Inverse Tarot

This is an Inverse Tarot Reading. In an ordinary tarot reading, cards are randomly selected for a particular querent, in the hope they'll be meaningful. This is a particular card shown to randomly selected querents, in the hope that it will be meaningful to one of them.

Autumn of Talons: The Northern Shrike (Lanius borealis)

Northern Shrikes are grey and white songbirds. Like other songbirds, they are small and melodious and lack talons, but unlike other songbirds they are fierce predators. They sit in high places and watch for birds and mice. They skulk through brush. They ambush. They lure other birds by imitating their songs, and they kill birds larger than themselves by driving them into the ground. Because they lack talons to tear open prey, they impale it on thorns or barbed wire instead.

This is an Inverse Tarot Reading. In an ordinary tarot reading, cards are randomly selected for a particular querent, in the hope they'll be meaningful. This is a particular card shown to randomly selected querents, in the hope that it will be meaningful to one of them.

Three of Songs: The Great-Tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus)

Great-Tailed Grackles are medium-sized iridescent black birds with long tails. Both sexes sing. Their songs are strange and unmusical; they sound like electronic buzzers, rusty hinges, squeaky balloons, and hissing cats. But in the dense brushy habitats where they nest, delicate melodic songs would be distorted and absorbed. A grackle's song has evolved to carry across harsh terrain.

This card is about your Art. This card does not say which Art yours is, only that you contain strange and wonderful things, and sometimes you pull those things through the portal of your breath and bone and into the outside world to share.