Read Online Burning by Elana K. Arnold - Free Book Online Page B

in his voice. Just a straight-up statement of fact.
    On my other side, Pete shifted uncomfortably. “It’s okay, man,” he said. “You’ve earned it. We all know you have.”
    We sat there for a minute, the three of us with our dicks in our hands, not knowing what to say. Then Lala said, smooth as silk, “Shall we go on?”
    I wanted to say, “Fuck you.” I wanted to wipe the cards off the table and get out of the fucking tent, but I nodded miserably, as if I deserved this, like a bad boy taking his spanking.
    “Next comes the Root of the Matter,” she said, tapping a card underneath the first pair.
    The Hanged Man
, read the card. On it was a man, swinging from one knee upside down from a tree branch, his hands behind his back as if bound, his face corpse white. The same color as my dad’s face after a day of work at the mine, coated with a fine layer of gypsum dust.
    “Here we find what is really going on at the heart of your situation,” said Lala. “Perhaps we see exposed here a secret you have been keeping.”
    “No secret,” I said. “That’s my dad.”
    Lala was still before she spoke. “Bound, helplessly hung, emasculated?”
    “The chick doesn’t pull any punches,” chortled Hog Boy.
    I just nodded, miserable.
    “You see your father as out of options, out of time. His livelihood is gone. His hands are not free to help his family, or even to help himself out of his predicament.”
    I remembered my father sitting at the breakfast table,thumbing through the Help Wanted section of the
Reno Gazette
. Hopeless.
    “But you see,” said Lala, lifting the Hanged Man, “when we invert this card, we find the situation may not be as dire as it may seem.”
    I blinked. Flipped over, the Hanged Man didn’t look imprisoned anymore. One leg crossed over the other, a serene expression on his face, he looked instead to be relaxed, perfectly at ease.
    “Sometimes what looks like a hopeless situation to one man can be an escape route to another,” Lala said. “It is just a matter of perspective.”
    I considered that. Could she be right? But no matter which way I tried to manipulate the situation in my mind, Pops was screwed. No, she was wrong with this one—Pops was the Hanged Man, all right.
    “What’s next?” I asked, wanting to get away from that card as soon as possible.
    She gestured to a card to one side of the first pair. “This is the Recent Past,” she said. “You have been a busy boy.”
    It was the Eight of Pentacles. This was clear enough; the number “8” was in a circle at the bottom of the card and it pictured a boy, ten or twelve, working at a table. He was carving a pentacle into a piece of wood. Shavings littered the table and you could tell he’d been working a while; seven other carved pentacles were hung on the wall behind him.
    There was a doorway, too, behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice the view. He was focused on what was in front of him, his work.
    “You see,” said Lala, pointing to the green hills, the blue sky and clear lake just outside of his workroom door. “Look at the pleasures of life that this boy—that
you
, Ben Stanley, have turned your back on. So much for a boy to enjoy out there. But not this boy. For this boy there is his work. But see! He wears a smile on his face. For him, his work is a pleasure, too.”
    I found myself arguing with her. “Even if he likes his work,” I said, “look how much he’s giving up.”
    “True,” she acknowledged. “And those sunny days, once lost, will not come again. Still, his work will be preserved. And it can be shared with others.”
    Not like running. That was just for me. I was the only person who gained from it; I couldn’t bring James or Hog Boy or Pete along with me to college.
    There was movement behind the screen. I’d almost forgotten there was someone else in the tent with us. “Is that your sister?”
    Lala looked displeased, as if I’d said something that upset her. “Let us keep our focus