Setting the chipped mug on an end table, my fingers turned the stiff card stock, trembling. Do I dare know what the day brings?

The angel stared, a blond pretty-boy in long robes. His Aryan-blue eyes fluttered half-closed, focusing on the twin chalices. One ethereal hand dumped the fluid from one heavy goblet to another, without a hint of strain on the delicate wrists. Somehow, his bare feet balanced, the ball of one on a gray stone, while the other sloshed in the stream. On his tiptoes, with the long blue pleats of the robe hiding the strain.

And isn't that the lesson of Temperance? Carrie Nation carried her axe, vowing to rid the world of saloons and stumbling red-faced drunks and other intemperate subjects. Like sex; sex is always intemperate, a tropical climate by nature. Temperance: a type of climate marked by the wishy-washiness of seasons that never seem to make up their minds, and instead kick around like bored children in a playbox, making trouble.

Irises bloom behind the androgynous winged prettyboy, and a golden crown rises, sun-proud, to hover above a pair of breastlike peaks. The road wends, moon-pale through fairytale-green grass. A storybook scene, enlivened on the rectangular plain of the card.

Of course, the angel doesn't see any of it. He's too busy being saccharine angelic, focusing on the task he was set to: pouring water from one goblet to another while getting his precious Caucasian feet soggy and, one presumes, muddy. Giraffes could lope behind him, ridden by tail-draping peacocks and gossamer fairies. Redwoods could sprout from the plains in a moment's time, or the holy crown could sink behind the mountain, disrupting a crater lake and sending mudslides onto the town below. He wouldn't know. Pardon me, ma'am; I just have to pour this water.

See? I'm not missing a drop. A drip. See? A preternaturally perfect stream from one hyperexpensive heavy container to another.

He can't even focus on his own haloed, gray-winged beauty, his golden ringlets, the tiara; with his eyes glued to an odd instance of manual labor, he can't angle his eyes over to the stream, which would serve as the perfect, albeit rippled, mirror. All it would take is a glance, a momentary reflex, a twitch. Chances are, the holy water wouldn't splash, not even a single drop, into the lyric brook. And if it did, what would it hurt? Water to water, like to like.

Oh, it means all good things, doesn't it? That road: the Buddhist middle path, eschewing sex and good food and fleshly pleasures. Temperance: self-control, resisting temptation and pleasure. Some call the card Art, and draw instead a figure engaged in a task of creation. This I could understand better, but I think it ultimately changes the meaning. No, art is harnessed passion; this card depicts something more sinister, in my mind. Perhaps it's a personal grudge, and nothing inherent in the old gypsy tradition that crafted wisdom from a card deck and some cheap paint.

With a feather pen, I'd give it a new name: corporation. Efficiency. Temperance, you see, has nothing to do with you; it has everything to do with the buzz and hum surrounding the gray walls of your cubicle, with the housemate and the boss and the IRS screaming imprecations. You paint it with the inkwell of shoulds and oughts. The angel, in a liltingly soft therapist-voice, says, "Jasmine, you must be a good employee and do what the boss says. It's a tough job market out there, so you can't lose your job. Pity those who fling insults at you over the copper wires, since they know not what they do. Turn the other cheek. Don't mind your cousin James; that's the adult thing to do. Act like a grownup. Pay your bills. Chew that lower lip and, for the gods' sake, don't say a word."

Fuck me. Fuck me because I cannot stop listening to that angelic voice, to the slosh of water between the cups, as it all sounds so goddamned simple. The facts click simply, beads on an abacus. The angel adds them up, harsh thoughts adding on one wire and saintly thoughts on the other. That androgynous voice: the lilt of the chastising mother with the sagging eyes and the stained sweatshirt, the therapist dispensing meds, the periwigged judge. It doesn't matter if you believe in the wheel of reincarnation rather than angels or a heaven populated with buxom virgins or a hell bedecked with the latest in sadomasochistic instrumentation. It doesn't matter, because that angelic hand taps the ledger and makes the lines fall into straight constellations of black and white numerals.

We can't read the algebra, so we go on faith. Five million Frenchmen cannot be wrong, nor can five million voices in one's head, or five million employers willing to salvage your remains for body parts in order to make a good ol' George Washington. No, the world is right. Be temperate, wait. Lie back and spread �em. The cards shall fall from dainty hands, forming a perfect house; live there until the drywall comes crashing down on your haloed head. Sacrifice: the XX-chromasonal way.

I hate that card, because it's me there pouring, in an ugly flannel nightgown that I've worn to bed for the past fifteen winters, in a work blazer with a pen behind my ear, in the thousand lame costumes that string together a human day. The cups weigh down my wrists, but I'll never show it. The cubicle walls block out that halo rising in the hills, my own sunshine glory, the Goddess rising within and knocking on the bone walls of my sternum.

My eyes closed, and my limbs longed to crawl beneath the comforter, waiting for the next rebirth. Maybe something unusual and spicy next time, such as a Maharishi.

"Hey Jasmine," the Old Woman smirked, her heard-unheard voice lilting through my mind's cavern, imaginary but real to me. She had a New York accent, screaming Brooklyn like a bagel.

"Hey, Jasmine. I put some irises behind you," she said. "It's up to you to notice them."

***

Intemperate, my fingers quaked as I tapped the square plastic, in an endless initiation of contact. Ye gods, said rational mind, chewing the end of a pen. Don't tell Christian all this shit. He won't want you, then. More baggage than a freaking stagecoach. But something possessed me, a maniacal lust toward empathy and compassion mixed with semen.

He had left the piebald-socks girl � her name was Amy, it turns out. He's been casually seeing Erin. The name threw me, and then I realized: Silvermoon. "Oh yes, remember how we all talked on Ostara? Great ritual, by the way. Oh, Erin's such a shew. All she talks about is pagan stuff." I regaled him with tales from the office. And then, sickly drunk on a draught of pure loneliness, I spewed it all out electronically like a drunk on the pavement.

Intemperate again, always with words. And yes, I'll pay. Don't you know? The drops escaped the goblets, dumping diamonds into the murky stream.

My sister had called, asking for a place to stay yet again. She said her husband had pushed her down a flight of stairs, but they might reconcile. And yet, the memory erodes the sides of landfill's memory, how she had lain drunken on the futon that one time.

"Yeah, well. It's not true, any of it. You know? I was fucked up on some shit. And now I might've fucked up so bad that he'll take my fucking kid. He'll take my fucking kid."

With a whiskey-roughened voice, she vomited up the lies. They bounced off my brain, reflected by the kryptonite of blood-loyalty. Blood-loyalty: the same foolish concept that has slaughtered entire clans of Bedouins and McCoys.

The tears streaked her mascara, shadowing her eyes. A rubber-fleshed skull. She had showered after I bailed her from the drunk tank ("disorderly conduct" said the bored desk lieutenant as I plopped down part of my savings. No more bedroom furnishings for me, sister.) Damp black hair plastered her pale face: the face of our father. Our Polish grandmother, distaff side, had insisted on calling her "Blackie." No child of mine, as the saying went.

And before our father died, he had called me, weeping like Jill was doing now, on my futon. This was after she had landed in jail the first time, for drunkenly whaling an undercover cop in a seedy townie bar, the type with the green lampshade lights and the burnt-out neon signs, the wood-paneling and the toothless men nursing their scotch and scratching their maggoty crotch. She needed her fun, she said later. She had been fired from her long-term managerial job at the deli, the one dad got for her through a friend at work. She lied, saying that work has gone well, and fabricated problems with a fictitious bologna shipment.

Her husband was out of town, and she left her infant son with her friend Bob, previously arrested (albeit waiting indictment) for the possession of child porn.

"It was bullshit!" she wailed after the cops pushed her from the jailhouse door. "I was just having a drink when this guy comes up and hassles me."

And the job? he asked.

She strapped herself in the back seat, dropping her chin. Her silence plunked, a hunk of concrete in a stream.

"Blood is thicker than water," my dad always said when I stamped my foot, attempting to shrug her off like last night's bad dream, or the common cold. When my mouth-corners dragged in an unattractive scowl, after she dumped the load of dishes or the lawnmowing or any conceivable goddamned chore on me.

"Blood is thicker than water. I want you to be there for each other when I'm gone."

And he was, after he bailed her out. Their words flew like softballs, punching holes in lamps and the plaster, sending the knickknacks of ego crashing to the lineoleum. In my room, I sat in lotus position, trancing myself into Faerie, and only finding an eerie green pool where blue-skinned nixies scowled.

They had Jill's face. The winds of Faerie roared, pushing me back to the room with the dancing shadows on the wall, spun from candlelight. Their words crashed against the wall. She blamed him, his six beers a night, his inability to plug into the hard drive of her feeling and download its files.

Om mane padme om, I hummed, counting on my fingers. And rose, to go back to my college apartment. I could hear dad shout at her.

"What did I do wrong to get a daughter like this? To get a daughter who lies �"

I slipped out the door into the seats of my Dodge. Two days later, he called, distraught. The question haunted him.

"What did we do wrong?" His voice was stained with tears and beer.

"Nothing, dad," I assured with a sickeningly faux sunny cheer. "You and mom always stressed the importance of honesty and education and hard work."

"But she lies. You can't trust anything she says."

"At least you have one good kid," I said, wishing I could suck those words back into my larynx and keep them locked there like prisoners. Don't say anything; don't complain. They hate it when you complain. Chimneysweeper-girl, cleaning up the soot left by your elder sister.

He died that night, clutching his chest. Only in his forties. He smoked his whole life, mom said, in between bits of cursing. The Goddess, the Norns, the Fates. Any mythological concept she could get her head around. By the gravesite, I played my harp, the strings of my heart, and sang an air in Gaelic. He had loved the language, though he couldn't speak a word and didn't have a drop of it in his Slavic blood. And as I sang, I saw the Old Woman, a motherly woman now, loop her thick arm about his shade, and lead him to Charon's ferry. The Styx waters shown as Hecate, the torch-bearer, the Old Woman, led the way.

I'll watch over you, his shade whispered, kissing my forehead. Perhaps it was only an imagination, wish-fulfillment filled by grief, as a therapist would say. But not in my household. We heaped stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes on his plate during the Dumb Supper, forty days afterward. Mom bowed her head, her youthful face etched with the grief of a Crone. Dad was never a Wiccan, but I felt him sit in the ancestor's seat, with a twinge of amusement.

And a black serpent coiled in my gut. Cigarettes didn't kill dad.

Jill did.

"Blood is thicker than water," I heard in my ear. I glanced up, and saw the mascara streak down Jill's face. Her husband took her by the elbow and led her home, or to a therapist's office or electroshock treatment, whatever escape money can buy.

And when she draped herself on my futon years later, I heard him whisper that damn cliche into my ear. I paid her a fifty, and she returned to her spouse that night. I knew she'd be back.

On the night before Samhain, I take dad shopping at the mall and out to eat. His spirit, anyway, lodged in my head, joking along. Mom takes him out on Samhain proper, which makes it a lively season

My palms sweated, waiting for Christian's e-mail. It was short, poignant as a truncated scene in a made-for-TV film.

You are such a good person, he wrote. It's amazing how much you can care for your sister, even after all the mistakes she's made. You're an angel.

A giddy smile wavered on my face, half-lit by the light of the monitor in the dark. James' snoring echoed through the hall.

Ironically stuck in a pagan's Tarot deck, Archangel Michael looked up from the goblets, the pouring complete.

"Enjoy it," he said, shrugging his great gray wings. "It's not going to last."

***

The fishing line jumped as the slimy buggers bit.

"Oh, what's that?" I asked the public information cop. He spun out the bare facts.

Stephanie Fischetti or something like that, 23 years old. Taylor Street resident. The cops arrived at 10 a.m., responding to a 9-11 call. Little Stephie stumbled to the door with enough liquor on her breath to embalm a corpse. She's been drinking all night, and blaring albums from The Rapture. Maybe some friends were over, but they had fled after she called 9-11 and burbled into the receiver.

Her left hand grasped her right wrist, while blood streamed down and stained her punk rock band tee-shirt. The fingertips of her thumb, index and middle fingers were scattered on the linoleum.

"We believe that she decided to light a firecracker and it was in her hand when it exploded," the captain said with pressed-shirt officiality.

"What kind of firecracker was it?" I asked, furiously scribbling with the blue ball point.

"We believe it was an M-80. The incident is still under investigation."

Little Stephie collapsed in the arms of the wide-eyed ambulance crew, wailing. The clearheaded responders blithely gathered her shorn extremities into a plastic bag, packed them in a cooler (routing several cans of ginger ale) and sent them along for the ride with her in the ambulance. No word on whether reattachment was successful; the nursing supervisor crisply reported that she had since been discharged. Which, of course, led me to surmise that Frankenfingers had perhaps received new life, reconciled with their respective hand.

"How could it be an M-80? That would've blown off her entire lower arm," sniped a bald, drooling copy-editor who stalked over to my desk.

"That's the official word from the cop shop," I replied.

An editor � not Brenda, thankfully � dragged himself over to my desk, stifling a grin.

"Can you get a hold of her?" he asked, hands dangling limply at his side.

"I'll try," I replied with feigned enthusiasm.

Flipping through the white pages, I pondered : what do you ask in cases such as these? Do stationary shops carry cards for these occasions? Chewing my pen like a ruminant, I jotted down a list of prospective questions. None seemed promising:

"Don't you feel stupid now?"

"How long did it take to sew your fingers back on? Did it hurt?"

"How was it to ride in an ambulance with your own severed extremities?"

"Why the hell were you drinking at 10 in the morning? For that matter, what possessed you to set a firecracker off in your house?"

"Will you ever be able to leave your house again, after realizing what a stupid ass you've been?"

I settled on the generic: "Do you have a comment on the incident?" And chided myself for my utter lack of charity. Maybe the girl had a perfectly good reason for downing Jack Daniels in the a.m. and deciding to put on a Fourth of July display in her kitchenette. Or perhaps it was the dreaded Intemperance, working its wicked ways among the young, the drops flowing into the stream beneath the disgruntled angel's feet. Maybe Temperance is the guardian angel (or spirit, for the non-Christian); distracted from its task, it couldn't fly fast enough to keep up, and to whisper into the girl's ear: "This may not be wise."

No listing for Fischetti. It would be easy to find, I realized; Taylor Street is short. But the brown-suited editor didn't know that. And maybe I strayed from the straight path of my profession by shirking, but I couldn't condemn a 23-year-old kid to a life of ridicule for a moment of intemperance. At least, no more ridicule than an ordinance police brief in the cops column. But no front-page pullout.

As if there was a difference to anyone outside the profession. The girl's name and the circumstances would be shorn of clothing and left shivering and naked on the newsprint. The keys rattled, bone shakers held by savages, as I typed.

"Just doing my job," I muttered temperately.

***