Violet Morrow's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Violet Morrow had been told no twice by the permits office, and the building two blocks from where her grandmother died was still locked to her. She stood in the clearing she had rented at the edge of Indigo Woods and counted the people drifting past the gate. Six this morning. Yesterday it had been twelve. They came because they had heard about the medium new to town, and they left because there was nothing to walk into yet — only trees, a hand-painted sign, and Violet with a pygmy marmoset clamped to her shoulder. Gizmo dug his claws into her collarbone and bit the soft place behind her ear. Not the warning bite. The impatient one. She felt the same thing in her own chest. She had a plan, and she had until the weekend to make it work. She could not host séances in a clearing with no walls, and the rune-carved hut she had scouted as a backup sat wrong in her stomach every time she stepped inside it — too narrow, too loud with someone else's old intentions, nothing of her grandmother in the wood. So she had stopped waiting for a building. She paid two carpenters in cash and a tarot reading each, and by Thursday afternoon they finished the platform at the center of the clearing. Carved boards. A purple canopy on four posts. A small table for the board and the candles, benches on either side for the living. She walked the perimeter and burned sage along the runes until the smoke held still in the air. The space took the offering. Her grandmother's voice came through quieter here, but it came. The platform solved one problem and exposed another. People still would not stop. They glanced at the canopy from the path and kept walking, because a séance setup behind a rope did not promise anything a stranger could touch. Violet sat on the bench with Gizmo curled in her lap and drew in her notebook until she had it. The next morning she called the same carpenters back and spent almost everything left in her account on a small carousel — four horses, lanterns at the eaves, moons cut into the crown. She set it at the mouth of the clearing where the path met the trees and ran it for free. Children climbed on. Parents waited. Waiting people read her sign. By Saturday afternoon she had booked eleven sittings for the following week, three of them paid in advance. That night Violet sat on the platform alone and listened. Gizmo had not bitten her once since the carousel started turning. Her grandmother was still in the locked building two blocks away, still waiting, still getting louder. But Violet had doors open now, even if they were not the doors she wanted. She picked up her phone and scrolled to her sister's name and held her thumb above it.