The Fool · Le Mat

The Fool is numbered zero, and the plate prints it, a small open O in a flat yellow sky. Pamela Colman Smith drew him mid-stride, the forward boot on the lip of a crag, the rock falling away beneath it, chin lifted, eyes nowhere near the drop. An open white rose in the outstretched hand, a red feather laid back from the green wreath in his hair. A dark staff over the shoulder, a small rose-colored bundle knotted at its tip, everything he owns and it is not much. His tunic is black, worked all over with green vines and red-and-yellow wheels, the long sleeves lined in red. A little white dog rears at his heels, muzzle open, and the tradition has never settled whether it warns him or cheers him on. Behind and below, snow-topped peaks in white and cold blue. The sun sits pale in the corner, rays reaching across the card. Nothing in the picture is falling. Nothing in the picture is safe.

The card declines to say whether the step is wise. That is the step.

Air is the element the deck hands him: mind unweighted, movement arriving before the reasons do. Zero counts nothing and permits everything, which is why the deck can seat him first among the majors, or last, or anywhere between.

Upright, the tradition reads trust. The question asked without embarrassment, the risk taken while it is still the right size. Reversed, the same lightness spent badly: the leap that expects catching, or the foot that hovers and never lands.

The rose stays white either way. The dog stays at his heel. The cliff is where this card has always stood.