Deck of Cards (787 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.8 on 12 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by AlwaysAnEagle (View user info) at 2005-01-21 03:23:02 EST
It's amazing what a tourist industry will spring up around. In Massachusetts, a rock settlers never landed on draws crowd after crowd, come rain, sleet, snow or blistering sun. Off the Virginian coast, an island full of horses behaving exactly as horses do brings tents and clanking pots strung along stuffed backpacks. In the Minnesotan prairie, drivers pull off the road to stand next to a giant ball of twine in the glare of camera flashes. Here, on the Pacific seas, people flock to the beach to watch piles of stone. The coast meanders along the cool, dormant water, enjoying life in undefined peace, taking morning tea with the soft lime green line in the sunrise each day. These two morning acquaintances remain eternally free, caught only in minds and memories, and never allowing themselves to become trapped on celluloid, never committing to a distinct line for anyone to point to.
But these phenomena pale in the lenses of the visitors without number, because this is the beach ruled by the princess mermaid. On the grasses above the soaring bluffs that close in the still beach, rabbits run freely between the blades of waving grasses, stopping for a moment to chew a dandelion and laugh a small rabbit laugh at the people waiting on the periphery of the sand. They wait day after day, the rabbits escaping their notice, to see a phantom. Each morning, the sun rises on a new pattern of stone on the beach, rocks of all colors and shapes and sizes rubbed smooth by the sea, laid in swirling patterns across the white sand. Never is there a footprint, never a man or woman for the reporters to interview...not that there are any reporters anymore. Those impatient fools left when Hurricane Andrew slapped the Floridian palms and scoured the Gulf of Mexico, sacrificing magic for headlines in tragedy. For years, people have stayed to watch, searching for the artist who whirls these patterns into the earth, and some have even seen her...but all they find themselves able to say is that they saw a princess, a mermaid, wrapped in the tatters of sunken sailing ships, her neck looped in pearls and gold as seaweed trails down her back.
Silly fools, who see mythical beasts in the modern daylight.
But people are still speaking of the man who threw himself into the waves, crying out for his princess, disappearing. It was just last week that he hurtled into the surf, his feet making the first prints in more than ten years on the shifting easel of the beach, but he had been here for longer, much longer, sleeping sometimes in his tiny room in the local hotel and sometimes in the rolling fog, where no one could see. He said he spoke with rabbits, but not a single other person could spot them. He was crazy, they told themselves, and kept searching the waves as the sun painted their faces red and pink.
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It was in the middle of September, when the winds from the east swept clean the land and sank the dust of the year into the ocean, that he arrived in town with only a deck of cards as luggage. He took a room filled completely with a bed and a quiet white sink, in the top floor of the hotel, where he could watch the beach. As the days wore on, he spent less time in the room and more time invisible...he would walk off, in the eyes of the old know-it-alls and secret spies, towards the famous beach, but not a soul would see him arrive there, in his plain shorts and bare chest. Where was he, we may ask, and fairly, because this was no booming metropolis, but a small hamlet under the constant surveillance of grandmothers. In truth, he would go to the tops of the bluffs and lie with his skin to the cool grass, playing solitaire and watching the entire coast, from the water to the sand to the cliffs all around to the gulls soaring above. And day by day, the rabbits crept closer.
The first day that the brown rabbit with the tiny white spot on his left foot laid back his long ears and whispered to the silvery-slippery man who escaped the grandmothers, the man started up quickly, pushing up his body from the ground by six inches before he noticed that the rabbit had not moved. It stared at him with limpid deep brown eyes, urging him to come back down. The hairs adorning the rabbit's face whisked across the lobe of the man's ear, but he stayed still, enraptured by the animal's tale.
"We watch everyone else watching from our place here," the wise old creature told him, "and no one has come to watch the entire world before." When the man whispered earnestly and honestly into the silken ear that those who watched only the beach missed the magic of the place, his confidante flicked his tail once, twice, three times. From the grasses, his kin emerged to surround the man, and began to hold congress all around him.
"Each night, the sun goes down, and the bluff hide the shore from light," they explained, "and in the three hours during which the beach is liquid darkness, the woman comes out to paint her crying pictures out on the sand. While she lays the stones next to each other, she waters them into the ground with her tears, and sings songs...some with words, some with only sound. It is lucky we are not men, or we would spend each night crying for our poor shipwrecked princess." "Shipwrecked!" exclaimed the man, "why doesn't she climb the driftwood to the grass, and the town?" "She is shipwrecked, my friend, on the shores of her own heart," explained the brown hare, "she is driftwood of a different kind."
And so from these days of conversation, the rabbit society explained the horrible beauty of the woman who lived in the stone. He sat with them each day, and when the sun began to set, he would begin his walk back from the cliffs with the opening notes of the driftwood woman's song at his back. On the thirtieth day, one of the rabbits laid a velvet paw on his knee as he went to stand, and simply said, in his quiet soft voice, "stay tonight." The man sat down, and to his amazement, a pale light began to gleam from the eyes of these gentle animals, shining on the shore and it's tearful architect. In her voice he finally heard not just sadness, but the glinting hope for salvation.
All night he and the rabbits watched, and tears slid down his cheeks. When his voice finally cracked and allowed a sob to escape, his friend, the old grandfather rabbit, nudged his pack of cards towards him. He began to set out the solitaire piles, and on the third pile, a joker with a heart and a hastily scrawled letter topped the cards. The rabbit asked him why that card was different, devoid of pictures or ordered rows of figures, and the man replied that the deck had been missing that one card when he was given it as a child, so a joker served in its place. "Ah," said the rabbit, and paused - "the sun is returning." With the first rays of light, the joker flew over the bluff on a small breeze, floating down to a pattern that he saw spiraling across the beach to the exact point where, forty feet above the pointed arrow the design formed, he had sat all night, crying for the chance to save the mermaid below.
"Go," said the grandfather rabbit, "she is one of our children, as now are you."
The man who barely existed began to run, over the dunes, through the first arriving photographers, across the sands and driftwood, leaping over stones, and finally into the lapping water, never stopping until he was waist deep, and then dove into the depths, following some mad vision only he could see, screaming "solitaire" to the fish and corals.
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There was something different in the pattern on the beach that day, and the air felt free of the heaviness that every tourist had felt. A child walked out of a minivan, and instead of stopping reflectively, as children always had, he ran into the surf, calling for his mother. That day, the beach was open. People walked over the joyful stones, burying them under scuffed sand, laughing and laying out towels, and leaping into deep blue water.
Three days later, a small blonde child followed some rabbit tracks in the sand up to a small cave just below the crest of the bluffs, and no one could make any sense either of his epic climb nor what they found there. The search party saw, following the child's finger and excited voice, a canal, a tunnel, carved into the bluff by the sea. They followed the passages out to the meeting point between calm canals and broad ocean, where a table stretched out for the sea and sky to share breakfast, and a pack of playing cards lay in the curl of a mooring line. The pack, further examined, was missing a Queen of Hearts.
Today, one week from the stranger's crazy dash into the ocean, a letter washed up from the canals as the children scampered in and out. A single playing card was folded into it, and the paper was gently detangled from that card to reveal an indecipherable message, which, though no one could understand the references within, called to each person's mind the last pattern of stone on the beach, and a song none could place.
"My dear sentinel of the bluffs,
I leave this card to complete your deck, in hopes that we may sail away on the joker. I heard my song in your tears, and in the sweet whisper of your voice in the ears of my family and my guardians. These thirty days, I have listened, just below you, for all of you in your silence. I know not what brought you here, nor what you could want with me, but I find myself setting these stones for what feels like the last time, not in an expression of my sorrow, but as salvation for yours.
Put away your game of solitaire, my sweet sad spy, and come away with me...call me your queen of hearts, because undeniably, imperfectly, and blissfully, you have become my king."
As I understand it, three hundred sea anemones blossomed all around the entrance to the tunnels no more than an hour after that letter was discovered.
User Reviews
Submitted by LadyPlural (user info) at 2005-02-05 18:46:09 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This was a really... I don't have a word for it. Dreamy? Fable-like? A great fairy tale? Something else? I have no idea, but whatever the word is, this story was it. Utterly magnificent job.
Submitted by wanderingsharps (user info) at 2005-01-31 16:48:49 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
up in vermont, near Rutland is a place called white rocks.
It's a hell of a climb-mostly up streambeds and such.
but they have cairens up there-it kinda has a japanise garden feel.
(there's also this awesome guy who built one of those on 60 acres of land up that way too, who lets people hike around for free, but that's neither here nor there.)
Submitted by screamfeeder (user info) at 2005-01-31 16:39:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
One of the most under-rated posts.
Submitted by Durae (user info) at 2005-01-21 11:56:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by AlwaysAnEagle (user info) at 2005-01-21 10:57:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
The stones are a Block Island thing. People just wander around and stack 'em up. Not really sure why, but it's kind of neat...group effort thing, everyone does it, so I don't know who specifically did these.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2005-01-21 09:28:12 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Beautiful
Submitted by polyamorousaj (user info) at 2005-01-21 09:25:09 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Very nicely done.
You were up that late and you didn't IM me?
Pah!
Submitted by Socialist_Joe (user info) at 2005-01-21 08:59:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
my eyes arnt made to read
Submitted by Ainkara (user info) at 2005-01-21 04:53:43 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Wow....
I almost didn't read this for some reason but I'm incredibly glad I did.
Submitted by Dervel (user info) at 2005-01-21 04:25:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
The balancing stones in the photo, why and by whom?
I don't think anyone has played solitaire with real cards since the mid 90's.
Submitted by QueenSkye (user info) at 2005-01-21 03:34:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
yep, GREAT time to write a post...
Submitted by AlwaysAnEagle (user info) at 2005-01-21 03:23:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
What are you TALKING about? 3:30am is a GREAT time to write an Uberpost.
TigerLilly, do you have a guess as to where this picture may be from?