Quizás: A Preview

I just wanted to drop off something I've been working on. This is a section of prose, from a collection of concise non-fiction I've been gathering about my experiences in Granada. It needs work, it has only been roughly edited. Tell me what you think.

---

Quizás


She is intoxicating, slowing my mind, incapable of quick reactions, talking foreign words in foreign ways and familiar words in unusual ways. I cut the deck seven times and slide them across the table, in front of her, and she turns over the first row of cards.

I am in an old apartment. Not so much that the building, itself, is old, but it is apparent that an old person has been there. A grandma apartment. Cold. Sterile. Everything is orderly. So much of everything and all so orderly. Immaculate clutter. Rows of Spanish encyclopedias in soldiering rows detailing a history I wasn’t even aware existed, until just recently. Oil paintings like frosted glass windows, scenes of carriages in front of fruterias and plazas, pale streetlights barely glimmering against gray stone. Trinkets and figurines and sepia tone pictures that weren’t taken in sepia tone by choice. Pictures of men with mustaches. A private museum. I suppose, after so many years, sentimentality collects.

The second row of cards is turned and she tells me what they tell her. I have affluence in my dealings. It takes a moment to get past her words, the lullaby she is singing, to think how this might apply to me.

Our legs folded under the lightly pattered tablecloth upon the table, knees against the heater hidden beneath, warming the blood as it passes through.

The third row and I have fortune in love, but one by one all the face cards reveal themselves upside down. “No es bueno,” she says. “The people…”

Another row is turned over and the same, all the kings and the queens and the jacks of my life, all upside down. “This is not a good time for you and people. Maybe language…” she puts her hands in front of her like a boxed mime, “…from people.”

She flips the rest of the cards and not a face deviates, even the jesters are standing on their heads, they appear correct to me, they look to me properly, but she reads different.

“Impossible,” she says. “No puede ser. The cards…” she waves her hand above them as if she were trying to sell me the set, some sort of game show host. “…but look at you.”

I give an apprehensive giggle. I want to tell her, tell her what I feel, what I’ve felt for so long, how at home I feel in the book, buried under words. But how, how could I convey—anything—to her? “Gracias,” I say.

“Maybe you are like child,” she says. Her voice, elegant in its gentility. “Maybe you just watch like child. Just take in.” Her words blanket my body. “And maybe one day you say…” She waves her hand like the sun, rising across the sky and setting. “…‘Hola. I am here’.”

“Maybe,” I say.