By Kyle Zammit. Published in Issue 13 of Paper Chained in March 2024.
“Hey, we need a fourth person to play Forty-One!”
Heads about the prison pod instinctively swivelled toward the exclamation. This attention didn’t embarrass Samantha, in fact it visibly charged her with energy. With the eyes of a bird of prey, the would-be card player scanned the room for a likely candidate.
At that moment, a diminutive lady who believed she had mastered the art of being inconspicuous was crossing the room with her head hung low. Samantha’s eyes opened to their limit, her head tilted back, and her right arm shot forward, index finger trained on the lady who just wanted to be left alone.
“You,” Samantha’s voice thundered despite its high octave, “you’re playing Forty-One.”
It might require a quartet to play that card game, but if anyone’s eyes happened to casually wander over the metal table the players were sitting at, they would only see two players and two spectators.
Sitting opposite Samantha was the other blatant competitor. She was a girl with bleached hair and a supreme confidence, as if she already knew her entire hand would consist of hearts, even though the cards were still being dealt out by the deadpan lady sitting to her right. This dealer had made a fortune in soda cans and chocolate blocks on account of her poker face, although the bleached-haired girl had previously argued that she was cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs – in the form of the cataclysmic dosage of mood stabilizers she was on.
Samantha began the game by smacking down a two of clubs onto the table, which made the diminutive woman to her right flinch. The expressionless lady’s arm moved like a robotic limb in an automobile manufacturing plant as she deposited a six of clubs on top of Samantha’s two. The girl with the bleached hair launched a Jack of Hearts onto the pile as if she were making it rain on a pole dancer.
The game lost its tempo when it got around to the quiet girl. Her eyes had transformed into deep blue pools of terror and her gaze was locked onto something a thousand miles beneath the tabletop.
The other three women stared at her in expectant silence. The six eyeballs ramped up the tension, causing the blue-eyed girl to cover her face with the fan of cards in her hand.
The girl with the bleached hair fiddled with the sleeve of her jumper as Samantha drolled out a sarcastic “Heeeelllloooo.”
The frozen girl didn’t respond. There was a moment of awkward silence at the table before the woman using performance-enhancing drugs mumbled, “Do you have a King, Queen, or Ace of Hearts?”
The monotone question slowly sank in as the quiet girl looked over her shaking hand of cards. She moved her head in the negative.
“Finally!” blurted Samantha, arms held high in thanks to the Lord.
The bleached-haired girl took that trick with her Jack of Hearts. She also took the next one with a King of Hearts, and the one after that with a Queen of Hearts. Each time she slid the loose pile of cards over to her side of the table, her smile got wider while Samantha’s face got redder.
As the fourth trick began, Samantha’s eyes were locked onto the white-haired girl sitting across from her as if she were a cruise missile focusing in on an infrared laser.
The girl with the bleached hair and positively giddy smile launched an Ace of Hearts onto the table. That was when the cruise missile named Samantha detonated. If the steel table hadn’t been bolted to the ground, Samantha would have flipped it over with the speed and intensity with which she stood up.
With the thundering voice of a megachurch preacher recanting a passage of brimstone, Samantha boomed, “You cheating whore!”
As if to justify her language, Samantha slapped one of her cards down onto the table. It was another Ace of Hearts.
The bleached hair girl’s mouth was agape with shock. The words, “I thought I’d stacked the deck”, glowed in neon writing across her forehead. The quiet girl had fallen off her stool in fright and had already fled halfway back to her cell.
The expressionless girl remained expressionless.
“I saw you messing with your sleeves!” Samantha was coming around the table, intent on exposing the cheat in front of the whole pod.
An officer ducked her head out of the office. Her face was incredulous. “Could we calm down, ladies?”
Samantha wasn’t calming down as she tried to pull back the accused cheater’s sleeves. An awkward battle of dexterity ensued as Samantha stood over the white-haired girl, struggling to get a grip on her squirming form.
“This is stupid,” droned the poker-faced woman. As if she’d spoken some magic words, cards suddenly came flying out of the now confirmed cheater’s right sleeve.
The stupid grapple instantly ended as the spray of cards began landing all over the table, every one of them a heart. A couple of ladies who had apparently been watching the struggle from the second-floor balcony above them, cackled and called out, “Cheater, cheater,” in childish glee. The officer, as well as a fair percentage of the pod, had gathered about, laughing as cards also began falling from the cheater’s left sleeve.
As the bleached-haired girl pointed both her arms skyward to keep the cards in her sleeves, Samantha was busy soaking in the glory, doing victory laps about the table. The boisterous revelry continued until the girl with the hearts up her sleeves let out a scream of genuine fear. Girly screams of any sort were by no means uncommon in a women’s jail, but this one cut through the whole pod and immediately silenced it. The cheater’s face had grown as pale as her hair. Despite the fact her forearms were held upwards, cards kept fountaining up from her sleeves against gravity. Through the silence, the flapping, sliding and brushing sound of what must have been hundreds of cards gliding through the air and landing about the place, seemed far too loud.
Someone toward the back of the pod blurted out. “What the fuck?”
This flipped a switch within everyone’s minds and suddenly every lady in the room was shrieking, pointing, and babbling with excitement. The pale girl stumbled back off the stool she was sitting on.
She turned this way and that, as if unsure where to go. Her mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish. The whispers of silent screams drowned out by the cacophony about her.
With each passing second, the ferocity at which the cards spewed from her arms increased. Already the air within the pod shimmered as it rained a suit of hearts. It was pandemonium as women ran about catching cards out of the air as they fluttered and fell. Pretty soon they would be able to make card angels as the floor of the pod was rapidly disappearing under a layer of cards. Perhaps for the first time in her life, Samantha was rendered speechless. She was frozen on the spot, periodically flinching as cards flew into her face. The officer was in much the same state. The girl without emotions, however, was incapable of feeling awed, or confused, or scared. She calmly waded through the now shin-deep foam of cards toward the girl doing an impression of a goldfish. Kings were stuck in her hair, Queens had fallen down the front of her shirt, and Aces bounced off her shoulders as she fearlessly reached out toward the terrified lady in front of her.
With as firm a grip as she could muster, the stone-faced woman wrapped her hands around the forearms of the girl now lost in a fluttering haze of cards. Immediately the double fire hydrant flow of hearts ceased. As the cards that were already in the air spun and fell back to earth, the adrenaline fuelled mania that gripped everyone in the pod abated.
The girl with the bleached hair shook like a leaf in the wind, but the colour was slowly returning to her face.
Samantha finally rediscovered her voice and stated what everyone was thinking, “What in the goddamn was that?”
The million cards scattered about the pod offered no answer. The girl who had cheated at 41 let out a long sigh of relief as she looked into the eyes of the emotionless woman in front of her, but her face was no longer expressionless.
She had a faint smile.
It was at that exact moment that the cheater exploded into cards.
The quiet girl was in her cell, looking out the plexiglass window in her door and crying into a pillow she held to her chest. The tsunami of cards boomed and thundered with the sound of an avalanche. Within seconds the window was entirely covered, the quiet girl’s face had gone dark.
Silence followed. It was broken only by the muffled screams of those buried alive, slowly asphyxiating.
Don’t put cards up your sleeves.