Sometimes I dream of eating them. The little red berries; there’s a bush of them near the mailbox outside the house. We don’t trim the bushes, but we don’t get mail, either. So who cares, she tells me. She doesn’t ask questions anymore.
Sometimes I dream of eating those berries, when I’m lying on the floor in the afternoon heat. Maybe they’ll make me drunk like they make the birds drunk every afternoon, maybe I’ll grow black wings and speak seven words for each day of creation. Make me a magpie. Then I’ll rest. I’ll fly away and then I’ll rest.
You say my name I’ll kill you.
So we don’t say her name anymore. Or any more than we used to, perhaps. It’s been long. Here. In the summer, with the berries, with the birds. We loose track, after awhile.
She walks in. I’m lying on my back and I can see the way her pale toes dig into the worn shag carpet like little crabs on the beach. I’m going to go to California one day, I tell her.
This is California, she says. Dance with me.
I tell her I cant. I’m a magpie, I say, staring at her toes, and I can’t dance.
Dance with me, little magpie.
She’s pale. Her whole body is pale and transparent and I can see the blue veins winding up her legs. I stand up slowly so the room doesn’t spin. I know she’s already gone. She doesn’t usually go until later in the day. Maybe it’s the heat.
No. The heat never changes.

I don’t know how I’m still alive and she isn’t. I don’t know if I am alive. I don’t know if that matters.
Her hair is long and the color seeps out of it like milk, sticky and fermented. If I braid it for her, she tells me, it’ll stick together so tightly I’ll have to cut it all of to get the braids out. So I don’t braid it. We’re not allowed to touch our own hair. It’s against the rules. Without touching it with my hands, I can close my eyes and feel mine pooling on my shoulders, and then falling to wrap around my back like the veins wrap around her legs. Dark jungle vines. I’m dark, and she is white and blue.
I wonder if she can feel the way her hair sticks to her neck.

She tells me we have caught time, tangled in the berry bush, maybe. I told her that maybe that was all we had. Time, drunk with the birds. But even her crab toes laughed at me, crabs that can dig and hide away, forever.
If you ask the tarot cards the same thing again and again, they will give you the same answer, but never in the same ways. Whenever I ask, I am always the same. The Queen of Cups. She is almost never the same. She starts with the Fool and works her way through the major arcana. Today she is Judgment, which means that tomorrow, which of course, isn’t tomorrow, but today all over again, she’ll be the Fool.
We don’t have the World anymore in our deck. That was part of it. She’ll never be entirely perfect. The World. Justified. Whole.
I once told her that maybe she should try the seven of cups. A cloud of wishes, intangible fantasies. But she smiled like a cat when it sees something you never could. With the things I’ve done, she said, I don’t belong in a suit.
It seems unfair to the fates to take away their power, like that.
At least we left the cat out of it.
I remember when the cat used to get in. It’s hard to say that I remember the day that the cat got in, since, of course, it’s always been the same day. But cats see things. Things coming and going, and maybe the cat knows more about us than we do, since it can see everything we’ve done and will do. That’s why it left. Something was different. Something was wrong. It wont even drink from the saucer of milk that we leave at the doorstep. Now it plays games with the birds outside. It knows them too well. Knows where they will go, and when.
Sometimes this disheartens me, because the cat can’t tell us what it knows, like the cards can. If it were a card, I think it would be the Magician. Proud, knowledgeable, arrogant. It could also be the six of swords, traveling with us, strange expedients. But it’s a cat, so I can never know for certain.
We could have used the cat, but she told me that she didn’t want to be so stereotypical. We. Not we. Her. She couldn’t use the cat, so she used me. A trusted companion, as it called for. The last time I touched my hair was when I pulled it over my shoulder to cut out a small strand. She had to put her whole ponytail in, from the nape of her neck.
At least I have the veins of my hair weaving along my back. She just has her bones. Scaffolding. She has so little on her little white body. Like a ghost. She had to leave everything behind.
Which is exactly what she didn’t want to do, so she brought the house with us. The red berries, a guardian. To keep the little birds at bay. I like to pretend this is why I can’t grow my magpie wings yet. My skinny yellow toes. My beak. I wonder again what will happen if I eat some of the berries. If the home will break like a tower against an earthquake. When something so big and so fast is moving against you, when you simply choose not to go with it. We’ll fall back down from our sky.
She is small, but her dreams are big. They spread and bury, into the carpet, up along the walls. The crabs who think they’re in California. A sister who thinks she is a bird. A waif, a false Card, who took away her name and her suit, who thinks she can live forever.
If this really is forever.

I think about all of this as we’re dancing on the sandy carpet, the veins in her legs straining like cables to hold up the raw machinery that is left when she leaves. Every day, every this day, every time, she goes earlier. But this time was unexpected. My hand is on her back, I’m singing something I learned once, before. I don’t remember when, or what the words mean. My hand is on her back where her hair used to swing like the pendulum of a clock and suddenly she crumbles, like a stack of cards in a wind. In my mind, I swoop down out of the sky to set her gently on the beach. I don’t speak her language any more. I don’t need to. Birds keep their own time, and cats their own council.

I know it’s over. I let go of her to reach up, and run my palms over my head, my fingers through my hair. Murky. Tangled. A river. Feathers. There is no earthquake, and there is nowhere to fall. The cat is smiling at me. He knows where I will go.
I am alive. And she is not. Dinah, I say. Her name.

But it’s too late. I’ve already forgotten my own.