Royal Flush

“Two sevens,” Liza said, tossing a pair of cards, face down, onto the pile. 

Theo frowned, then put down four cards. “Four eights.”

“Cheat,” Ecc said. Unfortunately for him, when he flipped over the top four cards he saw four eights staring back up at him: hearts, spades, diamonds, stars. He wordlessly took the small pile and added it to his cards. “One jack,” he said, putting down a card.

Jack looked at the card Ecc put down for a long time before turning back to his cards. He had four queens: hearts, diamonds, clubs, stars. He had them all. Sort of.

“Five queens,” he said, tossing the four onto the jack alongside a nine. Liza Throne said “cheat” immediately, exposing Jack’s lie. He took his cards back. “Two of stars.”

Night scowled but said nothing. Then she put down a card, stating that it was an ace of stars.

“Like staying close, I see,” Theo muttered.

Liza tossed down a card. “King of spades.”

“Why would you throw that away?” Jack laughed. “You need a king to run a kingdom.”

“It’ll be a queendom, then,” Liza said dryly. Jack Princeton wasn’t very funny and Liza wasn’t exactly one for humour.

Theo glanced at his cards for a moment, then put down four cards. “Four threes.”

“Cheat,” Jack said, but Theo wasn’t cheating. He wouldn’t cheat about threes. Something about cards of three felt too close, too personal, to lie about. He’d spent an eternity with them.

As Jack organized his cards by number, a vivid daydream flashed in his mind. Sitting in a dark room, seeing nothing, all alone, in silence. And then he heard echoes, bouncing all around. Voices.

“Aww, I can’t play solitaire. There’s a missing card.”

“Which one is missing?”

“The jack of diamonds.”

“Maybe you can take one from a different pack.”

“Oh! I’ll see if I can find a different one…”

And then the echoes faded, and there was silence again. Only Jack sitting alone, not knowing where he was. Lost. Probably replaced already. He would probably stay here forever.

Forever…

“Your turn, Jack,” Ecc said impatiently.

“Oh yes. Two sevens.”

Night looked at her cards. Two, four, five, eight, jack, she thought, reorganizing them by number. No, no, a king does not go before the jack…

She just couldn’t concentrate. Almost all of her cards were of stars, little five-pointed things. They seemed to be mocking her, so far yet so close… But worse than that was herself. She was like a walking display of irony. No. This would end, here and now.

Some sort of fantasy flitted through Night’s mind. She saw herself on a porch at night, stars sparkling above. She could almost feel the cold wind blowing around her, free and unlimited. She was being tossed around in a whirlwind of strange patterns - in the middle of a game, she realized. This thought was confirmed by the two boys sitting on either side of her, yelling things and tossing around the cards. Night stared up at the dark sky - it seemed so close. It would be so easy to get there, if she wasn’t imprisoned by a paper box, by humans, by the stuffy presence of sixty-four other cards. It was so far...But close…

It would be like this forever.

Forever…

“Seven,” she said, and as she put down her card - actually a seven - she realized that either Liza or Jack had lied. Cheat was an odd game; nothing in it was as it seemed. You could say utter nonsense and they wouldn’t know.

“Two sixes,” Liza declared.

“Seven,” Theo said. Now everyone realized that there were two too many sevens, but nobody said anything. They all felt the same: afraid to be the one to call it a lie, afraid they might be wrong. None of them wanted to be that kind of person - the one who didn’t do anything because “what if” - yet all of them were.

“Eight,” Ecc said, putting down a card. It was an old card, part of an old deck, and it was dusty and slightly torn. The image of the ruined old eight card triggered something in his head and his imagination went wild. 

There he was, sitting at a round wooden table too small for the crowd of people sitting at it: most of them were vaguely familiar, somebody who he’d seen before but not sure where, and others were extremely familiar or not at all. It was altogether rather unpleasant, as he was being squashed by strangers, friends, enemies, frenemies, semi-strangers and whatnot, from every direction; he felt like he was suffocating. But that wasn’t all: he also felt searing pain, as if his every muscle was being sliced in half, every bone shattered. Looking down, he saw why: he was completely covered in gaping wounds; there were more than he could count. Another thing he saw was a very long, grey beard with a texture like cotton candy, covered in blood - and cobwebs.

Cobwebs.

He felt his neck and down his arm. They were coated in a thin layer of webs and dust. It was like someone had tucked him away on a shelf for years and forgotten to take him back out. He was old, forgotten, dusty, injured. He would be like this forever.

Forever…

“Nine,” Jack declared.

“Two tens,” Night added her own cards.

“Jack,” Liza said, and as she did, a sort of dream played out in her head. She was standing at the bottom of a long ladder, waiting to climb up, but there were so many people on it; it would be ages before she would get to go up. Liza was queen - she knew she was supposed to be at the top of the ladder, directing the others, but here she was, waiting at the bottom.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered. “Hurry up -”

And then she heard it. A loud, echoey voice, speaking in a confident tone that only a human could use. “We don’t need the whole deck; only half or something like that.”

Suddenly, the top half of the ladder simply vanished, leaving the bottom half stuck there with no way of leaving. Liza was useless. The queen was tossed aside, unimportant. She would be stuck like this forever.

Forever…

“Two jacks,” Theo said. His head tuned out on the others’ speech, imagining a whirlwind of cards as a deck was shuffled, being tossed around uselessly. And then, at once, it stopped, and half the deck - Theo included - was raised into the air, as was the second half, but that one was taken in a different direction. Theo found himself sitting on pale yellow sand, staring out at an infinite green sea. Around him sat thirty or so strangers, mumbling about. He looked for a familiar face - Spades or Diamonds or Clubs - but there were no threes to be found, only twos and aces and nines and sixes and queens and whatnots - all completely unfamiliar. He had no idea if the others knew each other - all he knew was that he was sitting in a sea of strangers, unable to find anybody he knew. He would be like this forever.

Forever…

By the time Theo’s brief but vivid day-nightmare was over, it was Night’s turn. She put down her last card. “Ten.”

“Cheat,” Liza said, but it wasn’t. Night had just won the game. In a small flurry, she vanished from her seat, and only the Queen of Spades, Jack of Diamonds, Three of Hearts and Eight of Clubs remained. They had lost. They would return to their deck as usual. But Night, the Four of Stars, wouldn’t. She would go and reach the stars as she wanted, and the Four of Stars would no longer exist in any deck of cards. And since one would be missing from the fours, they’d have to remove stars altogether, which is just what they did. And so, there were only Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades.

Forever...