Page 4 of Soft Flannel Hank

Esther grounded herself. Closed her eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the air fill her belly, expand her ribs. She felt her feet in her boots, her boots on the ground, rooting her energy through the earth and back up into her body. And then she began to shuffle slower. Seven times. Always seven times.

She fanned the cards face down across the tabletop.

“Alright, Hank Dove,” she murmured. “Here we go.” She felt drawn to two cards sitting directly next to one another and gently pushed them out of the line towards Hank. “Now you pick one.”

He didn’t hesitate like she thought he would. He picked the card at the end, the card that would have been at the very bottom of the deck when she held it in her hands. Esther’s intuition warmed her from the outside in, feeling his solid energy across the table.

“Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?”Esther said, putting the rest of the cards in a stack by her elbow. She pointed at the three cards in a row in between them. “So this card represents your past, this one is your present, and the one you picked is the future. Okay?”

“What, like fortune-telling?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him how she’d never once been wrong, how her grandmother had once been the most well-known divinatory witch in Savannah, how she’d been reading tarot since she was eleven, and tea leaves since she was five.

But he wasn’t ready to hear all that, and so instead she smiled and whispered, “It’s just a party game, Hank.”

Hank relaxed a little, leaning back in his seat, his arms crossing over his chest. “Well, alright then, Esther. Hit me.”

She flipped the first card.

2

Hank’s mom had always lovedThe Golden Girls. As her body had grown more and more frail, Hank would sit in the old wingback chair next to her bed and watch it with her. He would pass her tissues or refill her tea or any other of the literal hundreds of tasks required to care for a person dying of a protracted illness. Even now, when he couldn’t sleep, he sometimes watchedThe Golden Girlson late-night nostalgia television until he passed out in his recliner.

Esther had a southern drawl that reminded Hank of Blanche Devereaux. When she had said “It’s just a party game, Hank,” she drew out theain “party.” It sounded like “pahty.”Eeyuts juust a pahty gayme, Haynk.

The three cards sat before him. Esther quickly flipped the one to his left. He noticed that she had freckles on her hand before he noticed the card. Freckles covered her face from hairline to chin. He wondered if they speckled her all the way in between her face and hands, too.

The card was upside down. He moved to flip it right side up so he could see it better, but Esther grabbed his hand in the air to stop him. There was that small spark again. She pulled her hand back, and he heard her rub it against her jeans under the table, as if trying to replace the tingling sensation with another one.

“I just wanted to see it better.”

“It means something that it’s upside down,” she said.

He tilted his head and saw a man standing alone on a mountain. He held a lantern in one hand and a staff in the other.

“The Hermit,” Esther said. “But reversed.”

Hank rolled his eyes. “So I’m a hermit?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, aren’t you a literalist?”

He snorted.

“The Hermit reversed means isolation and withdrawal. And loneliness. Did you find yourself withdrawing in the past? Maybe people made you feel isolated? Maybe people who you were once close to?”

Hank coughed into his hand. She was edging very close to something that he didn’t want to talk about. So he took the safe route. “Sure. My parents were dying, and I had to take care of them. Didn’t leave much time for socializing. And then I just worked all the time.”

She looked like she wanted to ask him another question, but didn’t. Instead, she flipped the middle card. It was upside down as well.

He cocked his head to the side to get a better look. A child offered a cup filled with flowers to another child.

“Six of Cups,” Esther said. “Reversed.”

“What’s that?”

“The Six of Cups upright often represents childhood memories, innocence, simple joy.”

“And upside down?”