Fallen Angel by Willa Cline Read Free Book Online

interpretations offered, apparently you were supposed to decide what you thought they meant. Sarah generally preferred her divination tools to be a little more cut-and-dried, more concrete; she liked picking a card and having something tell her exactly what it meant, exactly what she was supposed to expect. She realized that was a little silly, but she didn't like trusting her intuition too much. Where had it gotten her so far?
    She gathered up the cards and straightened them, then spread them out again, facedown this time. She sat and thought. Please give me some guidance here. Tell me what I need to do. Help me figure out what to do. She picked up a card and turned it over. It was mostly beige and pink, like the inside of a seashell. It showed a woman sitting in the middle of a swirl of what might be a seashell, or might be sand. The edges of the swirl were blurred, like the tide had just gone out.
    She sat and looked at it. What did it mean? She was surrounded by sand, by water--she lived at the beach! So that wasn't terribly deep, although she supposed it was pretty strange that she would pick this card out of all of them. Surely it meant more than a woman who lived at the beach.
    She looked at it again. The figure in the center looked hunched, closed. It (she?) really looked surrounded. Or maybe she was being swept out to sea. Maybe it was a whirlpool, with the figure in the center.
    She was getting sleepy. She put the rest of the cards back in the box and set them on her dresser, then propped the card that she had picked against the wall at the back of the little altar. She'd leave it there for a while, think about it. The colors were nice and soft. She ran her fingers across the card, then the seashell--a cowry shell--on the altar, touched a little statue of the elephant God, Ganesha, then, as she did every time she passed the altar, touched her fingers to her lips, then brushed them across the silver frame.
    "Good night, dear heart," she said softly, and went to bed.
     
     
    8.
     
    Sometime in the middle of the night, she woke, smelling smoke.
    She was instantly fully awake, and jumped out of bed, startling Dinah, who had been sound asleep on the other pillow. She first checked the candles, thinking she might have fallen asleep without blowing them out, but they were all cold.
    She ran through the little house, stopping in each room and sniffing the air, turning and peering into corners, and looking up at the ceiling. Wait. The smoke detectors hadn't gone off, and she had several strategically placed so they would catch any hint of smoke--they always went off when she used the oven, and sometimes when she burned too many candles at once. She always meant to see if she could turn down the sensitivity, but had never figured out if she could--so surely, if there was a fire, they would have gone off.
    She stopped. She didn't smell it anymore, anyway. Maybe someone had built a bonfire on the beach, or maybe there was something on fire somewhere in the neighborhood. She opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. She didn't smell anything out there, either. Well. It must have been her imagination, she thought. You're getting too crazy for your own good. Next thing you know, you'll have ten cats and won't be able to get out of bed for the newspapers stacked around it, and they’ll be featuring you on that hoarding show . . .
    She got back into bed, pulling the covers up around her neck, and snuggling her face next to Dinah's warm body. She tossed and turned, turned the pillow over, tried it without covers and with, but it was no good. She couldn't go back to sleep. Dinah huffed in annoyance and jumped off the bed to go find a calmer place to sleep.
    Sarah looked at the clock and groaned. 3:00 a.m. She had to open the store tomorrow, Jason had an early class. She lay staring at the ceiling for a few more minutes, then pulled the quilt from the bed and stumbled into the spare bedroom.
    Through many long nights of