Stars and Cards

Posted on Fri 10th Jul, 2020 @ 4:59am by Yuliette Marayan Dr.
Edited on on Sat 25th Jul, 2020 @ 7:47pm

856 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Brown Sector: Zodiac

The Gutzman Memorial Library was guarded by the enormous statue of a half horse, half man sculpture drawing back a bow. Humans did have some pretty impressive mythology. Yuliette remembered one of her Terran friends at school being obsessed with the astrology of Earth. She kept insisting on trying to figure out Yuliette’s “sign” although that made little to no sense, since Rho Saro’s sky was something completely different. Her friend had settled on trying to work backwards, instead of from the birthdate-to-sign-to-personality reading, they had tried to peg Yuliette through her personality to the signs. Although intrigued by the astrological concept, when she read the descriptions, Yuliette had found them all so vaguely described that half of them could fit her to one degree or another, but none of them were entirely convincing. Besides, how could everyone born under certain stars all align with similar personalities? She didn’t say as much out loud though, seeing as her friend was very sold on the whole thing. That was supposedly a trait in itself: conflict avoidance. All her friends at the bar that night had been content calling Yuliette a Libra.

This pillar shaped like a horse-guy with a bow? Sagittarius. That was what the Terrans called him. People under his sign were supposedly idealistic, outgoing, adventurous, and funny. Supposedly Yuliette was romantically compatible with Sagitarrian folk— Libras sounded compatible to most of the zodiac. But who wouldn’t like someone outgoing and funny? They were magnetic personalities. The Zodiac talk led to other ideas for the evening. Yuliette and her girlfriends had also gotten card readings that night and Yuliette had paid because, well, she was “hostess”. She was always hostess. You had a lot of friends when you put up the coin. Her zodiac-obsessed friend had a half dozen breakups since that night and still insisted it had been told in the cards. She revised the meaning every time something new went down in her life.

Yuliette’s card reading had begun with the Wheel of Fortune. And now she stood in the Rotunda— The Rota Fortuna— a literal Wheel of Fortune. It was another name for the Zodiac itself. And it meant Change. The fortune teller had said “The rich become poor and the poor become rich.” Belief or none, Yuliette had been a little uncomfortable at that. And then all her friends had gasped at the next card— the skeletal Death. But it was upside down. So the sign for change was followed by a statement from the fortune teller saying: “Death is not a terrible card, it only means the end of something. You’re going to refuse your change. But you ought to embrace it.”

She did, in fact, presently wish she could refuse her condition— not that the universe gave two spits. As the fortune teller had continued, Yuliette wasn’t sure after misfortune and death that she wanted to see the third card. But it came up as Lovers, and everyone coo-ed and told her they would trade all the money in the galaxy for that card, which was easy enough for them to say since they were all leveraged up to their brow piercings. The card was upright, too, supposedly a true romance. Maybe that was a mistake and it should have been first in the order and come out upside down, predicting her love tragedy. Within a week of the card reading, Yuliette’s then steady boyfriend of three years turned on her and left her for one of her moocher ‘friends’ whom he’d been sleeping with practically the whole time, because she had better endowments (and not of the monetary sort). It left Yuliette with something of a complex and in her remaining time on Risa she had scheduled and cancelled the surgery her mother had always insisted on about a half dozen times before completing her residency and deciding on her mission to the desert.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want love. She just didn’t want loved for those reasons, the money, the fetishes, the society. None of the people of the sands were measuring her body or evaluating her accounts or name dropping when she was treating bone breaks, snake bites, and fevers. They even insisted on bartering what they valued for her services and not living like parasites. Her practice became her life, her self identity. And she had been happy, if a little lonely. At least it had been peaceful and a respite from her mother’s pressure to marry her off well. But Yuliette couldn’t even practice now. She couldn’t use her name, and without her name she wasn’t licensed or educated on anyone’s records, no matter what her head and hands were capable of.

Broke, ugly, alone, and wanted dead. Behind her sunglasses, Yuliette rolled her eyes. “Thanks, universe.”

Moving past the Sagittarius pillar, Yuliette entered the Gutzman Library. There was some research she needed to help her figure out how to move on from this place. After all, who would want to live on the Wheel of Fortune?

 

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