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experience with the female client, the boy, and the suicide. Consequently, I started helping clients redirect their trajectories, and I got rich doing so. I was discovered by the rich and famous, so my practice flourished with glitterati seeking my advice and interventions. It was also during that period that Laura Bishop came to see me that first time, and I started following her career.
    Except for some chronic acid reflux, life was working out perfectly. Then things took a turn.

    *

    I was reading for a client who planned to extort money out of her famous and wealthy stepfather. He had molested her when she was a girl. She wanted to make him pay for years of trauma. She sought guidance from the cards. It was one of the disquieting occasions when I felt tremendous empathy for a client and would feel guilty if I didn’t help her somehow. I laid a standard Celtic Cross spread. It’s a spread used to help clients know their current barriers, the past experiences that contribute to the present, and the future outlook if things don’t change. The significator, the card that represents the client, turned up the High Priestess. But in this case, the austere card seemed all wrong for the complicated woman across from me. My deep instinct knew that card, the severe High Priestess, was for me.
    I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the frozen face on that card. Then my body was viciously suctioned through a funnel. There was a violent constriction around my head, a sensation as if my brains would spurt out my ears. The pain immediately disappeared and I found myself standing behind a small dais. I was facing the back of an elaborately crowned woman seated on a simple throne. She was looking at what resembled a giant green screen used for movie special effects. To my right towered a white marble pillar, and a black pillar stood to my left.
    “Ah, finally, a human. It’s been a while,” said a dry, papery voice. The woman in front of me was speaking. “No, this doesn’t mean your client is going to become a queen, so you won’t get richer from her. Quit the panic breathing and come around to face me, dunce. Then you’ll know where you are and how unlucky you are.”
    Frightened and mystified by her awareness of me, I stepped off the dais and moved in front of the woman. My stomach bobbled its breakfast when I saw her. I covered my eyes and fought the nausea. Sinking to my knees, I whimpered, unwilling to dare another look. I was certain any shred of sanity I once blithely possessed had been abandoned to psychotic hallucinations. I worried if I’d finally reached my lifetime ceiling of Benadryl.
    “Oh, gather yourself, pathetic child. You haven’t taken leave of your senses. You won’t come to harm here. As for your fate in your…realm, I can’t be so optimistic. Now look at me and tell me what you see. Your well-being depends upon you accepting what is happening. Don’t grovel. Just look.”
    Every molecule within me knew that if I looked, my life would alter forever. And it was such a nice little life too. On my knees, my eyes covered, I tried to weigh the ramifications. Unable to muster anything resembling lucidity, I looked.
    Before me, on a stone throne, sat an elongated, chisel-featured woman wearing an absurd crown made of two half-moons with an orb between them. Her blue cape covered most of the red dress that was decorated by a simple wooden crucifix hanging from a chain that encircled her neck. In her lap, she loosely held a worn, leather-bound Torah. One foot reached from beneath her robes and idly rocked a crescent moon back and forth. It was the only movement she made. The moon squeaked like the lid of a Styrofoam cooler as it rocked against the floor.
    But what got me were her eyes. They were like marbles, unnatural as the glass eyes one sees in taxidermy. They didn’t move to track me, but I knew she saw me. It was as if whoever inhabited that form was hiding inside it, using it as a costume, using those