Emily Hall

Tarot Reader Wanted

She walked into the old speakeasy built on a now moved graveyard, looking for a ghost tour guide position. She had seen the photographs of Victorian women hanging silver in the air over grinning, oblivious tourists, had sobbed for no reason in the old brothel years before on her own ghost tour. A pack of poker tarot cards made by Salvador Dali in her purse, a cigar in hand, she sipped whiskey by the window as she filled out the application. The room was dark and smoky, light slicing the clouds. In the interview she was told they wanted her as a tarot card reader instead, after she took the owner's outstretched hand and was asked to read his energy and saw a little boy. Charlie followed her after that, small and pale, in his 1920's newsboy cap and breeches, one of the brothel girls' children maybe, with his crooked teeth and towheaded clumsiness. He'd play with the mirror in her car, make her deck throw "boy, coin, door" after a medium saw him running through a door in front of her at an event. Any time she got a reading after that first encounter, the medium would ask "who's the boy" and describe him. Or the night the beautiful Polish girl from the graveyard beneath asked where her families bodies were moved, "Where are they?", and showed her a grave left behind and bodies being moved. She knew bodies of the poor and forgotten had been left behind. When she left, the owner having had one of his rages in her direction, she left a crystal ball and a bullet from her grandfather's 21 gun military funeral, too afraid of his famous temper to return. One night, her husband had a vision of Charlie and the Polish girl while he was on Ambien, so she knows owner or not, they watch for her. She left coins and tobacco and Prosecco on the altar at seances in which jade bracelets on women's wrists turned grey to green. Now she talks to murder victims for clients, but the brothel girls still visit, their silk stockings whispering in her bedroom at night. Once you belong at the old brothel, you never quite leave. A photograph of a ghost in front of the fireplace had her face. She wonders if this place is kind of an afterlife of its own, if the hellhound sighted in the basement is actually the ghost of her dog. Somewhere behind the bar is a cigar box full of cards and charms the bartenders never use. Maybe we all live double lives, our ghosts wandering the haunted brothel while we are still here. You'll never know unless you ask your deck, ignore its warning, and apply for a job where ten foot shadow beings regularly attack staff when the moon is full. You'll never know unless you become one of the brothel girls yourself, part of the scenery in a spangled, fringed dress and red red lipstick, giving seances at midnight and almost breaking your ankle on the stairs with sexual favors at 1920's prices painted on them. You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. Say hello to the girls for me, chest tight with longing, just like a john.