "No, no," he said. "She's great, full of fire and independence, but not very stable in relationships." He fixed his eyes on Lance. "Are you two getting engaged?" "No," she said stopping her laugh with the back of her hand. Lance felt the fingers of her free hand brush along his arm as he stood-up again. He returned to the bar and ordered another bourbon, trying to ignore the way his throat swelled slightly and the moisture he felt on the inside of his hands. They'd been doing well enough. She laughed at his jokes and he still thought her cosmopolitan affectations were cute. The attraction was definitely there; he could hear her breath quicken when his arm settled around her waist, and he liked the way she parted her lips when they kissed. At the table she was giving the cards her careful attention. Her auburn hair angled down the line of her jaw, and her lips shone in the light trapped by her face. Lance looked toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. The bourbon licked the insides of his belly. He tried to concentrate on the silence above him, on the stale air pushed across his cheeks by the ceiling fans. The smell of cloves beat back the sandalwood from King Tut, and he turned too catch her pulling hard on a gray cigarette clasped between her thumb and forefinger. He'd never seen her smoking. The two of them were hunkered over the table. Lance watched her, how she set her fingers against her teeth, the way she studied the cigarette and spun a loose strand of her hair. "Come on" he said, around his palm. The sound of his own words surprised him, and he glanced quickly down the bar. Turning back, he found her studying him. He shrugged when she looked away. "You're uncomfortable with commitment though?" It was as much a question as a statement Phoenix appeared to be using to justify one of the cardboard characters he had his fat finger pressed upon. "I don't know if that's it, or whether I'm just not totally happy with where I'm at right now. You know maybe it's a sort of transient thing." Claire turned over the next card herself. "I see." He said, staring down at the new card. Lance leaned in for a better view. The new figure resembled a clothed skeleton with a bundle of sticks. "See what?" he said, too loudly. Claire shifted in her seat. "Well, I see where she was going with the transient perspective. This character represents change, like some upheaval or great flux is coming." Phoenix spoke at the tabletop. Lance looked at his watch. He unconsciously tallied the cost of the evening in his head. If they left soon, it would not be so late that inviting her upstairs would be uncomfortable. Claire flipped another card. "Oh no!" she said. Her hand went immediately to her mouth, then back to the table to touch Phoenix's pudgy whiteness. They laughed together. From his stool Lance first smiled then shook his head. "What's so funny?" He stood up and walked over to the table. "Well that certainly changes things," Phoenix said through his smile. Lance stared at the cheap gold headband and the absurd mushroom of hair that sprouted from it. "Changes things? How do you change, flux?" he asked. "What do you suck-up the loose ends with a cosmic vacuum cleaner or something?" He tried to laugh but the smile died on his lips. They weren't listening anyway. They were back in their private world of flickering card-faces and dime-store incense, spreading out their carney tricks to cover more questions than answers. "I must have bruised the psychic connection," he explained over his shoulder to the yawning bartender. This time Claire's look lasted a moment longer, though she broke it off without acknowledging his bleary grin. Lance turned his back, focusing on the bourbon left in his glass and the growing dark space inside of him. He jammed himself into his isolation, forgetting the sweetness of her voice, allowing the icy breath of indifference to run cool fingers along his spine. Several minutes later she was at his elbow with her jacket draped over her arm. "Are you ready?" Lance looked into her eyes. "I've been ready," he said, starting for the door. Outside she slipped into the jacket and they walked without touching back along their earlier route. He felt the darkness crouching between his shoulder blades. "So what's up?" he asked. "What do you mean?" She sounded smaller in the wideness of the night. "What are we doing?" She stopped walking and shrugged, staring sideways into his face. It had grown cooler out since they'd been in the bar. "I mean, what do you want to do now?" He wished the words back in his mouth as soon as he let them go. "I don't know." "I thought you might like to come by my place for a little while." He tasted the blandness of his words while they dropped into the empty space between them. "I have a big day tomorrow," she said. "I've got this great bottle of Veuve Cliqote," he offered. He swallowed hard in the darkness, dragging his wet hands down his pant-legs. "Really?" She looked past him, down the quiet street. He shivered in the breeze.