Free Unquiet Dreams by K. A. Laity Page A

times over and over. It was what made him the enlightened one after all.
    I'm not much of a scholar though and the words were quickly jumping about on the page like they were hearing a crazy rhythm, refusing to make much of any kind of sense. "You got something easier?" I asked the chick, who was still dogging me not in a bad sense, but like she figured I might need some additional help.
    She smiled—a warm gesture, one I wanted to last longer—and reached for another book, thinner than the first, with another Buddha statue on the front and a name that looked like a hi-hat sounds. It said The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. That looked more promising.
    "Why don't you sit down and flip through it and see if it's more helpful," the red-haired gal purred as a mismatched couple rang in through the shop door. I parked myself in the chair and gave a pass through the covers. The first part of the book was about turning a wheel and the way the Buddha came to enlightenment. It was a hard row to hoe, but I tried to stick with it and break it down, but in a short while I had to admit it was not going gangbusters.
    "How're you getting on?" the pretty chickola asked once she had dealt with the little man and the big woman, who seemed quite excited about some Hindu book they had located with her help. They wiggled out the door practically jumping into each other's clothes.
    "I'm not latching on to the Buddha's groove," I had to admit. "I don't know that I need his whole message, you know? I'm just trying to make sense of what he said to me. Interpret, you know—alter it to my key, as they say."
    Miss Serious looked through her lenses. "What did the Buddha say to you?"
    I closed the book and set it on the shelf beside me, which I knew was the wrong place, but I wasn't thinking at the time. "He said I had a higher calling," I told her.
    "Don't we all," she agreed, nodding sagely as a Buddha herself.
    "He said another thing I didn't really understand."
    "What was that?"
    "Know this auto," I said, then frowned myself. "Well, maybe it wasn't quite like that."
    "Maybe not." She pursed her lips, which didn't make them look half bad. I wondered what she might look like wailing in the dark of a club and shimmying to some of my wild rhythms. "Are you sure it was in English?"
    I considered the wisdom of her words. "Now that you mention it, he might have been speaking in a foreign tongue." He had not spoken with an accent, but there was something about the bloke that seemed a bit foreign. Maybe it was the way he carried himself with a kind of stiff back, like he wasn't too willing to bend. Why would the Buddha have to bend? "How am I going to know what he said?"
    She appeared to be thinking this over. Which is to say that her eyes got a far away look and she took off her glasses and tapped the arm of them against her teeth. It made a small tap-tap sound. Without the glasses on I could see just how green her eyes were, which was very green indeed. That fact seemed unusual enough itself. I could smell spring grass in the colour of her eyes.
    "I think you need a reading," she said at last.
    I was thinking maybe I needed a nice long session on the floor of this establishment with her riding on top of me, but I was willing to give the reading a try. You never know what it might lead to, a little rumpy-bumpy would be all right by me. "What kind of reading?"
    She was lost in thought another minute, but finally said, "Tarot."
    Well, at least it was something I knew. I mean, you couldn't hang out in the club scene for too long without running into a least a couple chicks who claimed to be able to read your fortune in their pretty little pack of cards. It was copasetic. I never minded. Whatever they thought worked was fine by me as long as it worked out in the end for me, which is to say getting more than a little advice.
    When she pulled out the deck I nearly changed my mind. It wasn't bad exactly, but there was something a bit eerie about the