August 21, 2008
AUCUN IMBÉCILE JE
| BERRIEN C. HENDERSON |
|
|
Cut your thumb on the card’s edge opening the new deck.
The quick stings. You continue and find your first card.
A line of blood becomes a crimson strikethrough: Temperance.
Smear of oblique vermillion—prickly heat dances along your neck and scalp.
The card’s paint bubbles and flakes at the tiniest of rips on the angel’s mouth; it gushes language in India ink spurts. Temperance vomits letters into the cups. The words jumble; you sweat to focus and strain at garbled phonemes.
Jabberwocky comes upon you, nary a vorpal blade near.
The cups pour into and out of themselves.
The fabulous beast! Marvelous angel! Hideous thing! Temperance busies itself with one wing and obsessively picks feathers from one wingtip and exposes naked bone it then slams earthward. Its face remains static, its mouth a ragged tear of esoterica, of arcana, of dark mystery.
See the earth shudder. Watch the waters roil.
XIII!
XV!
Judgment falling . . .
Focusfocusfocusfocusfocus.
Remember: The courier and the note.
”Mssr. P—– sends a gift,” says the messenger sent of late to your loft. A static line of mouth. Gloved hands, careful in tendering the package. A smallish thing: half a sandwich squarish and thick.
Temperance guzzles the liquid—wine? water? the same?—and spits out viscous dribblets and giblets from a mouth of bloodstained teeth.
Hot, the poison from the tainted deck. Simple, the cuckold’s sprung trap.
Under your breath you craft equal invectives for the tasseomancer and his wife the minx.
Nothing to do against branching agony along hand and arm—the heart soon clutched by something other than her.
Temperance reaches out the card’s edge and spears letters with one sanguine wingtip, bereft of feathers, now sharpened bone dripping gobbets of marrow.
Smiling, it arranges them, then drinks from one hovering cup—a pantomiming of tea time—then leaves you fevered at its wink and nod of lifeblood-tacky letters:
Aucun imbécile je.
Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia. Father, husband, educator, and journeyman writer, he prefers crafting stories of magical realism with a Southern flavor, but if it’s speculative, he’s generally so inclined.