Moonlight and Oranges by Elise Stephens

Author:Elise Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Booktrope Editions
Published: 2011-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

The tent was full of silence; pink, velvet, ominous silence.

Madame Ovary said, “I assume your friend dragged you here against your will?” She spoke in a surprisingly ordinary voice. Instead of ethereal and wispy, it had a dry, sarcastic rasp like Lorona's never-married Aunt Dolores. The psychic smacked the seat of a puffy chair with her bejeweled hand and folded her knuckles under a double chin.

“What do you want from me, missy?” She seemed bored and also pleased with herself for throwing the order of waiting clients into disarray.

Lorona answered, “Nothing,” and blushed immediately. Her curiosity was clanging with question after question inside her head as if she held spinning lottery balls between her ears.

Madame Ovary closed her eyes slowly, one millimeter at a time, letting her forest of lashes crawl downward. Her palms flipped up. She entirely ignored the crystal ball, and Lorona felt a weird intangible tug on her arms, telling her to place her hands inside the woman's. As Lorona's fingertips touched the fortune-teller's palms, Madame Ovary sucked in sharply through her teeth. The surprise felt genuine, but Lorona couldn't tell. She flinched and tried to pull away, but wrinkled thumbs curled over her hands and held them in place.

“Your heart is troubled.” Madame Ovary opened her purple-rimmed eyes and didn't blink as she spoke. “You have betrayed him, and yet,” she paused, probing Lorona's face, “you do not fully understand what you have done.”

Madame Ovary smiled, still not blinking, and an invisible ice cube slid down Lorona's spine.

“You have yet to find the answers he seeks. There is a missing part of something that he needs and he will not tell you what it is. You must find this and bring it to him.”

“Find what?”

Madame Ovary shook her head. She still hadn't blinked. Lorona flipped her hands so that her own palms faced up, expecting the woman to examine their creases. Madame Ovary folded Lorona's hands in on themselves and shook her head. “I don't need to see your lines to know this. It's written all over your face. If you love him, and I can see that you do, you'll need to pass the tests that were written before you were born.”

“I'm totally confused.” The skepticism returned. It felt good to tell this woman she was crazy. It meant Lorona didn't have to take her seriously.

“Listen,” Madame Ovary snapped. Her unblinking eyes watered, as if she still couldn't close them. “You are the only girl tonight who's invoked anything real. This,” she spread her arms across the tent and then pointed one crooked finger at Lorona's chest, “is real and I can feel it.” She shuddered, and then in the same dry rasp she said, “You will find your first answer on the wall, the second in the scent of deception, the third in the life within, and the fourth emblazoned on your own flesh. If he is brought to see these four signs, he will have his answers to his dream.”

“I don't understand.”

Madame Ovary gasped and fell forward.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.