Cards Close to the Chest
Prompt: Supernatural
Characters: Kent, Aces Ensemble
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All of the guys chirped Parse for buying a pack of tarot cards. He might have been their star-talent rookie, but that didn’t mean he was above some healthy razzing. Especially since he bought those cards, at all fucking places, a Barnes & Noble. The guy lived in Vegas but he bought his occult knicknacks at a store that was designed for bougie soccer moms. Seriously, who did that?
“Since when does Barnes & Noble even have tarot decks?” Carl wanted to know, raising his voice to be heard over all the hooting and hollering.
Parse just shrugged, looking cool and collected as ever. “I think it was part of some special promo. They were in the section with all the books for twelve-year-olds about vampires.”
“Oh, God, I think I saw that,” Max recalled, his face scrunched up in memory. “Edmonton, right? God, what a hellhole. Couldn’t even find a decent coffee place, so we had to go to ’Noble’s in-store cafe. They fucked up my latte, too.”
Parse swept his gaze over the assembled team. “Anybody want me to do a card reading for them?” he offered, brandishing the deck at them. “I think I’ve about got the hang of it.”
His generosity was met with a chorus with a chorus of scoffs and eyerolls until Burnsy, one of the vets, volunteered.
“Always wanted to have my fortune told by somebody,” he said easily, shooing Carl out of his own stall and sitting down beside Parse. “Go ahead, Parser. Solve the mysteries of the universe. Or at least tell me how I’m going to do in our next game.”
Parse had Burnsy select three cards from the deck (“Six is the usual for reading an entire future, so we have to scale that down to focus on just the game.”) and then did his best to decipher them. The rest of the locker room either feigned disinterest or listened with skeptical expressions, curious in spite of themselves.
“So, it looks like you got the Page of Cups, which means a happy surprise is coming your way. Then there’s the Three of Swords, which means there’s gonna be some suffering. And then we have the Nine of Wands, which means … resilience and determination. Huh.” Parse squinted at the foldout page of instructions. “So, I guess you’re going to suffer, get a nice surprise, and then recover? Can’t be sure of that order, though.”
“What’s there not to be sure about?” Carl asked scornfully. “He’s going to get hurt and then get better. That’s generally how that works.”
“Well, at least we know I’m not dying,” Burnsy said cheerfully. “Thanks for reading my fortune, bro. I guess we’ll see if it comes true or not.”
While Parse still got grief from some of the guys about giving up hockey and becoming Vegas’s next great stage magician with those cards of his, everyone forgot about the prediction for Burnsy. That was, until their next game, when an attempted slapshot at the Flyers’ goal in the last four seconds of play rebounded off of Burnsy’s thigh, entering the net and giving the Aces their victory.
“Wait a minute, that’s exactly what you said would happen,” Jello recalled when they were out for drinks later that night. “Parse, you said that Burnsy would suffer, but there would be a happy surprise, and then he’d get over it. Well, the dude took a slapshot to the leg, got us a goal, and now he’s left with a hefty bruise where the puck hit him. But he’s still gonna be okay.”
“Hey, that’s right,” Parse said, but he didn’t seem especially amazed. “Guess that did happen, huh?” There was a teasing look in his eyes, which were blue that day.
“Just a coincidence,” Carl insisted. “If he broke out those cards again and tried to make sense of them, none of it would come true.”
“Wanna bet?” Jello challenged, raising his chin stubbornly.
So, with fifty dollars riding on the outcome, the next day Parse did a full card reading for a neutral party: Max.
“Something you’ve wanted to happen for a while is gonna happen soon,” he informed Max as he pored over the cards. “But there’s strings attached, and it’s going to be difficult at times but rewarding at the end of the day. And also—” he tapped the Empress card, “—this one means motherhood, so possibly a kid will be involved?”
“God, I hope not,” Max said fervently. “Neither Lauren or I want kids.”
But just a few days later, when they were on the road, Max got a call from his wife, telling him that their elderly neighbor had fallen and broken her hip. The lady would be in rehab for the next six weeks and wouldn’t be able to take care of her dog even afterward. What would he think about them adopting a four-year-old Golden Retriever?
“I mean, we’ve always wanted a dog,” Max explained to the other guys. “We’ve talked about getting one but never really got around to it, so we’re totally going to do this. I really like that dog, too, she’s a real sweetheart.”
Jello was emphatic that the circumstances proved him right. “Lauren getting a dog is basically her becoming a mom!” he insisted. “She’s still responsible for another living creature. And some people refer to their pets as their kids!”
“One, no it’s not,” Carl said flatly. “Two, those people are freaks. Three, this proves nothing.”
But a number of the rest of the team was convinced that it did, and suddenly Parser was regularly performing card readings for several of his teammates. Skeezy wanted to know if he should move into a development with an HOA (Parse predicted an inevitable sacrifice of freedom for contentment), Red was questioning how meeting his girlfriend’s parents would go (Disastrously, but through no fault of Red’s, and to his ultimate benefit), and Chazzer checked to see if his holiday plans would go smoothly (They wouldn’t and would just leave him disappointed).
One by one, each of Parse’s predictions came through. Skeezy found out that he couldn’t build the dream deck he’d always wanted if he moved into the HOA neighborhood, so he decided to look for a house elsewhere. Red went to meet his girlfriend’s parents, but her father announced during dinner out that he was divorcing her mother, rendering the rest of the visit extremely uncomfortable. His girlfriend, however was enormously impressed by him sticking it out with her despite the awkwardness. And Chazzer ended up stranded at the airport for nearly forty hours due to a blizzard taking place during his layover, missing his visit home entirely.
“So, like, everything he says is going to happen ends up happening,” Max concluded during a team breakfast. “He has a gift.”
Carl snorted. “No, he doesn’t. He’s making guesses and some of his guesses work out. You could read your horoscope in Seventeen magazine and get better results.”
“Yeah, how fair would it be if God or Buddha or whoever made Parser made him psychic and a total beast when it comes to hockey?” Jazzy put in.
“Maybe he’s so good at hockey because he’s psychic,” Jello suggested. “Everyone has always said that the reason he can score like he does is because he can anticipate where the puck is going to be. Maybe he’s not anticipating. Maybe he already knows before it actually happens.”
They all paused to think about that, even those of the team who were more skeptical about Parser.
For his part, though, Parser didn’t seem bothered one way or the other about if his predictions turned into reality. Whenever someone came up to him and began talking excitedly about how the cards had been right, he responded with a modest shrug and a small smile, casually engaging with his teammate but not seeming very moved by what they had to say.
“Do you even believe any of this mumbo-jumbo?” Carl demanded one day as he and Parser tossed a medicine ball back and forth between themselves during sit-ups.
“Not especially,” Parse replied easily, amusement glinting in his green eyes. “Definitely not as much as I’ve convinced some of the guys on the team to.”
Carl scowled. “Then why the Harry Potter act? Is it just a joke to you? A way you can secretly chirp the other guys?” Maybe Parser was just out to make fun of everybody. Maybe he was just trying to be a dick.
Parse tossed the medicine ball at him with unnecessary force. “No,” he replied flatly. “I don’t care if they believe it or not. I just think it’s good for them to believe in something, like destiny or fate or some bullshit like that if they’re already stressed out about what’s going to happen next. Helps them deal with it, weirdly enough. Guess they figure there’s nothing they can do if it’s already in the cards.”
“Pathetic,” Carl snorted.
“No, it’s not.” Those weird mood ring eyes of Parser’s went stormcloud gray. “Not if it helps the guys deal with what’s bothering them. Some people struggle with not knowing what’s going to happen in the future. This is a solution for that.”
“Huh.” Eyeing Parse and seeing the frown on his face, Carl decided that continuing this line of conversation would only increase the danger of Parser lobbing the medicine ball at his head. So he wisely changed the subject. “You ever use those cards to find out something for yourself? Like, about what’s going to happen to you down the road, I mean.”
Actually, he was really curious about the answer, about if Parse had ever believed in the cards to tell him the future, or if he’d originally bought them with the idea of tricking the guys and helping them cope. If it was the second one, then that was super weird.
Parse’s eyes went even darker, going nearly black. “No. Not ever.”
But Carl somehow got the feeling that he was lying. He noticed that when Parse spoke, his thumb was stroking that Memorial Cup ring he’d won back in Juniors, the kind that were given to only the captain and the alternate captains of the winning team. When they’d seen that Parse still wore it after being drafted into the actual League, Carl and some of the other Aces had assumed it meant he was an arrogant prick.
Now, though, Carl wasn’t quite sure what it meant. He also wasn’t sure why Parse lied about those cards—it wasn’t like the chirping had seemed to bother him before.
Still, the next time he saw Parser surrounded by teammates, each of them with a specific question they wanted him to answer by reading the cards, Carl kept his mouth shut. If their hotshot rookie wanted to do something to help out the team in his own freak way, Carl wasn’t going to stop him.