Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman Page A

or sea, with an island in the distance and two rocky formations in the midground. And she wasn’t really sitting on the box; it was more like she was floating above it. Or maybe she had just gotten up from kneeling and was now in the act of sitting down on the box. No wonder the Two of Swords made Andromeda think of her own box: there it was, underneath a hovering girl who was not quite feminine enough and who now looked to her a bit like a cemetery angel with swords for wings, the box a marble sarcophagus.
    She put the cards back in the box, but then pulled them out again because she thought she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, the Tau-robed figure on the crest of the larger island behind the Two of Swords girl. She was mistaken. There was no one on the hill in the picture on the card. As an afterthought, she wrote down the cards she remembered from the dream, just in case they might have any divinatory or forensic significance: the Fool, the Hierophant, the Page of Cups, the Five of Cups, the Hermit, the High Priestess, and the Tower. That was seven of the ten cards in a Celtic Cross spread, leaving three unknown, unless the dancing Tau-robed one represented a card as well. If so, the Magician was a strong possibility—the figure might have been conducting a rite of some kind, and he might even have been juggling as well as tumbling. The fact that the girls’ bathroom spread had placed the Magician in the first “this covers you” position seemed to confirm that supposition. Strangely, Andromeda noted, Pixie’s Magician rather resembled the Two of Swords figure, giving the whole spread a curious symmetry.
    Her quick, mouthed, surreptitious banishing ritual was interrupted by Darren Hedge, the reference librarian who supervised the pages. He was standing in front of her when she looked up.
    “Do you feel like packing up Sylvester Mouse tonight?” he said. “Picking up some extra hours,” he meant. “We need to pull these books.”
    Marlyne was going home “sick” again, and Weird Gordon, another page, was going to fill in for her at the desk. (“Sick” probably meant Marlyne was hanging out with Tommy the maintenance guy, with whom she was having a not-too-discreet affair.) Darren Hedge handed Andromeda a list that had been printed on the library’s ancient machine-type printer, a thick stack of paper accordion-folded along perforated lines, with the strip of holes on either side. Nearly an inch thick, which meant hundreds of books, probably.
    “What’s it for?” she asked, but he had already disappeared, leaving the list behind.
    Weird Gordon walked by on his way to the main desk, quietly singing a little song that went “Filling in for Marlyne, at the front desk, filling in for Marlyne …,” and clumsily swaying while he walked. It was perhaps the most annoying habit for a coworker to develop, Gordon’s little songs about everything he did. “Time to get out the stapler. Stapler!” “Everybody’s taking their break, in the break room, break room….”
    “Gordon has a little crush on you,” Marlyne had once sung, parodying his singing style. “I’m picking up a vibe.” Marlyne was always “picking up vibes” and thought everyone had a crush on everybody else. Andromeda knew that, for her part, she could never come close to feeling attraction for a boy with such poor taste in shoes: today, despite the damp weather, he was wearing his mandals. For the love of Mike, as the dad would say in the Groucho voice when he was doing the corny dad routine, there was no excuse for that. She cracked herself up, though, imagining the song Gordon might sing if they were ever to hook up somehow: “Here we go unbuttoning, here we go unbuttoning, un buttoning Andromeda, Andromeda’s shirt from Savers, kickin’ off my mandals, my man sandals, kicking off my mandals….” Then she saw him smiling back at her and accelerating his clumsy dance, showing off, and she felt bad for encouraging him, so she