A Snake, An Octopus, And A Rat

The woman’s lips are stained crimson red, and when she pulls them back in a smile it looks more like a wet baring of teeth. She delicately folds one leg over the other, revealing a slit of smooth, dark skin. Her chair matches mine, the ratty color of drained hope. In the swirling dust motes swirling around the room, she looks a shade too bright, a slash to clear. 

I shift slightly, trying to conceal my unease. For the hundreds of kids who were led down the hallways, venturing into the maw of the guidance office, I couldn’t imagine any meetings going quite like this. I picked at one of my fingernails, toying with the hangnail until it drew blood.

“Why am I here?” I asked eventually, the words slipping out like oil between my teeth. She smiled again, a triumphant glint like she’d won something. A flare of anger pulsed against my sternum, but I masked it with a smile. Sickeningly sweet, like cloying Titram Arum. 

“Well, Avery. I heard you’ve been having a little trouble in school.” Her response was well times, slightly hushed. She waited a moment, looking into my eyes until I had to look away. A couple of skipped classes and failed assignments hardly seemed worthy of an intervention. She sighed but continued in the same soft tone. “I know you don’t trust me. Why don’t we play a little game?”

Instead of a response, I shrugged. The movement caused my back tendons to ripple, something pulling tight. Unperturbed, she pulled out a hand of cards. They were a glossy black, made of something thicker than cardboard. A spider hung from the front, painted so realistic its eyes glittered. Red webbing was strung across the sides, a similar ruby shade to her long nails. 

She spread them on the table, placing them one by one. Each had a different creature on the cover, like a menagerie of the dark. Scales glittered off a snake posed to strike, a bat hung with one wing almost pushing out of the page, and a jellyfish oozed out of another. They didn’t fit in here any more than she did, radiating something more sentinel than a deck of cards should contain.

She gestured once, drawing my eye across her collection. “Pick any three you’d like.”

I swallowed, tracking her hand with the wariness one would reserve for a rattlesnake. But to not do so seemed an awful lot like losing again, and I didn’t think I could bear that. Without thinking too hard, I groped the first one to catch my eye. 

The black snake card was in my hand. It seemed to undulate underneath my fingers, textured like scales sliding. I placed it in front of her, the ebony shimmering in the sun. She flipped it over, practiced, and sure. 

Ornate, golden letters were scrawled across the top. Deceit, it read, with harsh strokes of accusation. A man wearing a porcelain mask of tears was laughing underneath, mirth tinged with madness in his eyes. The tears seemed to slide down the page, black and thick. His features were impossible to make out; only his eyes crinkled and leered out of the page. 

She tutted, drawing my attention. Something landed on my hand. A moth, heavy and fuzzy, with many muscular legs squirming as it tried to right itself. I swallowed a scream, looking up. Her lips were tugged into a small grin, one that faded once I looked up. 

“Have you been lying to someone, Avery?” she placed a hand on mine. I shivered, expecting it to be something serpentine. It was surprisingly soft, warm, and dry. “You don’t need to answer. Why don’t you pick another card?”

It occurred to me that something could be very wrong here, but the thought slipped away as soon as I grasped it. Her eyes were an unusual shade of brown, with some sort of flecks in the center. Slowly, I picked another card without looking away from her remarkable eyes. 

She held it up for me. An octopus, slick and black, curled around the cover. Its tentacles shivered across, searching. If you focused, you could see hundreds of fish caught in its suckers. Her hand held mine harder, nails digging in enough to draw beads of blood. I jerked free, leaning back to cradle my hand. 

She ignored me, holding the card with a white-knuckle grip. The opposing side had the word Mystery on the other side, letters curling around each other. Fat beads of condensation dripped from the web into a fog below. If you could look just right, figures grasped from within it.

“Mystery? Avery, darling. Are you involved in something? Mystery, deceit. It’s almost like you have something to hide…” Something fanatic seemed to light in her eyes, and I opened my mouth to respond. But the words locked in tight in my throat, crawling back from the hatred in her gaze. 

The horrible feeling sharpened. The secret, the big secret. The one that derailed a perfect student, the one that tore me from my pedestal. But no one knows about that man, so I have nothing to lose when I silently shake my head. 

I have a thought to leave, but I look down to see moths. They formed a squirming, writhing mass; one that weighed me down, from fuzzy bodies and twitching limbs.

With a slight detachment, I saw myself grasping for one last card. A rat, fat and dirty, peaked out from undeath. Its eyes shone like beads, glimmering out from the page. She flipped it, quick and sure. 

Death, a gleaming gold, is written in stark colors. Skeletons climb, shoving over each other, endlessly pouring upwards from Hell. They reach for the gold with desperation, fingertips nearly grazing the only color other than deep, damning red. 

Deceit, mystery, death. Perhaps I would have fainted if the moths hadn’t crawled up to my chest. They writhed, wings flicking against my skin.

“He wasn’t supposed to die,” I manage to whisper through cracked lips. It was an accident. A couple of drinks too many, a secret party that I was as high off of as the drugs. Hurrying home before my parents, waving off the well-meaning folks even more drunk than me. Perhaps I was speeding, maybe I was going too slow. It wasn’t fast enough he’d died on impact, rather, his life trickled out underneath my feet. Flashes of hauling the body, throwing them into Dead Man River, which runs so fast it claims lives every year anyway.

One thing I remember, behind his round, bookworm glasses, was that he had the most remarkable brown eyes. One thing I remember is his little girl, grinning out from his wallet picture before I throw it into the current. 

One thing I remember is staring at my heels, hidden in my closet, with blood drying on the heels. Completely out of sight, but haunting my nights anyway. 

One thing I knew was that I was living on borrowed time anyway. The girl, smiling, accusing, laughing, glaring at me from across the table. She was so much older than I thought she would be. 

She doesn’t look happy as the moths close over my face, feelers probing. I rob her of her revenge, laughing until asphyxiation is just as threatening as her. 

Then they close over my face, and panic is snuffed out in place of brutal acceptance. 

One thing I knew was that I was always living on borrowed time.