Creative non-fiction
by Claire Massey
The birth charts are printed on heavy vita paper, the kind that resists thinning over time. The astrologer slides my father’s across the table. He should have lived, she says, by the sea, an inlet, a cove, a way to the gulf. He would have been happy. I nod my head, remembering how Dad trucked his sailboat for miles across featureless plains, to launch in reservoirs and lakes, manmade. Divorce forced the sale of his Flying Scott.
Now the mystic’s long, tapered fingers hover over my birth chart. There’s a legacy of longing to be near the water, she says, that’s where you should live. With a partner yearning for peace.
Our joint attention turns to the life path my mother trod. As if the tips of fingers can sense danger, the astrologer barely touches this chart. My mother once studied a palmistry book, Fortune in Your Hand. I remember her comparing the tangled mass in her palm, the zig-zagging lines of head and heart, to the cover’s ideal map, the lifeline with its gentle, doable slope gracefully curving to end at the deep wrist ring. Your mom was overtaken, the astrologer explains, by nervous exhaustion. You too, must guard against this kind of darkness.
We end with the synastry chart, his fate and mine, entwined within a circle divided into houses of experience yet to be lived. With one hand the astrologer feels the smooth-textured paper, places the other on her heart. I know you wanted another who craved conquest, adventure, but that was not meant to be. This man will be a foil for your troubles, his love a sheltering refuge. Do live with a view of a bay or an ocean, face east in the morning, meditate on every solar return, palms cupped like vessels storing life-giving waters.
Epilogue
We have been married forty years.
Sometimes late at night,
when the moon is on the build
in a fertile sign, we sit on our porch,
among aging pines and crepe myrtles
planted long ago.
Sometimes when unpredictable winds
change course, we hear the give and take
of the surf, ever in tandem
with the shifting tides, the cosmic plan.
Claire Massey’s work appears in many journals, including Bright Flash, Streetlight Magazine, IO Journal, Fictive Dream, Literally Stories, Barely South Review, Wilderness House, Writer Advice, and in her collection, Driver Side Window. She appreciates stories with a deep depth to length ratio and treasures her copy of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.
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