MAJOR ARCANA: Part Four, Chapter 6

Prospero's Apprentice

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Previous chapters are accessible (in reverse order) under the Major Arcana tag.

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PART FOUR

Chapter 6. | Prospero’s Apprentice

On New Year’s Day, Jessica Morrow knocked on Diane del Greco’s door. A few inches of snow had fallen between Christmas and New Year’s, but then the temperature rose unseasonably into the high 50s. Everything—snow, soil, and all—melted and ran in the incongruous heat of the low winter sun. 

Jessica Morrow perspired in her violet velour coat; the heels of her Chelsea boots were caked with mud. As she waited for someone to open the door, she half-turned, ready to run. No one was making her do this. That was the worst part. If someone had ordered her to do this under threat of death, she might have refused. Of all the pains of adulthood, she found this one the worst: that you knew yourself well enough to be obligated to force yourself through agonies you understood would benefit yourself in the end. How had “you” and “yourself” ever become so distant and estranged? Where were the days, she wondered, when she thought and felt everything with the whole of her? At 38 years old, her mother dead, her son dead, the last thing she felt like was an adult—she felt like an orphaned baby and a poor crone at once, and both abandoned on the step of an empty church—and yet, here she was, on this errand of a woman alone, on a mission to restore some semblance of a home in this world with the only materials left to her, materials as unpromising as that totally deranged girl, or whatever she was, Ash del Greco.