<<Previously… 2 slices of sourdough, shredded cheese, dab of butter, minced garlic, 3 dabs of red pasta sauce, 6 leaves of spinach, sliced mushrooms.
answer to last week’s riddle: Clouds >>
written for the theme: cinnamon
New Orleans, ten Tuesdays from now.
The French Market – teeming, as always, with haggling tourists and locals. 
Somewhere that only a couple hundred years ago was a place to trade with Indians. Torn apart again and again by hurricanes and fires, just to be rebuilt, re-imagined, reprocessed. It’s died and been resurrected more times than I have. These days it boasts an overabundance of sunglasses and wallets, flasks and silly T-shirts that tell people just how drunk you got on your trip here. You can buy fresh fruit, purses, scarves, ancient Chinese artifacts (and replicas of those same artifacts), altars, beads and masks, jewelry and statues of Hindu gods.
“Don’t see your lot around much, not these days, mate.”
As always, Gabriel walked up behind me just as I entered the rows of stalls. “I’ve been by,” I said. “But I’ve got this fake mustache I wear – throws everybody off.”
Tall and lanky, with eyes too big for his head, Gabriel always reminded me of a stick bug. He grinned wide. “I see ya,” he said. “You’s too good for us market hounds, now you’re all high and mighty, workin’ for the lady an’ all.”
I shrugged. “Guess you got me figured out. No use in me trying to hide the truth anymore, I suppose. Load off my shoulders. Now that it’s all straight between us, I’m here to see The Augur.”
He cocked his head to the side. “’Course you are.” He walked over to one of the posts holding up the roof and opened a panel revealing a large, faded-red switch. With a loud THOCK he flipped the switch, and everyone vanished except us. “You know the way.”
I nodded to him and walked down the long hall, past all the empty stalls, until I came to the plastic table with the old woman sitting behind it in a plastic folding chair. She was so old that it was impossible to assign any kind of ethnicity to her, her wrinkled skin so aged that it almost couldn’t be called skin anymore. She was wrapped in a tattered but clean brown blanket with jagged yellow patterns on it.
The Augur looked up suddenly, as if I’d woken her, then she seemed to sink back into her chair. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Thought you’d know I was coming. Isn’t that your job?”
She grinned with a mouth only half full of teeth.
“I knew that you were coming, but my tax return’s also coming today, and it’s a bit more exciting than you are.”
“Ouch.” I pulled a small box out of my jacket and handed it to her. “From my employer, of course.”
She took the box and it disappeared under her blanket. “You want your fortune read, before you go.”
“You always ask, and I always say no.”
I turned to leave, but her hand shot out and grabbed my arm. I turned back to her and she pulled up my sleeve. My arm from my wrist to my elbow was completely black and burnt.
She ran a wrinkled thumb over the words Don’t Do, written over my thumb. “But this time you want to know.” Her eyes were windows to a deep, gray sea.
“Alright,” I said. “I suppose I do.”
The Augur eased back into her seat, pulled out a leather bag and produced from it a dozen or so cinnamon sticks. She popped one in her mouth and started chewing, then dropped the others clattering onto the plastic table. Her eyes scanned them over, picking a few of them up one at a time and then placing them back where they were. She pulled the one out of her mouth and spat the chewed cinnamon over the other sticks.
“Glad I didn’t eat before coming here,” I muttered.
Her eyes shot up to me, and I felt like I was going to fall forward into their vast grayness. “You made a mistake,” she said. “A horrible mistake.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got that much,” I said. “Can you tell me what it was?”
She shook her head, slowly. “It doesn’t matter now. Your pasts and your futures have reached through the worlds of time and gotten a stranglehold on you, and they will not let go until they get what they want.”
“What do they want?”
The Augur looked over the sticks, then her eyes fixed on two of them that made an X. She looked up at me. “You have to die.”
I took out my flask and took a swig of Chartreuse. “Everyone has to die,” I said. “Kind of.” I pocketed my flask. “Thanks for the reading.” I started walking back through the empty stalls.
“There’s more,” she called out after me.
“I’ve got all I need,” I said.
A figure stepped out from behind one of the brick offices. “Do you have all you need?” he sang. His face shifted and melted its way across my memory, and he wore the colorful clothes of a balloon-sculpting clown. He pulled off his blue top hat and tilted his head.
I smirked. “I remember you this time.”
His eyes held in them such a dense sadness, and that sadness reached out and grabbed a fistful of my shirt. “No,” he whispered. “You don’t.” His sadness picked me up and threw me spiraling through the air, and when I landed I knew I was on a sidewalk, and the sun was on my back. I was no longer in the French Market. I looked up, and I was at the foot of the Gateway – right in the middle of the Bywater.
The clown was nowhere to be seen, and my wrist started throbbing. I could feel the episode beginning to shred apart at the seams. Energy poured into the air from my wrist and mixed with the energies of the Gateway, the forces braiding into each other. Then the episode slipped right out from under me, and I was gone.
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story and photos Copyright 2010 by Andy Reynolds
for more stories and a menu of the episodes, visit my website: AndyReynolds.net
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