Tarot Mercedes Dantes ((exclusive)) 〈90% ESSENTIAL〉

Fourth card: “Obstacle. You have all the tools but you keep waiting for permission. Who the fuck gave you that rule? Was it your daddy? Your third-grade teacher? Because I can call them. I have no problem yelling at ghosts.”

“People come to me and say, ‘Will he come back?’ ‘Will I get the job?’ ‘Am I cursed?’” She snorts. “You’re not cursed. You’re just predictable. You keep dating the same man with a different name. You keep applying to jobs that will destroy your soul. The cards don’t predict the future. They show you the pattern. And patterns are just habits you haven’t hated enough to break.”

She flips the second card. “Present. You’re healing wrong. You think healing is forgetting. It’s not. It’s learning to carry the wound without bleeding on everyone.” tarot mercedes dantes

She grins, and for a moment, she looks like a teenager. “Mercedes because I wanted a car I couldn’t afford. And Dantes… like Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo . A man wrongly imprisoned who becomes a ghost of vengeance and mercy.” She taps her temple. “I was wrongly imprisoned? No. I was guilty as sin. But I chose to become a different kind of ghost. One who reads cards instead of holding grudges.” As I leave, she calls after me: “Hey. That Ten of Cups? Don’t go looking for it. It’s not a destination. It’s a decision you make every morning when you wake up and decide not to be an asshole.”

By [Your Name]

“Prison is the best divination school on earth,” she tells me, finally lifting her gaze. Her eyes are the color of whiskey left too long in the decanter. “You learn to read men in three seconds. You learn which ones will stab you, which ones will save you, and which ones will cry when the guards come. Tarot is just that skill with pictures.” Mercedes’s signature deck is a modified Rider-Waite she calls The Concrete Arcana . She has scrawled over the traditional imagery with Sharpie and glitter glue: The Hanged Man now dangles from a fire escape. The Tower is a public housing project collapsing in slow motion. The Devil wears a police badge.

“First card: your past.” She flips. “You’ve been fighting a war nobody else signed up for. Family stuff. You were the referee when you should have been a child. Sound right?” Fourth card: “Obstacle

I realize: Mercedes Dantes didn’t read my future. She read my present. And for twenty dollars, she gave me something rarer than a prediction.