Crooked Words

by K A Cook

life is about knowing when patients lie to me.”

  “Oscar.” Sydney grimaces. “You’re acting like a bratty child. Stop it.”

  “It’s—”

  “Stop.”

  Arrah scuffles back to the table, ignores them both as she takes a card from the top of the deck—and then stops, staring at the card, her lips making a small O-shape of shock. Oscar’s stomach hurtles to her ankles, because she knows before Arrah’s hand turns and the back of the card brushes against the silk what the card is, what it always is, what trick these charlatans like to pull—and there it is, skull-and-bones grinning wickedly up at her.

  Sydney grabs a pillow from the back of the loveseat and buries her mouth in it; the pillow does nothing to silence her loud, squawking laughter.

  “I … milord, it … it doesn’t… not literal…”

  “I know I’m not fucking going to die!” Oscar waves her hands at the table, glaring down at Death. “Just … just get on with it.”

  Arrah swallows, nods, and draws another card, laying it across the first. It too is terribly familiar, and while Sydney’s laughter becomes a shoulder-shaking near-convulsion, Arrah’s face turns a sickly shade of grey as she looks down on the Five of Swords.

  Oscar grits her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache. “Hurry it up.”

  Arrah nods again and lifts the third card … and then puts it back down on the top of the deck, resting them on the table. “My … milord, I … perhaps we should reshuffle.”

  Oscar slides her boots off the table, takes the time to prop her left heel against the ground—this isn’t delay, just being careful—and leans forwards to pick up the deck. The Devil, followed by—as usual for her—the Moon, and then the Ten of Wands and the Ten of Swords. She doesn’t bother with the rest; she just tosses the deck back on the table, not caring that the cards flutter and skid across the silk and onto the floor.

  The Wheel of Fortune lands face-up and upside-down by her left foot.

  Arrah slumps back against the loveseat, looks from the cards to Oscar and back again, shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing.

  Sydney has stopped laughing, but her lips curve upward into a smug, self-satisfied smile. “We keep telling you that you have to stop trying to do everything,” she says, leaning forwards and picking up the Ten of Wands.

  “You told her.” The words explode from Oscar’s lips, furious and petulant. “You fucking told her—”

  Sydney throws the pillow at Oscar’s head, forceful enough that Oscar barely raises her forearms in time to deflect it. “You shuffled the cards, Oscar! Did you see her draw from the bottom of the deck?”

  No. No. This is a trick—the cards were rigged, they have to be. It is the only explanation. “Someone else told her, then.” She shifts her left foot, despite the increased throbbing in her knee, just enough to turn the Wheel of Fortune face-down on the rug: she’s had more than enough of that, thank you very much. “Every damn reader you’ve had here knows by now, and any one of them could have told her—”

  Sydney snatches up another pillow and hurls it at Oscar’s face. “Does she look like she knew, Oscar? Does she?”

  This time the pillow smacks against Oscar’s forehead, jamming her spectacles against the bridge of her nose, but the pain isn’t as sharp as the question. Indeed, Arrah quivers like someone sitting down in Oscar’s office for the first time, terrified of the frightening insane-declaring-and-making psychiatrist. She still stares at the cards, eyes wide, jaw open, and for all that Oscar would dearly love to believe Arrah knew about Oscar’s previous spreads and rigged the cards to come out that way to mess with her head, every scientific, medical and psychological bone in her body screams that regardless of whether this is real or not, Arrah believes in what just happened.

  “I didn’t know, milord. I swear I didn’t know…” She blinks, wraps her arms around her knees, raises her head to stare at Oscar. “Ah. Know what … milord?”

  Oscar scowls and can’t bring herself to answer.

  Sydney, however, does. “She always draws Death first. And no, she doesn’t draw the same spread every time … but most of the same cards. The Devil. Eight, Nine, Ten of Swords. The Wheel of Fortune.”

  The words hang heavy in the now too-silent room.

  “It’s not real.” Oscar lifts her left foot up onto the coffee table and grunts as a spike of pain shoots down from her knee to her ankle. “Just some attempt at mysticism because conventional patriarchal religion doesn’t—”

  “You know, for a psychiatrist, you’re pretty damn good at ignoring reality.” Sydney leans over and picks up a handful of cards, sorts through them and shuffles them together. “Seems to me the universe is trying damn hard to make a point while you’re sitting back and declaring what is and isn’t real because that’s what suits you. What the hell kind of science is that?”

  Oscar snorts. “Is this your point, then? With this?”

  Sydney slides forwards and offers out the deck, the cards spread across her brown fingers. “Pick a card, love.” She narrows her eyes. “You know that I wouldn’t rig them, or is what we have that meaningless?”

  No. For all that Sydney drives her to despair, for all that Sydney fails to understand any number of realities or why everything Oscar does just isn’t rooted in some self-harming hate, she wouldn’t do that. She’d tie Oscar to a lawn chair in the garden, yes, but she wouldn’t rig the cards to make a point—not when she seems to believe that the universe is making her point for her. Oscar sighs, but she reaches forwards and runs her fingers over the deck, picks a card entirely at random. No tingling fingers, no feeling of rightness, nothing but paper and annoyance.

  Death cackles up at her.

  Oscar snarls and tosses the card on the table, not caring that she now looks like a toddling child having a tantrum. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not literal death … change, right? Death of the mind or soul or something, they all say, so why does it matter?” Literal death, and the freedom from pain it brings, would be better, but that’s the thought of someone lacking in the sanity she pretends to possess, the thoughts she doesn’t dare utter, for no-one, not even her family, will understand.

  Sydney places the rest of the cards on the table—gently, reverently. “Oscar. Last time I took you for a reading … just before we left for Iscal. You drew the Death card. You then—do you remember, Oscar? You failed to get Athanase to help, you ended up hurting yourself out of depression, and as soon as you came home, you fell down the stairs and broke your arm and your head!”

  She rolls her eyes, tries to hide the sudden, hot, surprising tears. “And how, exactly, does one follow on from the other?”

  “Three years ago.” Sydney learns further forwards, ignores Oscar’s question. “We went to the fortune teller at the fair, remember? You drew the Death card. A week later you got shot in the knee.”

  “That was a freak accident! Do you know how hard it is to get shot in the fucking knee?”

  On the other side of the table, ignored by both, Arrah gapes.

  “In Levesque.” Sydney points at Oscar’s chest. “That end-of-term party put on by your housemates, where one of the history students fooled around with a deck of cards? Remember what happened after that? No, you probably don’t, because you were so sick with fever I thought you were going to die!”

  That—what the hell does scarlet fever have anything to do with anything?

  “And then there was the time we met Prefect Athanase’s personal clairvoyant—just before we met Sydney.” The soft, low voice startles Oscar right out of her pout; she turns her head to see Grandmamma standing in the doorway. Dressed for home in a plain black gown, her hands folded, her grey hair tied back in a simple, almost-severe bun, she looks cool and serene. “I don’t think I need to remind you what happened after that.”

  No. Athanase happened. Oscar scowls and folds her hands together in a vain attempt to not think about Athanase and everything that followed. “And your point, everyone?”


  “Change.” Sydney reaches down to the table and picks up Death. “Unless you want to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore the universe once more and see what it does next. Break another leg? Lose your sight? Become so ill you’re forced to spend the next year in bed because you’re too stupid to take a hint when it’s right in front of your nose?”

  The room almost wavers. She feels dizzy. “You seriously expect that this conversation is going to—what? Make me how you think I’m supposed to be?”

  Sydney shakes her head, scrooping up as many cards as she can reach. “No. Oscar … well, I don’t see how we’re going to get a psychiatrist to poke around in your head.” Her eyes linger, for a moment, on Oscar’s shirt and coat, her equally-masculine dress—because, of course, just which Southport psychiatrist is going to not declare both of them depraved? “But we’ve got the next best thing, and the universe seems to be screaming at you.” She shrugs and shuffles the cards again, and then hands them back to Arrah, who still sits with her jaw hanging open, her eyes wide. “So. Mistress Piper, can you please do a reading for my spouse? I assure you: the cards are correct.”

  She can get up and walk away, for all that limping makes for an undignified exit. She can, save for Grandmamma still standing in the doorway: for all that Grandmamma looks like a nice, short old lady, Oscar doesn’t doubt that in any altercation for the door,