Dark Rivers of the Heart

held high, shoulders back, she went around the table to a chair opposite the one in which Roy sat.
        Guinevere, about forty, was exceedingly beautiful, in spite of wearing her long blond hair in medusan cascades of cornrows, which Roy disliked.
        Her'made-green eyes flared with inner light, and every angle of her face was reminiscent of every mythological goddess Roy had seen portrayed in classical art. In tight blue jeans and a snug white T-shirt, her lean and supple body moved with fluid grace, and her large breasts swayed alluringly. He could see the points of her nipples straining against her cotton shirt.
        "How ya doing'?" she asked perkily.
        "Not so good."
        "We'll fix that. What's your name?"
        "Roy."
        "What are you seeking, Roy?"
        "I want a world with justice and peace, a world that's perfect in every way. But people are flawed. There's so little perfection anywhere. Yet I want it so badly. Sometimes I get depressed."
        "You need to understand the meaning of the world's imperfection and your own obsession with it. What road of enlightenment do you prefer to take?"
        "Any road, all roads."
        "Excellent!" said the beautiful Nordic Rastafarian, with such enthusiasm that her cornrows bounced and swayed, and the clusters of red beads dangling from the ends clicked together. "Maybe we'll start with crystals."
        Chester returned, pushing a large wheeled box around the table to Guinevere's right side.
        Roy saw that it was a gray-and-black metal tool cabinet: four feet high, three feet wide, two feet deep, with doors on the bottom third and drawers of various widths and depths above the doors. The Sears Craftsman logo gleamed dully in the amber light.
        While Chester sat in the third and last chair, which was two feet to the left and a foot behind the woman, Guinevere opened one of the drawers in the cabinet and removed a crystal sphere slightly larger than a billiard ball. Cupping it in both hands she held it out to Roy, and he accepted it.
        "Your aura's dark, disturbed. Let's clean that up first. Hold this crystal in both hands, close your eyes, seek a meditative calm.
        Think about only one thing, only this clean image: hills covered with snow. Gently rolling hills with fresh snow, whiter than sugar, softer than flour. Gentle hills to all horizons, hills upon hills, mantled with new snow, white on white, under a white sky, snowflakes drifting down, whiteness through whiteness over whiteness on whiteness…
        Guinevere went on like that for a while, but Roy couldn't see the snowmantled hills or the falling snow regardless of how hard he tried.
        Instead, in his mind's eye, he could see only one thing: her hands.
        Her lovely hands. Her Incredible hands.
        She was altogether so spectacular looking that he hadn't noticed her hands until she was passing the crystal ball to him. He had never seen hands like hers. Exceptional hands. His mouth went dry at the mere thought of kissing her palms, and his heart pounded fiercely at the memory of her slender fingers. They had seemed perfect.
        "Okay, that's better," Guinevere said cheerily, after a time.
        "Your aura's much lighter. You can open your eyes now."
        He was afraid that he had imagined the perfection of her hands and that when he saw them again he would discover that they were no different from the hands of other women-not the hands of an angel after all.
        Oh, but they were. Delicate, graceful, ethereal. They took the crystal ball from him, returned it to the open drawer of the tool cabinet, and then gestured-like the spreading wings of doves-to seven new crystals that she had placed on a square of black velvet in the center of the table while his eyes had been closed.
        "Arrange these in any pattern that seems appropriate to you," she said,
        "and then I'll read them."
        The objects appeared to be half-inch-thick crystal snowflakes that had been sold as Christmas ornaments. None was like another.
        As Roy tried to focus on the task before him, his gaze kept sliding surreptitiously to Guinevere's hands. Each time he glimpsed them, his breath caught in his throat. His own hands were trembling, and he wondered if she noticed.
        Guinevere progressed from crystals to the reading of his aura through prismatic lenses, to Tarot cards, to rune stones, and her fabulous