High Card
The noodles were indeed extra drunk, slick with oil and fragrant with basil and chili, their steam fogging the white cardboard containers. Maven carried them into the living room, the smells of Thailand cutting briefly through the house’s persistent honeyed aura.
As Maven placed the containers down, Dana folded herself onto one of the two loveseats, facing the wall of glass that now showed only their reflection against the black night. She flipped open her container, pinched a cluster of noodles between her fingers, and brought them to her mouth, licking her thumb clean afterward.
No utensils: a feral gracefulness.
Maven sat on the opposite loveseat, the low table a lacquered battlefield between them. She opened her own food but didn’t touch it. The image of her daughter in the boutique, arms raised, the tape cinching that impossible waist, played behind her eyes. Frederick’s terrified profile in the window of his idling car.
The game.
She reached beside her cushion and produced two decks of cards, still in their cellophane boxes. The shrink-wrap crinkled loudly in the quiet room.
Dana’s eyes flicked up, bright with interest. “Ooooh. What’s this? We doing shots after? Because I’ve got a story about grappa in Genoa—”
“A different game,” Maven said, working the plastic off one deck. The cards were new and slippery. “Truth or dare. Old school.”
“I love it.” Dana wiped her fingers on her dress, leaving tiny, transparent oil stains on the peach chiffon. “But why two decks?”
Maven slid a deck across the table. It stopped just before Dana’s container. “High card gets to ask. We each shuffle the other’s deck. Keeps it honest.”
A slow, serpentine curve of the lips spread across Dana’s face. Different from the sweet, vacant smiles from the carousel of photos on the wall.
She picked up the deck Maven had given her. “You don’t trust my shuffling, Mom?”
“I don’t trust anyone’s shuffling,” Maven said, cracking the seal on her own deck. “It’s how my parents raised me.”
They shuffled in silence, the only sounds being the riffling of cards.
Maven’s hands trembled just enough to make the bridge tricky.
Dana’s movements were fluid, expert; the deck bending and merging in her long fingers without a single fumble. She finished with a smooth cascade before the cards fell into a perfect stack in her palm.
“Ready,” Dana said, her honeyed voice a purr.
Maven placed her shuffled deck on the table. Dana did the same. They reached for each other’s deck simultaneously. Their hands brushed when then did.
Maven drew a card from the top of Dana’s deck without looking. Dana did the same.
They flipped them.
Maven drew the Queen of Spades.
Dana, the Seven of Diamonds.
The queen’s severe, stylized face stared up, a tiny dagger through her crown. Maven let out a shuddering breath. “Truth or dare?”
Dana leaned back, hooking one arm over the back of the loveseat. The thin fabric of her dress strained. “Truth. Ease me in.”
The question was there, coiled and ready. What did you buy in Bologna? What did the chalice censer hold? But that was a battering ram, not a scalpel. Dana would deflect or lie beautifully. Maven needed to open the lock, not break it.
“That day in the boutique,” Maven began, keeping her tone casual, almost bored. “When I was measuring you. What were you thinking about? Your mind was somewhere else.”
Dana’s smile softened, and she looked at the ceiling. “I was thinking about pressure. How a shape’s definition comes from the force applied to it. A riverbank by the water. A vase made by the potter’s hands. I was thinking…” She brought her gaze down, her eyes holding a luminous, distant quality. “…the tape was your acknowledgment of my new shape.”
Her answer wasn’t about Europe or cursed objects. It was a glimpse into the inner workings behind Dana’s eyes.
“Next draw,” Maven said.
They reshuffled and drew again. This time, Dana’s nine of clubs beat Maven’s five of hearts.
Dana didn’t hesitate. “Truth or dare, Mom?”
“Truth.”
Dana remained silent for what seemed like forever, then she smiled. “Have you ever licked your own nipples before?”
The question hung in the air between the loveseats, vulgar and absurd. Without a giggle or a leer. But with pure, clinical curiosity.
Maven blinked. The cinnamon scent on her skin felt suddenly childish, a weak defense. “What kind of question is that?”
“A true one,” Dana said, her head tilting. “Bodies are just art projects that move. I’m curious about their… functionalities. Their range of motion.” She picked up a strand of noodle and sucked it slowly into her mouth. “So? Truth.”
Maven’s face grew warm. She glanced at the photo of sixteen-year-old Dana, all braces and sarcasm. That girl was gone. This one was waiting. “No. I haven’t.”
“Would you try? If I dared you?”
“That’s not how the game works,” Maven fumbled for her deck, the cards sticking. “You want a shot at daring me? Draw.”
Dana’s laugh was a light, breezy sound. “So rigid. But okay.”
Their hands moved. Cards flipped.
Maven’s Two of spades was a pathetic sliver against Dana’s King of hearts.
“Truth or dare?” Dana asked again, her voice sweet as poisoned syrup.
Maven’s throat was dry. “Truth.” She wasn’t letting this girl dare her to do anything.
Dana leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. The neckline of her dress gaped, but she made no move to adjust it. “When you sent me away with Dad for nine months, what were you most afraid would happen?”
The air left the room. Maven had braced for questions about Frederick, about loneliness, about dating. Not this. Not the raw, secret fear she’d fed midnight after midnight.
The plane taking off, a shrinking speck. The terror that Dana would love Frederick’s ordered, luxurious world more. That she’d find Maven’s life; the boutique, the glass home, the careful independence, small and messy in comparison. That Frederick would politely erase her from Dana’s life.
“I was afraid you’d prefer his version of life,” Maven said, the confession ripped from a deep, unglamorous place. “That you’d come back and my house would feel like a quaint dollhouse to you. And I’d be the doll.”
Dana listened while her smile shrank to a sliver. “You think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know what’s happened,” Maven said, her voice gaining strength, steering it back. “You tell me. What really happened?”
Dana widened her smile and tapped the deck. “It’s not my turn to answer. Draw.”
The game sped up. Shuffle. Flip. Maven’s Jack. Dana’s ten.
Maven exhaled, a shaky victory. The queen had been a fluke. This felt earned. “Truth or dare?”
Dana leaned back with narrowed eyes. “Let’s go with… dare.”
Before Maven could plan a challenge, something simple, like standing on one leg, Dana’s fingers went to the neckline of her peach dress, hooked her thumbs in the fabric and pulled down.
One breast popped out like it was a jack-in-the-box, startling in its pale, heavy fullness. The air in the room seemed to thicken, the honey scent intensifying with a coppery edge.
Dana took the breast in her hand, her fingers splayed to support its weight. She bent her neck with an easy, contortionist’s grace, lifting the dark nipple to her mouth. She sucked, once, a deliberate, audible sound. Her eyes never left Maven’s.
After releasing the glistening nipple, Dana tucked herself back into the dress with a practiced shrug. “Just a demonstration. For future reference. Still your turn, though. What’s my dare?”
Maven sat frozen. “That wasn’t your dare?”
“It was a freebie,” Dana said, licking her lips. “You’re stalling. I chose dare. Dare me.”
The original, simple idea was ash. Maven’s pulse hammered in her ears. She wanted to break the table between them. She wanted to shake the truth loose. Frederick’s words echoed. Get her to show it to you.
“I dare you,” Maven said, her voice like gravel, “to show me where the censer is. The one you brought back from Europe.”
Dana’s head tilted, and her eyes narrowed. “How interesting that you ask that.” Her voice lost its honeyed drip, becoming analytical and precise. “Is that why you called Dad while I was getting takeout?”
Maven sat resolute, her spine pressed against the loveseat. “It’s not my turn to answer. The dare, please. Show me the censer?”
Dana smiled, a perfect teeth grin that didn’t touch her observant eyes. “It’s on the coffee table between us. Don’t you see it?”
Maven blinked. The question was absurd. The table held only the debris of their game and their abandoned dinner. No intricate silver. No Pompeian ash.
“What do you mean?” Maven asked, the words automatic, before looking down at the table with fresh, forced attention.
There it sat.
As if it had always been there, nestled between Maven’s half-eaten noodles and her deck of cards. A vessel about the size of a pomegranate, just as Frederick had described. Wrought silver, blackened in delicate webs, not with tarnish but with intention, adorned it. Small, perforated holes dotted its domed lid.
A thin, viscous trail of smoke or shadow rose from those holes.
It snaked with purpose through the still air, a tendril of darkness moving against the faint draft from the glass walls. The shadowy smoke curled, seeking and finding the space between Maven’s lips and nostrils.
The odor hit her first. Not pungent or acidic like smoke. But the absence of aroma, a cold vacuum that pulled the memory of such from her brain; cinnamon, basil, leather, honey, all siphoned away into a silent void, then transfused them with something else.
The living room snapped into a hyper-clarity that was physically painful. Every thread in the upholstery gleamed, separate and distinct. She could count the dust motes suspended in the lamplight, could see the microscopic cracks in the table’s varnish. The photos of Dana’s youth seemed to vibrate on the wall.
But it was Dana herself who changed most.
The beautiful girl on the loveseat dissolved into a layered blueprint. Maven saw the elegant architecture of her skeleton, the sleek cables of muscle, the fascinating, chaotic weave of capillaries. She saw the slow, tidal pull of lymph fluid, and deeper still, a core of simmering gold light where her heart should be, pulsing in time with the faint, sub-audible hum now filling the room.
The golden light had threads. One thick and thorny shot out through the glass toward the vanished road, toward Frederick. Another, finer but stubborn, connected to Maven’s own sternum. Countless other filaments, fine as spider silk, trailed away into the night, toward the city, toward strangers.
All of it was breathtaking. A terrifying beauty.
“It’s easier to see the strings this way, don’t you think?” Dana’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It was no longer just sound. It was a vibration that rearranged the air particles between them. “The connections. The shapes.”
Maven tried to speak. Her jaw was like marble. A statue that watched the world reveal its guts.
Dana leaned forward, and in this new light, the movement was a symphony of leveraged physics. She picked up the censer. Her fingers were portals, the gold light within her streaming down her arms and out through her fingertips, caressing the blackened silver.
“He was so scared of it,” she said, conversational, rotating the object. The snaking tendril of shadow remained connected to Maven’s face, a taut umbilical. “Dad. He thought it would bind me. But it just… clarified things. It showed me what was already there. What everyone finds precious.”
Maven’s hyper-focused vision zeroed in on the thread connecting her sternum to Dana’s golden light: that faded ribbon, straining now, trembling. “You see it too,” Dana said, not a question.
“I see a lot of things,” Maven managed, her voice sounding thin and alien in the humming air. “None of them make sense.”
“They will.” Dana’s gaze, within that luminous architectural blueprint of a skull, held patience that was centuries deep. She set the censer back on the table. The shadowy tendril remained attached to Maven’s face, a leech feeding on her confusion. “Want to draw again? The cards look different now, don’t they?”
They did. The two decks were no longer just plastic-coated paper. They pulsed with subtle bioluminescence, a soft, sickly green radiating from the heart of each stack.
Dana reached across the table. She didn’t shuffle. She simply drew the top card from each deck, her movements precise and economical. On the lacquered surface, between the congealing noodles, she placed them face-up.
Maven’s card, the Queen of Hearts, easily beat Dana’s card, the Deuce of Clubs.
The queen’s smile was a knife-slash in the glowing pasteboard. “Lucky you,” Dana murmured, her voice a blended harmony of honey and something older. “Truth.”
Maven sat frozen, her mind reeling through vaults of terrible questions. The censer’s void-smoke filled her lungs, cold and clarifying. It stripped away the civilized layers, the maternal softness, leaving a sharp, desperate point of need. Her voice, when it finally came, was meager and dry. “What did the censer make your father do? Why was he so afraid?”
Dana giggled, a sound like broken crystal chimes. She looked down at her own hands, the gold light swirling under her translucent skin. “When my body came in,” she began, as if reciting a beloved recipe. “Made me a woman like the one I hold precious. I celebrated. I masturbated. So hard. So long.” She looked up, her eyes now solid orbs reflecting lamplight. “Daddy couldn’t help but peek into my room. We he saw me, the smoke…” she paused, correcting herself, or something else corrected her, “…it found him.”
She leaned forward, the ribbon of light connecting to Maven pulling taut. “And he jerked off so hard. It looked painful. His knuckles were white on the doorframe.” A ripple of pleasure passed over her face. “He finally came, not in some fictional explosion, but a gentle ooze. It was so cute.”
Maven finally found herself again. A raw surge of nauseating clarity mounted. “Cute? That’s horrific! He’s your father.”
“A man is a simple mechanism,” Dana shrugged, the motion elegant and dismissive. She drew the next cards from the deck without revealing them. “You didn’t have to worry, Mom. Dad isn’t who I find precious.”
A second voice unfolded from Dana’s throat, weaving through her own like a serpent through lattice. It was lower, textured with a familiar vocal fry and a weathered Latina rhythm that mirrored Maven’s own, but deeper, ancient. “She finds you precious.”
Maven blinked. The words hung in the air, overlapping, a stereo horror. She heard both. The sweet valley girl and the smoky echo of something that sounded like a distorted version of herself. As the golden light in Dana’s core brightened, it beat in rhythm with Maven’s own rabbit-quick heart.
The faded thread between their sternums suddenly glowed, too, as if freshly dyed. It wasn’t golden. It was a deep, venous purple.
“What is going on?” Maven asked, the question less a demand now and more a plea directed at the void-smoke, at the cards, at the impossible daughter holding a piece of her own voice inside her.
“Whose voice way that?”
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