Grandmother and her fortunes
Baba Femi’s fingers wrapped around the teacup, bones wrapped in paper-thin flesh. Though the Gur wagon was parked for the evening, still those boney fingers trembled as she lifted the cup to her cloudy eyes.
“Bear,” she croaked. “Pine. Star.”
Each word dry and wheezing, as if her lungs were already crumbling to ash. The elder coughed into her hand and little Manishie was quick to take the cup from her and set it gently down, knowing by now how her great-grandmother’s episodes required her help. She was more caretaker than apprentice, more apprentice than kin.
“Girl,” spat Baba, pointing her twitching knobby finger at the remaining teacup...Manishie’s. “It is time. Bring it here.” Barked orders, cold and impatient.
But Manishie had never needed Baba Femi’s warmth to love her. Who could blame her impatience? She had run out of time for patience eleven years ago, when Manishie’s birth had twisted the promise of a scion to inherit the Gift. But she’d clung on to watch that Gift blossom, defiant, in the putrid mix of Manishie’s own blood. Mama said it was spite that kept her living long enough for her eyes to watch the tribe die out. But Manishie loved Baba Femi even for her spite. She liked the way you could see the bones and veins right beneath the skin, the way Baba’s spindly hand was feather-light in her own small hand. She resented much already at eleven, but never Baba.
But though she scrambled to free the cup from Baba’s hands, she hesitated to present her own leaves. She had watched, assisted, so many times before as Baba Femi had growled fortunes to Gur and outsiders alike. Watched the wonder and irritation on their faces when the future did not suit them, watched the fear, and on rare occasion watched the relief. The apprentice already knew well the dark and twisted paths the leaves could foretell, and today’s question would settle the matter of her place in the vardo forever.
The afternoon’s tea twisted into knots in her stomach as she hesitated, too long a wait for Baba Femi’s liking.
“The tea, girl.”
Manishie placed the tea cup gently into Baba Femi’s hands, closed those frail fingers around the porcelain.
Her great-grandmother lifted the cup closer with Manishie’s help, as she had done so many times before. Beady, wrinkled eyes scrutinized the mush of leaves within. Blindness clouded her vision crippled her in the daily chores of living—Manishie’s own life seemed to revolve solely around fetching Baba’s things, cleaning after her, helping her into bed…It did not cripple her Sight. Her clouded pupils quivered as she drank in the wisdom of the tea leaves.
“Baba?” Manishie whispered. Fear enveloped her like a hand gripped at her neck, threatening to smother the fickle flame of hope Baba had nourished these eleven years. Baba Femi had seen something, however small, in her mutt of a bastard great-grandaughter. That flame flickered threatening to go out.
“Half-blood,” spat Baba Femi. The words stung, even if they had been heard many times before. Wheezing, Baba caught her breath and heaved out each word. “Long have I nurtured the Sight among our tribe. Your aunt carried the Gift, but she died young. Your mother, but it drove her mad. Drove her—” hack! She coughed mercilessly. “--to mix blood that wasn’t meant to be mixed. Long did I wonder…”
And so had Manishie. Those whispers at the edges of her mind, the presence of eyes prickling the back of her neck…that taste of ash on her tongue. She was different, yes. But could she be the right kind of different?
“But you. You.” An accusing finger shook at her, knobby and skeletal, pointed like a knife at the girl. The elder woman pushed the teacup towards her, blind eyes unmoving. “Read, girl,” she croaked. “Read and tell me all you see.”
Manishie’s heart fluttered painfully in her chest, and she lifted the teacup. At the base of the porcelain, the leaves were…scattered, meaningless, a soggy brown-green mess. Mounds with no rhyme or reason.
“What do you see.” Like an impatient frog, she croaked again.
Manishie knew if she lied, the woman would know. So she said the truth as quietly as she could. “Nothing, baba.”
Baba Femi delivered a sharp slap to the back of Manishie’s head. “Look, stupid girl. Allow your mind to see what the leaves are telling you, not what you think they look like.”
So Manishie looked, listened. Her head swam a little from the stinging. And slowly as her mind settled into the hills and valleys and edges of the leaves, they began to take shape. They reminded her of those glimpses of something at the edge of her vision…
“A…woman, on a pyre. A child’s…shadow…?” She struggled to make sense of the shapes. “Bones. Bones, and…” the word that came to her lips was ash. Why was it ash? “Ash.”
Feeling Baba’s eyes upon her, she lifted her own to meet them. The weight of the wagon shifted as the Gur eavesdroppers hanging on its edge grew bored or were shooed away.
“Is it the future, Baba?”
The air froze between them as Manishie waited, forgetting to breathe. The fog of her baba’s eyes left her chilled, as if Baba Femi was seeing her through a fortune glass.
“No.”
A knife in her heart. The chill of disappointment.
Baba Femi rasped her words, that chill trickling down Manishie’s spine. The chilling gravity of words spoken by the Sight, her voice rattling like a dying gasp.
"Ever shall you walk with eyes blind to the future and frozen to the path behind you. Always will the true Sight elude you. Your gift will mock you, twist you, rot in your heart. It will curdle your hopes and turn your dreams to ash.”
And one last rattle, words that haunted the girl many nights since. “Though the Sight may sing in your blood, it denies you, for you are no true daughter of Raumathar.
