Cloudy Days

On cloudy days, people were more inclined to visit Alison's seafront booth for tarot readings. She could spend hours without customers when it was sunny - she blamed the contrast between bright sunshine and her windowless unit under the arches. But, when it was overcast, she could get a queue going - and queues tended to grow.

She only sipped a little water between customers because every trip to pee was lost time when she could be earning. A cloudy day like this in early August could mean taking it easy until the bank holiday. She checked her make-up, adjusted her jewellery, and went to welcome in the next person. Opening the door, Alison blinked. A young woman with a pram waited, but before she could enter, a man strode up from Alison's left.

"You're the tarot reader, yeah?"

The man wore a muscle tee and light blue jeans, both tight. She bit down a sarcastic reply and started directing him to the queue when he interrupted. "You told my girlfriend a lot of lies."

Alison had seen a lot of people already that day, but knew who he was referring to. That reading was dominated by swords cards, all of them suggesting that someone needed to escape a relationship. She'd done a second spread to be sure, and the Eight of Swords returned to the same position. The card's image was a woman, bound and blindfolded, surrounded by eight swords thrust into the ground.

"I wanna word with you," said the man, squaring up to her. Useless Colin was watching from behind his ice-cream counter, but he wouldn't step in. None of the customers did anything either - which made sense, because they were appraising Alison. If she didn't deal with this complaint well, then the line might disperse. Once you lost a streak, even on a cloudy day, it was hard to get it back.

Alison wondered if the man was about to hit her. It was obvious he'd not thought through what he'd do once he got here, and now there was a crowd watching. His ego was at stake. Alison panicked and did the only thing she could think of. She grabbed the tarot deck from her pocket and handed the mam a card. Surprised, he took it. Looked at the card, looked at Alison, looked at the card once more, and visibly deflated, his puffed-out chest collapsing, his shoulders slumping forward. He walked away.

She could tell the crowd was impressed as she led the next customer in. That deck was ruined, but she had others and it was worth the sacrifice to keep her trade turning over. She settled the customer while opening a new set of cards. By the time that reading was done, the queue was even longer and she could feel the expectation. More people had heard about an angry man turned away by a single card. Alison's day would be long but lucrative.

By the time she finished, Alison was happy to lock up. She walked to her local and took her pint to the smoking area because she'd been sitting down long enough that day. Her single cigarette burned to a cylinder of ash as she sorted through the deck, hunting the missing card, the one she'd given to that unpleasant man. The ash reached the filter as she scanned the cards, checking and counting. Despite giving a card away, the deck was complete, no missing card.

Background

This was another Wednesday Writer’s piece, one of several I’ve written about tarot readers recently, stirred up by my recent adventures reading them at a club night.

I've been thinking a lot about which stories of mine I like most. Generally, it’s the ones I've written to a given theme, rather than ones I've tried to build for a larger project.

But sometimes I struggle with a theme prompt. I went through dozens of ideas of this. It seemed like a story about a picnic would be good. I wrote some interesting starts but nothing took. I thought I'd got something when I wrote about a scarecrow being given a church burial, but that had no spark. It's like some stories are alive and others aren't.

When an idea works for me, it has a sort of chime, a resonance. For this one, all I had was the idea of the tarot reader’s growing queue on a cloudy days. From there, the story unspooled - stepping outside for the next customer, angry man approaching. No actual plot there, but it developed quickly. But just thinking about that queue, I knew I had something ‘alive’.

There's a lot of writing advice in the world. The problem is that only some of it will work for you, and it's impossible to know which that is. I feel like I'm still learning how to write, and slowly improving. Paying more attention to how I work best.

Meta

The substack is finally gone. Getting rid of that was harder than expected, but I am now committed to this platform.

One of the things I’d not considered about Buttondown was that it has no likes. Obviously, this is a good thing - I shouldn’t be concerned by how many people click a button in response to my work - but it’s interesting that I felt any pang of loss from that. I do have the option of adding comments, and I’ve activated those for the time being. It’s nice to hear from people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Simon Indelicate’s essay Metrics are the Thief of Joy, which is a good reminder of what’s important about sharing work and what isn’t. John Higgs’ recent essay on counter-culture has also stuck in my head. There’s so much in that one that I’m still downloading it. Maybe my turning away from social media and algorithmic feeds is part of something larger.