My friend, the one who gave me the tomato, lives in an old church called The Moon Mansion. Something like 14 other people live there.

I went to visit her the other day and she took me to the basement to see the plecostomus.

The house is packed with forgotten oddities. The old guy who owns the place is a Cancer and runs it like a 12th house dormitory. Mostly artists and two of his sons live there. I bite my lip and pinch myself whenever I go there because it has surreal dream architecture, hidden doors and iconic piles of stuff you haven’t seen in years. Stacks and stacks of National Geographics next to a wall of display picture frame corners, darkness spotted with glare coming out of floating peep holes, a miter saw, a suit of armor, muffled conversations leaking through the walls.

After we had a good stare at the old fish she turns around and knocks on a door I hadn’t noticed.

“Go Away!”

“Can we come in?”

“No.”

“I want to show Nota the elephant.”

“Well, I guess if you have to.”

The outside of the door has an image that I know. It was the magician from the Aquarian deck. Pasted at eye level where the speak easy would be, you know if there was a speak easy. There were little pieces of wire jutting out around it with beads hanging off. Some extra handcrafted adornment reiterating the hanging motif from the upper left hand corner of the card.

Inside was a concrete floor spattered in paint, a couple of shelves, a mattress and a painting of Strength.

One of the guys inside I knew. A Taurus. He was sprawled out reading the vampire bible and shouting about what parts were shit and tapping his big green ring against the wall. The other, The Magician was leaned back in a padded desk chair with his feet up.

There was a plaster elephant identical in form to one that they had in the attic. Only this one had been painted to look like something from Hellraiser. It had jagged pieces of mirrored glass running down its back. The Magician nudged it around with the toe of his boot, still slung back in his chair and knocked it into the wooden snake sitting next to it.

“Eh, whatever.”

My friend asked if they were going out later. Turns out both guys were Taurii.

“Yeah, we’re having a Taurus party later.”

“Like how later?”

The Magician stretched and looked at his wrist with no watch, yawned and said “yeah, just later.”

We left and I asked “Wait, wait, he’s a Taurus?”

“Yeah.”

“Why was he wearing an Aries belt buckle?” I hadn’t processed the image in my mind until afterward. The Magician had been wearing a huge silver Ram belt buckle, which was quite prominent because of the way he was draped over his chair.

“I dunno, I think he just likes it.”

For a moment I knew there was more to it then that. He was a very deliberate symbolic communicator. But then I forgot to care as we drifted into the next scene.

Have you ever been invited into a Magicians abode?

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