Corn

In a yellow city, a city where dust and gourds and autumn flowers are all the same color as the bricks, the Caster sits in a room strewn with oat straw at a massive oaken workbench, scarred and worn, and casts corn.

Her favorite method is to shake several kernels of dried corn in a cup made of a dried, hollowed-out cob, then splay them out onto the letters and runes carved into the ancient board in an archaic pattern. No whole words are evident, but sets of letters and bits of ideas. Her genius is in making those partial ideas whole. With her pronouncements, she makes the town whole, the country.

People come from all over the countryside to see her. They are often disappointed to find a woman so short and nondescript. Her graying brown hair is short, wiry, curly. She wears shapeless gowns of yellow, maize, daffodil or toast. Sometimes she has corn silk tucked behind her ear.

If you look at her eyes, of course, she ceases to be nondescript. But she lets few people do that. She wears broad-brimmed hats outdoors and sits with the sun behind her indoors, so she can see the faces of those brave enough to seek her help.

What do you wish to know? she asks, her voice a soft rasp, pieces of silk and husk together, the wind through the field.

The sun, yellow behind her, delineates the dust motes in the still air, slashes and slants across the table where the runes, burned deeply into the wood in an age long past, are beginning finally to wear away. The table is solid, encouraging the trust of those who seek her out.

The Inquirer finds he cannot ask. Not for his heart's desire. Not now, too close to the fullness of harvest, when the runes are sometimes cast in fresh corn, when the Caster counts the kernels in an ear. The number, she has found over the years, is always odd. Odd. She is very clear on how to count the little semikernels at the top of the ear -- she doesn't. The number still comes out odd.

She has a consistent correlation in her head; she won't write it down. It will die with her, and the next Caster will have to start anew. There is no teaching in this order. Anyway, 177, for instance, means interesting news by post. Two hundred and twenty-nine means an animal will die. Three hundred ninety-three tells of a catastrophe too great to be talked of or borne. The one time she encountered that number, she was so agitated she dropped the ear, breaking several of the kernals open and voiding the reading. In the following year, nothing much out of the ordinary happened, to her immense relief.

The Inquirer comes back in the early winter, when the corncakes are made of dried meal and the dried stalks are being used for cooking fires. Ask, she says, and he does. His heart's desire. What is most of meaning to him, but to no one else. He is shy. He must trust her.

She asks him to dip his hand into the bowl and pull up a handful of dried kernels. He tips them into her cup. She rattles them around, her eyes hidden, her jaws moving silently, as if she is chewing. The rattle is replaced with the quick splaying sound and the kernels come to rest.

RSTQZZIOLT

Rest easy, she says. Your desire shall come to you. Work hard. Love everyone. Forgive others. Forgive yourself. Love yourself. Abide and you will find your heart.

He leaves, his heart full of potential and resolve. The Caster reloads the cup and casts again. Every fortune is different; every cast is new. But the words she speaks to each inquirer, in privacy and confidence, are the same.

Rest easy, she tells them. Abide and you will find your heart.