"When You Book Us a Tarot Reading After Your Death" & "Miss Havisham Teaches English" by Hema Nataraju

When You Book Us a Tarot Reading After Your Death...

I show up, you are still my sister after all. You say I’m late, but it’s easy for you. You’re conveniently dead. I still have mortal duties, you know--school drop-offs, pick-ups, work, checking in on Mom, driving her to doctor appointments. Why are we doing this tarot thing anyway? Since when do you believe in tarot? You never tell me anything, never told me anything, not the important stuff anyway--not when you collapsed, not your diagnosis, or your failing health. The tarot reader picks the Death card. You snicker--funny ‘coz it’s true, you say. But I don’t laugh, this isn’t like old times. Everything’s changed now. I’m empty inside. So what if I was an ocean away? I wanted to be there for you, look after you, to tell you things I never told you. What do I do with all this regret now? There’s nowhere to put it. I’m sorry, you say. The tarot reader draws Temperance--forgiveness, letting go. I forgive you, but when I try to hug you, you’re air. See? I can’t let go. Cannot let you go.

Miss Havisham Teaches English

Her class begins at twenty minutes to nine. When the swish of her yellowing wedding gown and the faint smell of decay glide down the hallway, we draw the blinds shut. Miss Havisham hates bright, we’re sure she feeds on dying hope and darkness. She holds a rotting, half-eaten slice of wedding cake in one hand, and a piece of chalk in the other.  “METAPHOR” she writes on the blackboard. “Repeat after me, girls--our hearts are blocks of ice.” We mumble under our breaths--our young hearts are only now learning to beat to the rhythm of love songs--we pine, we sigh, we long to be at the school gates where the boys drive around in circles on borrowed motorbikes. We let them tease us, we let them woo us, we pretend not to care, but our hearts are furnaces burning bright--the opposite of blocks of ice. We refuse to be her. Many years later, when we’ve been betrayed and broken, jaded and numb, when we’ve learned that love doesn’t conquer all, her ghost will visit us. We will see her in the mirror then, but not now. Not now. 

Hema Nataraju is an Indian-American writer, mom, and polyglot based in Singapore. Her work has most recently appeared in Best Small Fictions 2023, Emerge, Barrelhouse, Booth, Wigleaf, and 100-word Story, among others. She edits Literary Namjooning, and is a submissions editor at Smokelong Quarterly. She tweets as m_ixedbag.