Ruan, in her lab, holding a pair of tongs (in the conservatory with the candlestick?)
Hair is like the bob on the left, red.
What we can see of her dress is something like this on the left, though I think she prefers colors to neutrals.
She is wearing over the dress, however, an apron. Must be tidy.
And, of course,
Goggles.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/190176.html. You can comment here or there.
For Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt.
This is in the Aunt Family setting, which has a landing page now here (and on LJ).
Beryl is one of Evangaline’s nieces.
“But Mom…”
“Don’t argue. You know it’s your Aunt Beatrix’s turn to host Thanksgiving, and you know we can’t very well not show up only on her years.”
“But Moooom,” Beryl’s younger sister Amy picked up the complaint, “it smells funny there.”
“It’s the cats,” their older sister Chalcedony added. “Mom, come on. Someone needs to tell Beatrix that her house smells like cat pee.”
“Well,” their mother pursed her lips, “we do have a new Aunt in the family. Perhaps we can convince her to do the honors.”
Beryl faltered. “Now that’s just mean. Maybe we could call that TV show?”
“The last thing we want is some tv cameras in a Family house. Who knows what they’d find? Beatrix never had any kids, after all.”
“They’d find cats,” Chalce answered succinctly. “And who knows? She could have a kid in there somewhere, and nobody would be able to tell.”
“All right, you girls are just being silly. Sit next to someone with a cold for a couple days before the holiday, and I’ll let you have the Monday after the holiday home sick.”
“You know…” Their brother rarely spoke up. Men in the Family tended not to, after a while. Beryl had heard her father refer to them as the silent minority; personaly, she thought they stayed quiet mostly out of self-defense. Now, they all looked at Stone. Waiting. Stunned. He coughed. “Forget TV. The five of us could manage an intervention on our own.”
“An…”
“Five…”
“Seriously?”
“Awesome! Mom…!”
Their mother shook her head slowly. “An intervention. Well. It would make Thanksgiving awkward…”
“But it would make it smell so much better!”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/179401.html. You can comment here or there.
For ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.
This is in the Aunt Family setting, which has a landing page now here (and on LJ).
Beryl is one of Evangaline’s nieces.
“What did you get from your Aunt’s garage sale?”
Beryl’s mother was trying to be casual about it, but she did a very unbelievable casual. She was also rather predictable, so Beryl was prepared for her.
“Couple vintage dresses, two pairs of nineteen-seventies pants I’m going to turn into skirts, and these nice candlesticks.” She juggled things to show her mother the cut-glass sticks. “Aunt Eva even gave me the candles for free.”
“Hrmph, nothing interesting?”
“No, Mom.” She rolled her eyes. “No secret journals, no magical tea leaves, no mystical anythings.”
::Not going to tell her about your great-great-great-great-grandfather in your g-g-g-Aunt’s necklace?:: a voice teased in her ear.
::No, and neither are you,:: she answered firmly. ::Stay quiet when she’s around.:
::Yes’m,:: the voice answered with surprising meekness, and fell quiet, allowing her to navigate her mother’s nosiness with ease.
“Ah, well, I suppose Evangaline kept all the good things for herself.”
“That’s the whole point of the Aunt thing, isn’t it?” She didn’t mean to twit her mother, she really didn’t – it just made everyone upset, stressed out the whole family, and got them nowhere in the long run. But sometimes it seemed like Mom was just asking for it.
“What do you mean?” Mom was getting pretty uncomfortable with Beryl’s interest in their family’s line of Aunts, especially with Aunt Asta passing away. The discomfort only made Beryl all the more curious, of course, but her curiosity only made her mom, her other aunts, her uncles, and so on clam up like their lives depended on the silence.
“I mean, you have an Aunt in every generation, who holds on to the powerful things, right?”
“Well… who’s been telling you these things?”
“No-one!” she answered, with some exasperation. “But you guys all talk, and it’s not like we kids don’t have ears.” We kids made it not just her, not the teens, but the whole generation. Shift the attention. “And everyone knew it would be Aunt Eva.”
“Well, yeah,” Mom answered, uncomfortably. “But it’s not that big a deal, just the family tradition. The house goes to the unmarried niece of the current inhabitant.”
“With all the good stuff?”
“Well, it’s been in the family for a long time. There’s supposed to be some expensive stuff hidden under the rafters there.
The voice in Beryl’s head chuckled very quietly. She couldn’t really fault him.
“I don’t think she’d sell expensive stuff at a yard sale anyway, Mom. Anyone could get their hands on it there.”
“I guess you’re right. Well, they’re very nice candlesticks. And don’t call those dresses ‘vintage’ where you aunts can hear you; I think I recognize one from Sally’s senior year of high school.” Mollified, Mom took one last look at the candlesticks and left Beryl to it.
::They really don’t want you to know, do they?:: He didn’t sound like a dirty old man anymore; he sounded almost her age, and a bit uncertain.
::She’s afraid it’s going to be me. I don’t know why it’s a bad thing.::
::I can’t tell you on my own,:: he offered hesitantly, ::but I can’t disobey you, either.::
::That sucks. Being trapped forever in a necklace and having to do whatever… oh. Oh.:: She felt a grin growing. ::Grandpa, you and me are going to have some conversations.::
::Call me Joseph.::
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/174911.html. You can comment here or there.
For the_vulture‘s prompt.
This is in the Aunt Family setting, which has a landing page now here (and on LJ).
I imagine the speaker to be one of Evangaline’s nieces or cousins.
“Your family is insane.”
“My family is prolific. My family is also insane, but the problem you’re dealing with right now is an entirely separate one.”
“What is this thing?”
“Cheat sheet. It’s not going to help, in the long run, but at least you’ll have some idea what you’re getting into.”
“How do you keep track of all this?”
“I really don’t. I remember a couple salient points – Anshabet, there, just had a baby, so that’s important to remember – and my mother keeps me up to date on those sorts of things, but mostly I just smile and nod and listen to the ‘eee you’ve gotten so big.'”
“You have… four aunts and three uncles.”
“No. My mother has four sisters and three brothers. They’re all married, so double those numbers. And then there’s their kids, and my mom’s the youngest, so some of those kids are old enough to be my aunts and uncles themselves. Add in my mother’s mother’s family, that’s another six aunts, two uncles, then the ones married in, and then there’s my grandmother’s family.”
“Okay, you said prolific. I didn’t think you meant…”
“That’s why there’s the chart.”
“What do you do when you forget a name?”
“Smile and hope to death they’re going deaf and didn’t hear me mess it up?”
“And you’re going to introduce me to all of them.”
“That’s why the chart, yes.”
“Is it too late to elope?”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/172604.html. You can comment here or there.
For JanetMiles‘s commissioned prompt.
After Estate (LJ) and Lost Spirits (LJ)
and in the same setting as Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj)
“Three liters of water, boiling, with four cc of salt and one cc of rue. Testing with item one-seven-seven, ivory and brass dip pen.”
“Got it,” Johias nodded, and then, a moment later, “no. The aetheric resonances are still off the scale. What was your aunt up to, Ruan?”
“Wish I knew,” she sighed, pulling the pen out of the boiling water. “What’s next, salt, angel’s-tears, and holy water?”
“That’s after the holy water with rue. Here.” He handed her a towel, which she used to carefully wipe down the pen. There was no ghost inhabiting this one, yet, and if they were successful, there never would be. “Talking to the ghosts, they don’t even all seem to have known the woman. I suppose they still could have wronged her, if she was the sort to take offense at small things…”
“She was the sort to bind spirits into torment for her pleasure – well, for whatever purpose she had. I’m glad I didn’t ever get to know her. Holy water with rue, three liters boiling, one cc fresh.”
“You know,” he pondered, as he readied the aetheric detector, “it’s possible she had one of these set up for herself, as well.”
Ruan froze. “You think my father’s sister is in one of the ghost traps?” It still felt wrong to call Tansy an aunt.
“Well, it’s a possibility, at least. We haven’t checked for non-vocal ghosts because the ones we found were so very vocal.”
“I…” She dunked the pen very aggressively into the water and counted down seconds. “Ten.”
“Less aetheric resonance, we’re down to a measurable number. Nine point seven five.”
“That’s at least an improvement. Johais – I don’t like this woman very much.”
“I can’t say I fault you. Well, we could, perhaps, get some answers out of her if we did find her.”
“We could,” she admitted slowly, taking a towel and drying off the pen again. “All right, let’s try the salted holy water.”
“You don’t like the idea?” He aimed the detector at the third pot of water.
“Everything about the woman makes my skin crawl. She was evil, Johais, and that is not a word I use lightly. Evil, nasty, impolite… and I worry that she could, in some way, rub off on me. I don’t want to wake up evil.”
Johais kissed her forehead, just over the goggles, carefully. “Very unlikely.”
“Thank you.” They were alone, so she let the giddy smile she was feeling come out, just for a moment. “But you don’t know my family.”
“I have, to date, met thirty-five members of your family, counting the men, and that’s all your mother’s side. I’ve met four members of your father’s family, one of whom was, at the time, a ghost. I have a pretty good idea what your kin are like, my beloved. And I can easily see which family members you take after, and which you do not – and this one, this evil witch, if I may be so bold, is nothing like you.”
“You say the sweetest things. Holy water, three liters from St. James on East and Main, with three cc’s of salt and one drop of angel’s-tears, which, I will note, we’re almost out of.”
“Ready.”
She dipped the pen into the concoction, not, by this point, expecting much result. They had tried every suggestion from every aunt, cousin, grandmother, friend, quack, and even a couple from her father and uncles, and, to date, holy or not, water or vodka, nothing had given them the results they’d been looking for (although the blessed vodka had burst into flames, carrying with it a beautiful mother-of-pearl cigarette case said to belong to a former burlesque dancer).
“And… oh, my. That did it, Ruan. The aetheric reading just dropped to zero. Ruan, I think we found the solution… pardon the pun.” Johais was smiling from ear to ear as he set down the aetheric detector and hugged her tightly and rather inappropriately.
She didn’t mind. She pulled the pen out of the water and set it aside to hug him back properly, and, even less appropriately, kiss him very firmly on the lips. “You,” she murmured, “you wonderful man. I could not have done it without you.”
“I wouldn’t have had it to help with without you. This is a brilliant project, Ruan, a concrete application of research. And we succeeded!” The man’s glasses were fogging up, he was so happy.
“Once,” she pointed out. “Once, and with a very rare and difficult-to-obtain component. And we won’t know if we succeeded, in truth, until poor Mr. Anthony passes away.”
“Well, we have achieved something, at least! That’s… Ruan, did you kiss me?”
“I did. And you kissed me back.” Her own goggles were fogging as well; it had been a nice kiss, but not, she thought, quite that nice. “It was very pleasant.” She pulled the goggles off to clean them on the hem of her apron.
“It… what would your father say?”
“At this point, I believe ‘thank goodness you’ve managed to do something at all about Tansy’s mess.’ He’s quite embarrassed about the whole thing.” It wasn’t her goggles, she realized; the salted holy water was steaming over. She turned off the stove and moved it from the burner, then, to be safe, moved all the other vessels as well. The holy components had, after all, reacted very strangely to Tansy’s possibly-damned-artifacts. “Could you point the aetheric meter at the water, please?”
“That wasn’t quite what… well. Yes. But then I’d like to discuss this kiss again, if you don’t mind.” He stepped back away from her to point the boxy machine at the steaming water. “Ah… one moment, my glasses… hrm. Do did we simply transfer the aetheric connection into the water?”
She peered at the meter. “I don’t think so. There’s not nearly enough resonance left for that. It does make me wonder, though – and worry about pouring the water down the drain. Perhaps if we let it sit? As long as it doesn’t evaporate – I’d hate someone to die and then be bound to individual water particles throughout the world.”
“But it would be awfully convenient to know when he died.” Johais set down the meter and wiped his glasses off again. “Ruan, you kissed me.”
“Would you like me to do so again? To compare the results, of course, purely scientifically.”
“I do not believe there is anything at all scientific about what I am feeling, unless one wants to delve into biology. Quite messy.” The steam was curling his hair – and hers – and both goggles and glasses were fogged again.
“Johais, I’m fairly certain that whatever happens between us, it is going to be both biologic and messy.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/167824.html. You can comment here or there.
For JanetMiles‘s commissioned prompt.
Just after Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj),
and in the same setting as Estate (LJ) and Lost Spirits (LJ)
Commenters: 0
It took Evangaline’s family less than a week after her yard sale to start coming to her with complaints.
She had been expecting the nosy visits, wanting to see what she was doing with the old house, now that she had managed to clear out some of the clutter (or throw away priceless family heirlooms, depending on who you asked).
She had anticipated the complaints about her color choices, the inappropriate gifts of things to make the house the way her cousins, sisters, aunts, and grandmother thought it ought to be; she had come armed with several stock phrases to fend off opinionated relatives, the chief among them being, “If you’d like to live here instead of me, I’m sure you could paint it however you wanted.”
She had three unmarried nieces on whom she refused that line, however, and she paid close attention to the opinions of the youngest, Beryl. Their tastes weren’t identical, but there were enough similarities that she could allow Beryl to design a guest room to her own tastes – with the added benefit that such annoyed, distressed, and confused Beryl’s mother without in anyway giving her ground to stand on. There were benefits to being the maiden aunt.
She was still stripping out old molding and repainting the walls, taking every spare moment of time between work and other commitments to work on the house before inertia could catch up with her and resign her to chintz and floral patterns, and so she was in her oldest clothes and up on a stepladder in the living room when the first of the complainers came stomping in.
Her Aunt Antonia hammered a cursory knock at the door and let herself in, the way she probably had when the house was owned by her sister Asta. “Eva,” she snapped, “this rose you sold me is trash.”
“Hello, Aunt Tony. There’s tea in the kettle and cookies in the jar. I’ll be just a moment.” She didn’t bother turning to look. If she turned to look, she might make eye contact.
“Did you hear what I said? The rose is broken.”
“I’ll be right with you. I just need to finish the crown moulding or I’ll get lines.”
“Strip it and do it again. It’s a horrible color anyway. Asta never would have used something like that.”
“But she willed me the house, Antonia. I’d pass it to you, if you wanted it…?” It was a safe offer, after all.
“Tea in the kettle, you said?” Her mother’s oldest sister huffed into the kitchen, giving Evangaline time to finish painting the lovely plum shade onto the elaborate crown moldings. She wondered, in passing, if anyone else had ever noticed the sigils and signs painted tone-on-tone in the shadowed portions of the trim. She wondered if that’s why they were so worried about her redecorating.
She picked up her tools quickly, rinsed the brush in the laundry-room sink and then, having kept her aunt waiting long enough, headed into the kitchen. There, Aunt Antonia was perched uncomfortably on the narrow chair Eva kept bare of books or paperwork for just that reason, eating a cookie and drinking heavily creamed and sugared tea.
“Finally,” she huffed. “This place is a wreck, Evangaline.”
“I’m still moving in,” she answered placidly. “There’s a lot to be done, and a lot of moving about, and-” she brought it up even though she knew better “-I’m working it all around my job.”
“You don’t need to work now, you know. The family trust fund will take care of you.”
The trust fund had been left over from an era when women did not, as a general rule, work outside the house. Eva shook her head. “I like working. The house will take as long as it takes.”
“But you can’t properly host company until it’s done.”
“Well then, I will improperly host company until then,” she answered tiredly, clearing off the comfy seat and taking two cookies for herself. “Now. The rose?” Maybe then she could get her out of here.
“The rose is broken! When Asta was a little girl, it used to smell like flowers all year round.” She waved the glass sculpture indignantly at Eva. “Now it smells like stinkberries.”
Eva took it from her Aunt carefully. It hadn’t smelled like either flowers or stinkberries to her – and now that she sniffed it again, it seemed to small faintly of rosemary and sage. “Mmm. Perhaps it is.” Safer to agree than to suggest that her Aunt’s personality stank. “I’ll refund you the twenty-five cents you paid for it.”
“But it’s a treasure! It’s worth hundreds of dollars! The craftsman who made those was a friend of Aunt Ruan’s; he only made a hundred.”
“Mm, but you paid twenty-five cents.” She pulled a quarter out of her pocket and passed it over. “If that’s all…”
Aunt Antonia was only the first of the visits Eva received as a result of her yard sale. Some admitted quietly that the item they had gotten was a family treasure, charmed or enchanted or cursed in some useful manner, and worth far more than they paid. To them, Eva said “Keep it. It’s still in the family, after all, and I don’t need it.”
Some complained that the item they had thought was a steal turned out to be trash; Eva refunded their money if they were willing, or sent them on their way if they couldn’t let go of the thing. Some wanted to know what she’d sold and to whom; she did her best to ignore the ones that made that question sound like a demand. She had an inventory, of course, but it was none of their business.
She didn’t want to admit, either, that she hadn’t known about all the enchanted items she’d sold, some of them to complete strangers. She was fairly certain she’d kept the nastiest ones in the house, and the most powerful in the family, but the more complaints she got, the more stories of “Aunt Asta’s friend” or “Aunt Ruan’s associate” she heard, the less certain she was.
The complaints about the yard sale trinkets, like the complaints about the house, surged and trickled off, until she allowed herself to believe, two months later, that she was done with family meddling for a while. She had her music blasting, all the window open to the unseasonably warm autumn day, and her skimpiest, oldest tank top on over a neon-pink bra when her Great-Aunt Rosaria knocked on her door.
Eva tried not to squirm with embarrassment as she poured her grandmother’s sister a mug of fresh tea, having cleared off the most comfortable chair in the living room for her.
“The place is coming along well,” Rosaria murmured. “I see you re-did the protections – but, interesting, you got rid of the evil eye, there. I always thought that leant a certain urgency to door-to-door salesmen’s visits for Ruan.”
“I didn’t like the FedEx guy dumping and running quite so much,” she admitted nervously. “You don’t mind the plum?”
“I think it makes it look like a French Whorehouse in here, but if you want that look, it’s your house. That’s how the thing is set up, after all.”
“Thank you.” She wracked her brain, trying to remember what her oldest surviving relative had bought at the yard sale. “No problem with the doilies or the ash tray then?”
“Aah, the tatting whines sometimes on a cold night, but it’s always done that. Surprised Asta kept it around. And the ash tray – well, when you want that back, dear, come and get it. I came to bring you these.” She pulled an ancient-looking ledger book and a slightly-more-modern spiral-bound notebook from her bag. “I can’t find Elenora’s or Zenobia’s, and neither could Asta – you might try between the walls.”
Not wanting to look greedy, Eva leaned forward carefully towards the books. “I’m sorry…?”
“Their catalogs. Asta gave me these before her death, to keep them out of her sisters’ hands. I wanted to see how you handled the hodgepodge on your own before I gave you her notes.”
Eva’s heart skipped a beat. “And…?”
“I’ve been watching you since you moved in here, dear. I’d say you’ve been showing very discerning eye.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/163546.html. You can comment here or there.
For an anonymous prompt.
In the same setting, 2 “generations” earlier, as Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj), and directly after Estate (LJ) – The Aunt’Verse.
Commenters: 4
It started with her late Aunt Tansy’s attic of mysteries.
The ghosts couldn’t, it seemed, be released from the objects Tansy had bound them into. What the woman had done, Ruan still didn’t know, but the ghosts were trapped. The best that could be done was to give them a one-mile “leash,” so that they could wander from their prison.
That led to an uncomfortable house full of disconsolate ghosts, however, and, with Ruan still trying to figure out the traps laid in the un-ghosted objects, they were a distraction she really didn’t need.
She called on her Aunt Elenora, who was willing to take one of the tethered ghosts – Imogene the mouthy, who settled in happily to a life as Auntie El’s hat. Elenora spoke to some of her friends, managing to contact a friend’s sister’s second daughter, who took the cranky banker in a tie tack off of Ruan’s hands.
The daughter knew of a guy who worked well with the otherworld, and he (Johias) was more than willing to help Ruan work on the mystery of her Aunt’s trapped objects. He was also willing to take Willard-the-cigarette-holder off her hands, and, she noted, was also very handsome, and not without his own charm.
Resolving not to introduce Johias to her sisters, Ruan arranged a number of “safe” meetings with him where they could discuss the matter of Tansy’s collection. He had some innovative ideas about the traps, and they worked on testing them and putting them into practice, but, now and then, another object in the attic would start screaming angrily, as, somewhere, someone died and was sucked into their own personalized ghost trap.
That meant more ghosts to place, or more ghosts wandering around the house throwing things and tantrums and refusing to admit that sulking did nothing to help the situation. Ruan spoke to her aunts, and her aunts’s friends, Johais spoke to his family and friends, both of them to former teachers and former associates.
Finally, having exhausted aunts, cousins, and three-times-removed relations, Ruan and Johias began advertising discreetly in certain publications that catered to a certain audience: Free to a good home: Lost spirits.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/157089.html. You can comment here or there.
For rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
In the same setting, 2 “generations” earlier, as Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj) – The Aunt’Verse.
Commenters: 7
“What have we here?”
Ruan wasn’t so much talking to herself as she was talking to the hodgepodge she was looking through. Her Aunt Tansy hadn’t been, as they say, The Aunt – she was a paternal aunt, for one thing, totally not the right sort, and Ruan’s Aunt Elenora was still alive and well – but the family tradition seemed to hold anyway. Her father’s sister had taken a long walk into the ocean, and it was left to Ruan to clean up her mess.
To be fair, the woman’s attic wasn’t actually messy. Aunt Tansy had had, like Ruan’s father did, a very tidy mind. Everything was on its own shelf or in its own cubbyhole, labeled tidily in a left-leaning cursive that was probably Tansy’s. (she had been told, by her father’s other sister, that nobody had been allowed past Tansy’s sitting room in twenty years. The sister had seemed offended that Ruan had gotten the job.) There was even, in the same leggy script, a catalogue.
That was what intrigued Ruan. Her mother’s family was known to collect some strange things, although not nearly as tidily as Tansy had. But the descriptions here were less descriptions and more names.
Imogene Octavia Workman – red cloche hat with blue ribbon – June 7th, 1905
Cleo Bond – broken bootlace (in manila envelope) – July 15th, 1905
Olivia Twila Saunders – Left shoe, black leather with buckle – October 12th, 1912
Duncan Levy – 3 red buttons, metal (in cigar box) – December 25th, 1914
Willard Ellison – cigarette holder, ivory with ebony inlays (in silk purse) – March 2nd, 1916
Rhoda Burks – three beads from a fringe, glass, peacock blue (in wine glass) – October 27th, 1929
There were well over three hundred entries, each corresponding to a place on a shelf and an object to match. The three beads from the fringe were the last entry, the day before Black Tuesday.
Several entries had check marks next to them – perhaps five, out of the entire book. Ruan picked one of those – the red cloche hat with the blue ribbon, high on a shelf between an ice skate and a primer, and pulled it down, using Tansy’s surprisingly-sturdy stepladder to reach.
The hat nearly jumped at her, pushing her off the ladder and landing her on a rack of winter jackets. The ribbon seemed electric, sending shocks through her fingers, while it tried at the same time to twist around her wrists. Faintly, as if from very far away, she heard: “I’ll get you, I’ll get you, you nasty old harridan, can’t stand to see others having fun! Let me out! Let me OUT of here!”
“Peace, peace,” Ruan said hastily. “This isn’t Tansy. Peace.”
“I’ll give you peace, you… what? Not Tansy? Who?”
“Her niece. Tansy… is gone. Hrmm. Imogene? Imogene Workman?”
“Yes?” Now the voice sounded cautious.
“All right, Imogene. I’m going to work on getting you out of there.”
Three Glass Beads, Peacock Blue
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/153151.html. You can comment here or there.
I don’t have demons in any of my settings, so this is misc-verse
When Evangaline’s Aunt died, it fell to her to clean out the old house where her Aunt had lived and, before her Aunt Asta, her Aunt’s Aunt Ruan (family history stopped there, but Evangaline felt as if, if she tracked it back far enough, there would be an unbroken line of Aunts back into pre-history). As a childless Aunt herself, she accepted that the house would now become hers, but not that she needed to keep the piles of accumulated auntieness that filled it.
Tables were put out on the lawn, yard sales and freesales advertised, and Eva took two bright, sunny weekends to pull out of every nook and cranny, every eave and basement cabinet, every shelf and wardrobe, every piece of her ancestral Aunts’ lives.
Some she kept – the kitchen table was her self-imposed space limiter for knick-nacks, the living room itself for furniture (except for the bedrooms. The bedroom furniture she could keep for now; there were seven bedrooms in the old place, some barely bigger than a closet. For an unmarried aunt, it seemed excessive). The rest, despite family uproar (“If you think we should keep it, you’re welcome to come buy it at a family discount.”) went away.
Alone in a much-emptied house, Evangaline drank her tea and studied what remained. Four tea pots and one kettle (she’d gotten rid of seven pots!), one wide, shallow scrying bowl. Three little muslin dolls she’d been afraid to throw out – those would go back in their silk wrappings in their oak casket, and hope that Aunt Ruan or her Aunt had just liked dolly-making. One blue glass rose, and a beautiful matching vase. Three sets of tarot cards.
She’d sent the other six tarot sets to the sale, but these three had felt different to her fingers, tingled wrong, especially the oldest set, the one that was clearly hand-painted, in its oak box.
She’d finished her tea and her take-out pizza, so now was as good a time as any to figure out what it was about them, why these cards in particular had called her. She tipped the case out onto the table, letting the cards fall where they may.
The first thing she noticed was that this was not, exactly, a Tarot, or if it was, it was an interpretation she had never seen before. The second was that the tingling sensation was getting worse. The third was that the cards were moving on their own.
The woman on the card at the front – a blue-skinned woman, tall, dressed in medieval clothing and standing on the edge of a precipice – winked deliberately at Evangaline. Her card was labeled “The Fall,” and it looked like a long one.
As she winked, her card moved to cross another one – a deep, red-lit cave, with two eyes glowing out from its depths. “The Beast,” its caption proclaimed.
Evangaline’s hands hovered over the cards, loathe to touch them but drawn to see what the rest of them were. She reached for another one, just a tiny corner of lush greenness showing under the Beast.
“No, no,” the blue woman tut-tutted. “No, child, one reading at a time.” The cards burst into flames at “time,” the whole table of family heirlooms lighting on fire. “One at a time,” the voice repeated, as Evangaline jumped back from the heat.
The flames died down and vanished, the cards tucked back into their case. On the table, one teapot – that nearest the cards – was covered in soot. Nothing else was harmed.
Carefully, very carefully, she closed the card case and put it in a drawer. Her Aunts’ relics were going to require some careful handling.
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