A Diviner’s Abecedarian

Alomancy (divination by salt)

Before, salt was only for seasoning, so we didn’t think anything of it. It slept in porcelain shakers at our dinner tables, and we shook it over our plates without fear. We didn’t heed the superstitions of spilt salt, or salt tossed over a shoulder. We paid no attention to the shapes in which the salt fell. We never collected salt in secret, didn’t steal our mothers’ novelty shakers shaped like tomatoes and houses and dogs, didn’t hoard paper packets of salt from fast-food joints, or take it up in fistfuls to throw onto the flat earth. We didn’t read the strange runes it formed against the soil. Things were different, then. Objects only were what they were. Nothing more.

Bibliomancy (divination by book)

Imagine what our teachers would say if they knew what we’d done with our missing textbooks. Even worse, with the yearbook, each of our six photos tucked primly side by side, like scales on an ugly fish.

Cyclomancy (divination by spinning objects)

We play spin the bottle with an empty two-liter soda jug. We don’t mention how there aren’t any boys here, in the carpeted basement of one of our mother’s houses. If we did, we’d shame ourselves out of playing. Our six sleeping bags are loose around us, shiny like sealskins. When we kiss each other, we do it quickly, as if touching our lips to an electric fence. Then we wipe our mouths on our hands and pretend so loudly that we hated it—that meeting softness in the circle of flashlight glow was only a chore, a duty we had to perform. We are servants to the rules we set.

One of us spins the plastic bottle and asks, Which of us is the prettiest? The bottle chooses the girl with the long blond hair we all envy, who pinks in the dim light and whose hair we all imagine lighting on fire. Her turn to spin. Who’s the ugliest? and the one it points to shrinks as we titter into shivers. She tosses the bottle like a top. Which of us is a liar? she asks. It lands on the one of us in the ice-cream pajamas. Later that night, when the liar falls asleep, we write the word on her forehead with lipstick. Though she scrubs and scrubs all morning, the mark will not come off.

Dririmancy (divination by dripping blood)

The first one We don’t believe her, but when we look out our bedroom windows, the world is smothered with snow, bright as knife blade. We wade to her house and demand she show us how she knew. She says she won’t, and we tear at our thighs, and we beg, and we lift our skirts and wait, but nothing happens.