I dreamt again of the boy on the cliff, my limbs grasping for purchase in a sprawl of air. I felt myself falling, only, as the wind blew past me, I realized I was not falling down but up. And then I was tumbling over a cliff’s edge—not off of it, but onto it. And the boy was waiting for me there, but he had grown. He wore the face of the man with the peppermint schnapps. His hair was cropped close to his scalp and his goatee wrapped around his toored lips. His yellow waistcoat had been traded for a jacket, leathery like the underside of a bat’s wing, and his white wolf friend was now a black goat with gleaming yellow eyes and two twisting horns. He held a hand out to me and smiled. I reached for him, and he led me back into the waiting shadows of the forest. When I looked down again, it wasn’t his hand I was holding but a chain of shining red silk.

I pulled out my box of cards upon waking and used my phone to shine a light over their carnival colors, flipping through until I came to the Devil. And while the devil on my card was orange and black with white horns and red wings that billowed like a cape behind him, his smile was the same as the devil in my dream and his chains were unmistakable. He may not have looked like the man with the peppermint schnapps, but I knew he’d smell like mint if he were standing next to me. Old and young at once. Glamour. Carnage. The Devil is liberation, but only when you are willing to see him for what he truly is.

Open your eyes. There is so much you aren’t seeing.

Something sizzled in my mind like burning electrical wire. I spread the cards across the bedspread, looking for something that I would only know once I saw it: the Fool—the boy from my dream. He was as clear as the golden glow of his coat.

I have met them both in my own way. They have been keeping me company nearly my whole life. And now when I need them most, when Moony is too far and my mother is too near, they have emerged from my deck or from my mind, garbed themselves in sinew and skin, and made these streets their home.