MAJOR ARCANA: Part One, Chapter 5

The Eye

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface.

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PART ONE

Chapter 5. | The Eye

If her parents’ marriage had been her first prison, her mother’s freedom was her second. This woman who’d never had more than one glass of wine with Sunday dinner started buying it by the box. Where her old house smelled of potpourri, her newer ones, a series of suburban apartments with roach-colored carpets and rusty tub drains, now reeked of smoke and ash. A prissy whispered “damn” if she dropped a fork or misplaced her keys was succeed by “bullshit!” bellowed at the TV news and “motherfucking cocksucker!” hurled out the car window at rival drivers. Despite her former husband’s quiet insults, she hadn’t really ever needed to let out a dress when she’d lived in the hearth-warm house; in fact, she would try on her wedding dress every year on their anniversary just to boast that it still fit as well as it had when she was 25. Now—in tandem with the switch from meals cooked at home out of health-conscious lifestyle magazine recipes to frozen dinners and crinkling bags of chips—she came to favor the billowing cinchless mumu. Her high voice roughened. She snored on the couch after dinner, crumbs on her chest, a ceiling fan whose blades were edged with greasy dust spinning slowly above her with an inner-ear-deranging subliminal buzz. She went to the grocery store in slippers.