Tarotica

What the hell is going on? she wondered, struggling to regain her composure.

“Your daughter gave me your card,” she managed to say.

He nodded. “I am Lee Golden. Welcome to my gallery.”

“Golden doesn’t sound like a Korean name.”

“My mother is Korean, my father American.”

“Is all this your artwork?”

“Yes.”

“I’m very impressed.”

“You honor me. Are you an artist?”

Miranda answered, “Yes. Most of my work is abstract.”

She turned her eyes away from him, trying to rein in her feelings, and studied a painting of a beautiful woman pouring water from a vase onto the ground. “Is this a Korean goddess?”

“That is Kwanseieun, one of the most beloved deities in many Asian cultures. In China she is called Kuan Yin.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Miranda said. But where ? How do I know that name?

“This is Dae-Soon, the Korean moon goddess.” Lee indicated a picture of a female figure silhouetted against a silvery moon. “And Yondung Halmoni,” he pointed to another painting, “is the goddess of the wind.”

As Miranda examined the paintings and sculptures, Lee explained the mythology behind them. Oddly, the deities seemed as familiar to her as the Catholic saints she’d been raised with. Yet I know absolutely nothing about Korean spirituality.

His fingers brushed her elbow, sending sparks shooting up her arm, across her shoulder, and into her chest. Butterflies danced in her stomach. As he guided her into another section of the gallery, she saw a tall, stone statue of a man wearing a hat shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss. He looks like a giant penis, Miranda mused.

As if reading her mind, Lee said, “This is a Tol-Harubang statue. They are considered powerful sources of fertility.”

When she touched the statue, it burned her fingertips and she drew back quickly.

“It’s hot.”

“Is it?”

Suddenly, she felt dizzy. Her vision blurred. The walls of the gallery fell away.

Casting her eyes down, Miranda saw a long silk skirt where her jeans should have been.

At her feet, a youth wearing the robes of a Buddhist mendicant monk knelt and held out his begging bowl. She filled it with rice and milk. As the youth thanked her and rose to continue on his way, their eyes met. Her heart fluttered and a most unspiritual sensation flickered between her legs. Then someone called her name, “Sang-hee,” and she hurried inside a richly furnished house.

Each day she waited for the young monk, and when he arrived she put rice and milk in his begging bowl. All day and night she fantasized about him. She prayed to the goddesses—Kwanseieun, Dae-Soon, Yondung Halmoni, and Mulhalmoni—to dissolve the betrothal her parents had arranged for her to a wealthy old merchant. She prayed for the youth to be released from monastic life so that she might marry him.

One afternoon, Sang-hee slipped out of the house and visited a tiny shop frequented by women who sought lovers, or who could not conceive. She smelled the incense as she entered the shop and saw pictures of goddesses hanging on its yellow walls. The matron gave her a small vial of oil and a smooth stone as long as her hand, shaped like a man. That night as she lay in her bed, burning with desire for the young monk, Sang-hee rubbed the oil on the man-stone and slid it into her opening.

When the monk appeared at her door the next day, Sang-hee told him to meet her at a secluded spot beyond the town walls. There, they embraced passionately. With mounting hunger, their hands and mouths devoured each other’s bodies. He is smooth and hard, like the Tol-Harubang, Sang-hee thought as she guided his living man-stone into her opening that was so wet with longing, she needed no oil to ease the way.

In the months that followed, Sang-hee’s belly swelled. Now they must let us marry , she thought. Instead, her mother flew into a rage, screaming, “You have disobeyed the law and our traditions. You insult your family.” She slapped her daughter and pulled the girl’s hair, calling her terrible names. Sang-hee’s father hit her with a stick and cast her out of the house. When she went to the monastery to find her lover, she was told he’d been sent away.

Sang-hee’s heart ached with unbearable sadness. Everywhere she turned, she met with loathing. Finally she found refuge in a neighboring village, where she was forced to perform the lowest, most degrading chores in order to feed herself and her baby. She never saw the young monk again.

When Miranda came to, she was lying on a futon in a room at the back of the art gallery, surrounded by canvases, paints, and brushes in glass jars. Lee Golden sat beside her holding a cup of tea.

“You fainted,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Confused and embarrassed, Miranda answered, “I’m afraid I’m not quite well today.”

“I hope my daughter has not served you something that made you ill.”

“No, I drank too much last night. I’m still hung over.” But that doesn’t explain the weird dream I just had.

She sat up and accepted the tea Lee offered her, struggling to make sense of what she’d experienced. Sipping it, she again felt a curious attraction to him. And she knew she’d seen him before.

“I saw you in the park this morning, doing tai chi,” she said. “What a coincidence.”

“Coincident means occupying the same space or time,” he told her. “Some people, such as myself, believe the past, present, and future exist concurrently, not consecutively. Time is an artificial distinction, a limit our minds impose to simplify our lives. It doesn’t really exist.”

His smile exuded such serenity and compassion that Miranda decided to tell him her dream. When she’d finished, he laid his hand over hers.

“I think you may have temporarily erased the boundaries of time,” he suggested.

“You mean that girl was me in another lifetime?” she asked, squeezing his hand.

“Were you the young monk?”

“Perhaps.”

“Can we pick up where we left off in that previous incarnation?” Her heart beat faster at the thought.

Lee smiled kindly at her. “I am married.”

“Another limit imposed to simplify life?” Miranda asked, disappointed.

“If you wish, you can see it that way. The choices we make do create limits and responsibilities. Voluntarily assumed, they give meaning and structure to human existence.”

“But fate has brought us back together,” she insisted.

“Yes, but not necessarily as lovers.”

“What then?”

“As fellow artists. I suspect we have things to teach each other. Would you like to paint with me?”

Miranda glanced around the room filled with art supplies. “Yes, I would.”

Card 6: The Lovers

Even before Miranda called and asked him to meet her in Santa Fe, Eli had decided it was time to leave Sybil’s home. He felt ineffectual, even a bit cowardly, hiding out like this.

“I need to find out who poisoned Meditrina’s grapevines, who attacked me, and whether the two are connected,” he told Sybil as he stuffed some clothing and a few necessities into a backpack. “Maybe it really was a