i think i am imagining basements 1#

I could almost chew on the god-awful incense smoke in the room where she was giving me the reading.

I flipped the card over. Two figures stood beneath an angel.

“The Lovers.”

“That’s convenient,” I snorted.

“Alignment,” she hissed back.

“Or projection. Not the prophetic kind,” I snapped, frustration rising in my voice.

“Come with me.”

She pulled the beaded curtain aside and led me down into the basement of the shop.

At the bottom of the stairs stood a wooden door. She knocked on it like someone inside had been expecting us.

A voice answered.

Familiar, somehow—though I had never heard it before.

A.

What kind of name is A?

“Enough of one,” he said as I stepped into the room, as if he had heard the thought.

There was no TV, no decorations, no sign that anyone actually lived there. Just a mattress on the floor.

“You can sit.”

We talked for a while. I don’t remember about what. At some point the lights went out, and before I realized it, we had both fallen asleep on the mattress.

Morning made him smaller.

He slept on his side, facing me. I watched the slow rhythm of his breathing like something I might need to memorize later.

“It’s rude to stare.”

He closed the distance between us. I pulled away.

“Why A?”

His eyes sharpened.

“Names stick.”

I stood to leave. For a moment he stopped me.

He said my name like he was testing the weight of it.

“Don’t make this a symbol,” he said.

“It was a moment.”