There was nothing waiting for me at Rothschilds Library, of course. Or any of the other five libraries on campus, for that matter. But Nia didn’t need to know that.
I speed-walked for a few blocks until I was sure that I could no longer feel the burn of her gaze on my back.
I was a junior in college and just barely getting my first taste of romance, which by all accounts meant I was still stunted in the social stage of a highschooler.
And it’s not because I didn’t try.
I tried to put myself out there. I tried to open up to Forrest. And all I was left with was humiliation and a friend who genuinely believed making me feel small was helping me.
“Is any of this even in my control? Am I just destined for fucked-up relationships?” I muttered to no one.
A black car swerved just inches away from where I crossed the street and beeped noisily. It had gotten so close to me that I could see the panic coursing through the driver’s eyes, as if they hadn’t seen me crossing the street. As if I had just appeared out of thin air.
As if I was invisible, I thought, stumbling onto the sidewalk. A familiar shiver crawled its way up my back as I passed the age-beaten door of the psychic shop hidden within an old cobblestone stoop. I shouldn’t have come this way, but I couldn’t bear to use the Biology walkway and think of where I’d been just an hour earlier with Forrest.
I’d taken to avoiding this old stoop shop diligently over my first two years at Pennbrook. It hid on the mouth of Main street. I felt the shiver before I ever saw the building, like it was whispering to me, magic lives here.
It scared me. So, I started using the detour through the Biology walkway. The detour added about six minutes to my pre and post-work transit, but I couldn’t risk being lured into the little stoop-shop smoothly tucking itself into the otherwise normal fanfare of my college main street. Even now, two years later, it was just as inconspicuous as the first time I’d seen it: no neon lights, no dream catchers in the window. Just a tiny sign in the door for those who happened to wander close enough to read it.
Patrizia’s Readings
I stood, frozen, and watched as a watershed of students trickled out of the Ben & Jerry’s above Patrizia’s Readings with overpriced scoops of ice cream hanging from their mouths.
No one ever seemed to notice the little store that lived in the nook beneath the ice cream shop. But I did.
And this time I couldn’t walk away from its siren call. Because I knew college was supposed to be different: a new world of fun, romance, parties, and friendships that weren’t put on hold by premature tragedy. My first two years were a cacophony of disappointments, unexplained endings, and almosts that didn’t count.
But, then came Forrest. For a moment, I believed he really saw me.
I shouldn’t have.
And, worse, I couldn’t sleep without having those dreams. Which could just be due to stress. Or my refusal to give up eating right before I go to bed. Or an over-active subconscious.
Or it could be something more. Something ìyá-àgbà called a gift but Máàmi sucked her teeth at and called ‘rubbish’. Something this New World didn’t have the words to describe.
I needed answers. Answers that didn’t come from my own head or (ir) rationalizing.
But, as my heart hitched in my throat for a split-second, I almost came to my senses and turned around and went home; left the little psychic shop hiding beneath the garish ice-cream store on Main Street untouched. Until a memory caught me.
“Máàmi, when will it be my turn to see Miss Tisha?” I ask, as I watch my older sister, Bemi, strut on a long platform in the more renowned of our two county malls. Her long slender legs float gracefully as her shoulders slink with the gait of a panther. Her sharp features look slightly out of place against the fluffy body waves Máàmi had Miss Tisha put in over the weekend. Bemi needs to show off her aquiline angles, not hide them. And besides, that was her second salon visit in the past three months, while the single-braids I’ve had in for the past four months are so overrun by new growth that they’re starting to look like dreads.
“This is your sister’s day, Aṣa. Don’t be envious, it doesn’t suit you.” Máàmi says staring forward with laser-focus. Her head bounces with each of Bemi’s steps as if she’s walking with her, keeping count for an intricate choreography.
We spent last Saturday cheering Ṣegun on at a basketball game. The weekend before in a frigid grey repurposed warehouse of a waiting room attending the last round of auditions for this fashion show. When would my day come?
Máàmi snaps her head to me, as if I asked my question out loud or called her by name. A flash of recognition darts across her carob eyes and chips away at the irritation brimming on her pursed lips.
She lowers her head to mine.
“Listen to me, Aṣa. Some people are smart. Some are lucky. Some beautiful.” Her almond eyes flashed briefly to Bemi before turning back to me. “You can’t have everything, and you shouldn’t want to. Some things aren’t for everyone and you can’t let that eat you alive, you have to be okay with that.”
Maybe a part of me could live with the notion that because of what the world sees when they look at me, I have to be better than the best just to be seen. That because I exist at the intersection of Black, and woman and not-from-here, I might not get a job that I deserve. I might get barred from running for head of school like I did in high school. I might have to be twice as good to get half as much. Sure, I had spent a lifetime wrapping my head around that.
But to accept that I would be loved less? That college would not be the medley of fun, recklessness and drunken self-discovery that seemed a given for everyone else. To accept that no matter how hard I tried, I somehow deserved less of something as God-given as affection?
No.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t surrender to a world that said I should be content with getting the scraps of love, the broken thrown-away bits that no one else wanted. I couldn’t submit to a life of gorging myself on whiffs and second-hand shells of experiences from friends, books, magazines just to get a taste. No.
It seemed too this-worldly cruel.
I was desperate. Desperate not to feel stuck or bound to this half-life of almosts and waiting and bated breath.
So, I knocked.
The wooden door’s iron-wrought tassel rusted over with muted greens and purple like a long-forgotten penny. Long fluffy cobwebs covered the door, silvering over in the twilight moon’s reflection as they billowed ominously in the late October breeze.
I grabbed a crumpled-up napkin to protect my hand from the cobwebs as I knocked, catching a couple of lone cobwebs in the process.
Even with the tissue covering my hand, the coolness of the iron-wrought tassel bit at my skin. I tapped it twice, half expecting the door to creak open slowly revealing a little old lady hunched over a bubbling black cauldron.
Instead, the door flew open quickly on the second knock.
“Hello?” A deep voice questioned. An overwhelming scent of sage and incense inundated me as I looked up at the striking beautiful person in front of me. Their hair was a bed of multi-colored locs twisted delicately into a braid crown, and their dark eyes stared at me expectantly with one perfectly managed eyebrow raised, and a clean split running through the arch of their right eyebrow. My gaze caught on their hands, large and commanding with bright purple nail polish and a different color-jeweled ring adorning each finger.
This definitely wasn’t wasn’t the hunch-backed old woman I had expected.
“I hope you liked the Halloween decorations.” They said gesturing to the now sparse display of cobwebs, a good amount of which were entangled in my napkin from my “heroic” act of cobweb removal. Upon second glance, I could see that the remaining ‘cobwebs’ looked more like pillow stuffing than anything else.
“Oh.” The shopkeeper raised their eyebrows quickly at the sight of my ‘cobweb’ covered napkin. before pointing
“That’s okay.” They pointed a perfectly manicured finger next to the door where a small rubbish bin sat. “Half the customers this time of year come in groups and treat this as a sort of ‘haunted house’ seance simulation; more here for the ambiance than the actual reading. I can see that’s not your thing, so why don’t we skip the dramatics and jump into it?” They asked, still holding the door open as I stood with my unsure feet frozen on the threshold.
The waiting room was about the size of a closet and I had a feeling that once the door closed there’d be no real turning back.
I nodded wordlessly.
“Before you ask, let’s get some quick FAQs and housekeeping out of the way: Yes, I am the Patrizia on the door. Yes, this is really my hair. And no, I don’t feel like discussing my pronouns, please refer to the sign if necessary.” They pointed at the blackboard directly across from the entrance.
Pronouns Are ‘Zhe/Zhem/Zhir’.
Use Them Accordingly
No respect = No Service.
“Now, are you gonna stand there and gawk at me all day or did you come to request my services?” Zhe asked.
“No! I mean no I’m not going to gawk you all day. I’m sorry about that. I was wondering if I could do a reading.”
Aje ni e? Máàmi voice rang in my ear. “You think I took you this far across the world so you can play with that same juju nonsense that people waste their lives away on at home? Her disapproving face floats in my head; her full lips disappeared impossibly into thin pursed lips that wordlessly said ‘wa je gba’ (basically Yoruba for “come get your ass whooped”).
“Well come in then, I don’t bite. And I don’t steal destinies or fix fates either for that matter, but you already know that don’t you?” Zhe muttered with a dry smile dancing on zhir eyes.
I skulked behind zhem as we entered the well-lit main room that looked oddly, or perhaps expectantly, identical to the bright sterile interior of the chain ice cream shop above it.
The room was big enough to fit a sleek wooden square block of a table and four red pillow seats surrounding it. All manner of trinkets cluttered the table: at least five decks of cards, candles of all shapes and sizes, sticks that left wafts of spicy fragrance tickling at my nose, and three crystals: a translucent white pyramid, an amethyst stone almost as purple as Patrizia’s nails, and a large pink heart in the middle.
“I know. The lighting sort of ruins the whole Halloweentown vibe, but it makes no difference to the ethers.” Zhe looked up from zhir incense stick and found me still shifting by the door.
“We could go across the hall to “The Cauldron” as I call it, the more Disneyland version of all of this, if that’s what you prefer?”
“No, this is fine!” I scurried over to the nearest stool and watched as Patrizia finished lighting the candles.
A couple of zhir loose locs swung dangerously close to the flame, but zhe didn’t seem to notice or care. Zhir eyes were half-closed in peaceful concentration as zhe quickly sprayed something that smelled like whatever the altar boys carry at church.
All the scents were making me feel a bit loopy. Or maybe that was just my anxiety. I half expected Patrizia to grab my palm and break out in tongues, but instead zhe sat down and silently started shuffling a deck of cards.
“Is there an intention you’d like to set for this meeting. Anything you’d like to ask from your guides?”
“My-my guides?”
“You know. Your loved ones. Some people call them ancestors, some call them guardian angels. The ones whose spirits are tethered to you, who steer and protect you.” Zhir eyes seemed to catch something just left of my shoulder as if someone had just walked through the door. “And you do have a great many of them. You, good sis, are covered.”
I tried to gulp past the thick fog of fear in growing my throat. Maybe this is what I get for going to a psychic. Talk of raising the dead and the old wounds that came with them.
“Umm.” Right, question for my guides….
To start, why did you leave? I thought. How do I fill the vacant space in Máàmi‘s eyes? How do we become whole without you?
And then, selfishly, I wondered: Would I ever love?
My mind travelled to bàbá-àgbà. He passed away just ten days after ìyá-àgbà, as if he genuinely couldn’t live without her. As if he died of a broken heart.
I’d seen too much to ever genuinely question the existence of love, but how does one catch it when it’s constantly shapeshifting? How can I possibly catch love when it can morph from a jewel that glints on top of an unreachable tower into loose grains of sand that slip through the holes of your fingers the second you think you’ve grasped it?
“I guess my intention is to figure out how I can cultivate more love in my life.”
“Hmmm. Okay. Let’s see what they have to say. Remember, don’t feel the need to force a message to you if it doesn’t apply. And I also recommend writing notes and a general reflection of the reading afterwards.”, zhe continued shuffling as zhe spoke, “What sounds like gibberish today might click tomorrow. Sometimes the only thing we need to make sense of the conundrums of today is time.”
Zhe skillfully laid the three cards down and flipped them over in the opposite order that they had been dealt.
“Hmmm” zhe muttered. “Three of Swords, Five of Pentacles and the Tower in Reverse. I feel there’s been a lot of pain. Pain and guilt? That’s been holding you in a space of almost, captivity.”
Zhe quickly dealt one more card, a second card stumbled out, and before zhe could deal a third, the last card seemed to jump out of the stack.
“But then we have the Empress.” Zhe said holding up a card with a dusky skinned woman adorned in gold whose obsidian dune eyes followed me captivatingly.
“The Magician.” Zhe revealed a card showing a masculine figure with white eyes and short silver dreads holding a staff.
“And… Death.” Zhe said in the same matter-of-fact tone as if zhe didn’t hear the word that just came falling out of zhir mouth.
My stomach sank.
“Death?” I muttered soundlessly.
I shifted in my chair as my heart began pumpng in my ears to the beat of regret.
“There’s a lot of untapped power and potential in you. And you will have the opportunity to walk in that power. To take control of your life in a sort of delicious way, especially for one who has been in the tower for so long. But this big shift, this restoration necessitates death.”
My mind splintered into memories: A golden casket, ìyá-àgbà’s peaceful face. The wake I only got to attend from my dreams. I couldn’t bear to live that again.
“But I’m also getting these recurring images of, like, leaving the cracked arid land of a drought for something abundant and fresh. A forest? And something red…” Zhe continued, closing zhir eyes now as if the image was plastered on the back of zhir eyelids.
Flickers of the dream that had been re-visiting me flashed before my eyes: red blood drops on something pale and fleshy, my dress soaked as my mouth falls agape.
My hand twitched in my lap. I tried to steady myself on the table as I felt myself slipping into a state of dread where I could hear nothing, see nothing.
“I’m seeing hands holding and then the hands letting go.” zhe continued, “Like the shift is calling you to put to rest a relationship. Singular or plural? I’m not sure. But I do know that is necessary to truly walk into your power, to become the Empress.”
I didn’t have any relationships to spare. The only budding one I could think of was—my mind traveled to a pair of muddy green eyes as I imagined the light, the rush of thrill, the constant state of shock Forrest gave me being dashed away.
Maybe this was about him? The different side of himself that he had shown me today, was that the end? He said he would hurt me the night he had a panic attack. Maybe he was telling the truth—giving me a chance to run?
“It might be painful—” Patrizia’s voice cut through my thoughts.
There was that word again. Pain. The thing that slithered up my throat and into my life every day. The thing that became a centerpiece in my family, the thing that I was constantly running from and running into. Pain.
I didn’t want to know pain anymore; I couldn’t willingly allow it into my life after all the destruction it had caused.
I saw Patrizia’s lips moving, but zhir voice was drowned out by the sound of my chest drumming in my ears.
“Love and freedom.” Zhir voice phased in.
The air was being sucked out of the room as I tried to breathe over the crushingly heavy sensation of my chest.
I had to get out.
I had to leave this place before its energy clung to me. Before this pain and death Patrizia spoke of became prophecy.
Patrizia’s face seemed overwhelmingly large. Zhir soft black eyes suddenly portrayed the eyes of a hawk to me, as if I was seeing the world through a carnival mirror. Zhe was looking straight at me now, zhir thick eyebrows twisting in concern.
I tried to flash a smile in zhir direction and show that I was okay. But, as I moved to un-contort my face, I realized I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything, just numbness bringing me dangerously close to floating.
Even my fingers felt numb—a slight tremor was the only reminder that they still existed as I reached past the crumbs and spare change in my bag and towards three crumpled up twenty-dollar bills in the side-pocket.
“Sorry.” I managed to choke out, slamming the money on the table and running out of the shop.
Note from the author: if you made it this far, wow. You are a real one. I feel wildly exposed and deeply grateful. Thank you for being here. If anything moved you, I would love to know, but mostly I am just glad you sat with me in this moment.
If you know me in life or through my words, you already know what I am trying to do. I am trying to catch the impossible. Little flashes of the expansive, confusing, triumphant, aching, miraculous magic that is Black girlhood. The shadows and the sweetness. The strange growing pains of becoming in a world that does not always see you, and the power that rises when you choose yourself anyway.
This scene is from my first manuscript. I finished it a few Halloweens ago and it is precious to me. At the time, it did not feel like the world was ready. People encouraged me to shape it into something safer. Instead, I let it rest and let myself grow. Maybe now is the moment to start letting it breathe in the open.
So here we are. My little Halloween jump scare to myself. Thank you, truly. Happy Halloween, and I hope you have a warm and gentle night.
Eek. Bye.If you made it this far, wow. You are a real one. I feel wildly exposed and deeply grateful. Thank you for being here. If anything moved you, I would love to know, but mostly I am just glad you sat with me in this moment.
If you know me in life or through my words, you already know what I am trying to do. I am trying to catch the impossible. Little flashes of the expansive, confusing, triumphant, aching, miraculous magic that is Black girlhood. The shadows and the sweetness. The strange growing pains of becoming in a world that does not always see you, and the power that rises when you choose yourself anyway.
This scene is from my first manuscript. I finished it a few Halloweens ago and it is precious to me. At the time, it did not feel like the world was ready. People encouraged me to shape it into something safer. Instead, I let it rest and let myself grow. Maybe now is the moment to start letting it breathe in the open.
So here we are. My little Halloween jump scare to myself. Thank you, truly. Happy Halloween, and I hope you have a warm and gentle night.
Eek. Bye.
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