The rectangles danced as Gaffle shuffled the cards. Lanelle watched, mesmerized as the deck moved between his palms. The cards seemed to have a life of their own, appearing and disappearing through his fingers with a fluidity of motion that suggested water or leaves in the wind or the lively jump and spark of fire. Gaffle hummed to himself after about a minute and a half and set the deck down.
“I don’t know anything about tarot.”
Lanelle shifted in the armchair, looking at the back of the cards now that they were still. Gaffle handled them with practiced ease, but the cards looked in perfect condition. The color reminded her of indigo, but with blue and green instead of hinting toward purple. Funny, that she had ended up in the arts and was s terrible at knowing colors.
“A deck has a way of telling you what you know.” Gaffle drummed his finger against his chin, brow furrowed. “Like when you’re looking for something, and you have an idea of where you left it but can’t remember the exact place.”
A red vine crawled across the card-back, small leaves peeling off the stem at intervals. Lanelle fingered the surface, surprised at the ridge of the vine. Darker shadows bordered the edges. She picked up the card and turned it over, but the face of it betrayed nothing of the engravings on the other side. The artwork on the face side showed three silver daggers puncturing a heart that dripped to the very edge of the card. The silver along the edges winked at her as she turned the card over.
“What does this card mean?”
Leaning back into the cushion of the armchair, Lanelle examined the card again. The back of it still intrigued her, with its grooves and ridges. A prickly feeling dusted up her arms as she imagined shuffling the entire deck. With those vines tangling around her fingers, she’d spill the deck instead of shuffling it properly.
The shadows bordering the back of the card seemed to sneak into the artwork on the other side, despite the silver edges. She tilted her head one way, turned the card another, trying to figure out what she was noticing. There was something about the shadows, something about the vivid colors—the silver blades, the bursting heart, that below-the-surface iceberg blue-green.
“Here.”
Gaffle had the deck face up in his hands, going through them one by one. Occasionally he would pull some out, setting them aside. When he’d gone through the entire deck, maybe a third of it had been sorted out. Probably less. Lanelle wasn’t good at eyeing these things.
“Do you need this one back?”
“Put these in order.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? You just shuffled them.”
Gaffle traded the single card for the short-stack. Short stack is for pancakes, not tarot decks. Lanelle frowned, trying to recall proper card terminology as she took the cards. Did tarot decks have suits? And how was she supposed to put them in order when there weren’t even any numbers?
While Gaffle went about chopping lettuce and cucumber and tomatoes for a salad, Lanelle puzzled over the cards. The best she could think of was to group the cards that seemed most related to each other. The earth, sun, moon, and star were easiest. The king and queen were easy to figure out, with their thrones. The others—an old man with a staff, a younger person with a wand, someone in a cape, another person with one leg bent at the knee with their foot tucked behind the other leg—she wasn’t sure what to do with. Maybe the youngest person went first and the oldest last, but she couldn’t hazard a guess at the middle.
The rest of the cards were probably symbolic—like what she thought of as the sky cards, since she didn’t know what else to call them—but they were too abstract for her to figure out any order of importance. A lion. A set of two pillars. A lightning bolt striking what looked like a rook chess-piece. Okay, maybe the skull and the lightning one went together—at the far left, since everything ended in destruction. And the lion and the temple and the scales, those could go with the king and queen on the throne and their chariot. The sky cards could go at the beginning.
“I did what I could, but I’m pretty sure it’s all wrong.”
Lanelle carried the cards to the counter, setting them down in their groups. Gaffle had added a colorful mix of peppers to the mix.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
A week later, Gaffle shows her a new routine. His half of it, he says. She has to come up with the other half. Usually she can do that, as long as he gives her some pointers. She can’t just come up with choreography on the spot, but she likes to think she has some good ideas every now and then.
But all he gives her is a silver-edged card. The textured back still gives Lanelle a certain feeling she can’t describe. Almost like she’s being watched, but also like she’s watching something she’s not supposed to see. She shakes it off and examines the card. It’s not the pin-cushion heart. It’s the person with the tucked leg. She notices now that their hands are behind their head—or maybe they’re tied at the wrists? She can’t completely tell.
She climbs the ladder and does her best to shake off that double-sensation of watching and being watched. Closing her eyes, she steadies herself with a breath. Instead of replaying the routine Gaffle had done, she lets her shoulders relax and listens to the air. It sparkles, shimmers, whispers with something secret.
Lanelle believes there are stage spirits, invisible hands who will tug you to where you need to be. But you had to listen to them and respect them, so she does her best to seek their guidance. Through free-falls and swinging arcs and endless spins, she moves around the air Gaffle moved in, wondering if it matched what he was aiming for.
“I wanted it to hurt,” Gaffle says.
“You wanted it to hurt—you?” Lanelle twists her neck, scrunches her brow. “Someone else?”
Gaffle taps the corner of his mouth, looking at the still-frame frozen on the screen. He shakes his head, rewinds to the beginning. Watching it again, all five minutes and thirty seconds of it, before saying,
“It doesn’t. Not the way it should.”
“It doesn’t what?”
Except he’s terrible at explaining what he means, when it comes to these things. He rises from the chair, a spry, lithe motion that reminds Lana of a serpent. Gaffle is charming. Strange that he should be so charmed by something, but that’s what happens sometimes. That rare thing that catches the attention, lures a reptile to be enraptured…
Lanelle fiddles with a few nobs and buttons before catching up to him. He lifts her off her feet and she takes the ribbons like reaching for her spirit. Gaffle bundles himself in yellow silk and something about spilled egg yolk and wild cornfields flashes through her mind.
Hold your balance in the center of your being.
She brings her arm to her chest, curling the white satin around her forearm and tilting in a long diagonal. Her toes point toward the ceiling, as she stretches her free hand toward the ground, as if she could reach invisible soil and dig through it, summoning something lost to the surface.
Use your own bones as your point of reference.
Being in the air like this, it never hurts. Not for her. But the shadows start at the edge of her vision and then she is spinning. The advice goes through her mind almost every time they compose a complicated sequence.
The trick to not getting dizzy with the choreography is to not look at anything.
Gaffle sails close by, an elaborate arc as if swooping in to rescue her. But then with a deft cut of the wrist and turn of the ankle he stops short. Her free-fall leaves her in a puddle of red silk and black satin and she wonders if that is the part that’s supposed to hurt them. Watching a woman go down, a woman who could have been saved except no one wanted to get their hands messy. No one wanted to risk their own meager heights.
Your body is your compass, and the ropes are the degrees.
Lanelle rolls onto her back and closes her eyes. Her braids fan out behind her, but even on the ground she can’t count on gravity. She counts to ten, and then to twenty. By the time she makes it to thirty, the wafts of air across her face have ceased and a tickle of ribbon is just beyond the reach of her toes. She stretchers her arms out to either side, loops the ribbon around her ankle, and then lets herself be pulled up.
When they sit down later to watch another set of recordings, Lanelle blinks at the screen. The saturation seems off, somehow. She leans forward to check the settings but Gaffle’s fingers close around her wrist and tug her arm away. She settles back into the seat and stabs at a wonton with her chopstick. Gaffle swears he can’t eat anything when composing a set, but Lanelle was practically the opposite.
“This is good,” Gaffle murmurs to himself. “Really good. You’re perfect.”
“So—it hurts?”
“It’s a good place to end the set. Off-balance. There’s no closure.”
“Have you told Piper about this yet?” Lanelle asked. “Not just the part where you ask to borrow the stage, but where you tell her what the show is actually about?”
Gaffle grumbled something under his breath, eyes still fixed to the screen. Lanelle twirled one of the chopsticks around and dug into his shoulder. A tiny golden sun appeared in his bronze flesh, flaring red and then fading.
“She’s gonna be pissed if you don’t tell her. I know you two have this one-night-only ruse going on, but I feel like this is going to need more than three hours’ notice.”
Gaffle waved her off, sipping his seltzer water. Plain seltzer water at that, not even one of the fruit-infused ones. Lanelle couldn’t see how he could stand to drink it. They watched through the recording, blues and greens filling the screen, swirling to oranges, somehow glittering in the stage lights.
There’s nothing to it, really.
It’s all weight and counterweight.
Balance, tension, and proof of your own strength.
Lanelle hadn’t felt strong at all, when she’d stepped into Piper’s introductory class. This didn’t seem the type of hobby you could just casually pick up. Except she’d stumbled into the class because she was curious, and somewhere along the way it had become her day job.
It was different for Gaffle. He’d traded in all the company arts, like figure-skating and ballet and synchronized swimming. Although he wasn’t jaded or arrogant about his tenure in elite spaces like these—and was even more peevish about any awards he’d won—there was something about his relationship with these spaces that seemed ambivalent.
“Gaffle was good, but he treated that goodness—his talent—like a sickness.”
“Why do you say it like that?” Lanelle asked, tilting her head. “Past-tense? He’s not dead. And—he still seems like that, honestly.”
It was in the perpetual frown whenever he watched the recordings, or the grimace as he twined his body through ribbons and ropes. It was like he needed the hurt. Piper’s mouth is a flat line as she waits for Lanelle to realize this. And even as she does, Lanelle still can’t quite understand.
“What happened? What would make a person be so hell-bent on…”
“Sacrificing themselves?”
Piper says it point-blank, and Lanelle thinks it takes some kind of bravery or boldness to do it. A courage she doesn’t have, because it’s easier to move on from someone’s pain than to stay in it. It makes her wonder what pain Gaffle is stuck in. And why he would let himself stay there. And what would help him move on, or if this is the only way he knows how to live now.
“Some things are forever.”
“What?”
“Maybe nothing had to happen for Gaffle to be this way. Maybe it’s just the way he is.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Does it?” Piper crossed her arms. “Is it so terrible, to actually be yourself? And to know people care about you?”
Lanelle opened her mouth, but before she could say I didn’t mean it, Piper was halfway down the hall. She liked Gaffle, she really did. She didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with him, but something about Piper’s words pointed out an assumption she hadn’t known she’d made.
He was different, sure, but given enough time, whatever cloud was lingering over him would dissipate and he’d be happy. Gaffle seemed to know his way out of whatever he was going through—but maybe he wasn’t going through anything. Maybe he was just…being. But how could anyone live like that?
Lanelle tried not to pester Gaffle so much about the set for the next few days. She practiced her part of the routine as if a perfect execution would somehow make things right. Gaffle seemed either to not notice or not care about her quiet. At first she was mad that she’d started tip-toeing around him for no reason, but then she realized maybe it was better to just be straightforward.
“Hey, uhm—I’m sorry.”
Gaffle pauses in chalking up his hands. Lanelle doesn’t really know what to do with hers, but she clutches them together behind her back so he doesn’t see how much she’s fidgeting. A prickly feeling spikes up her calf anyway, and she scratches it with her toe before continuing.
“I was wrong about you. And I’ve been rude. I had to have been, for being so naïve, and I’m sorry. You deserve better credit—more respect than that.”
His shoulders are square because Gaffle always has perfect posture, but they suddenly look narrow, to her. He’s not an imposing figure. She’d thought it was his experience as an elite that had intimidated her, but maybe it was just his honesty.
“You always nail the techniques of a routine,” he told her. “The joy you take isn’t a bad thing.”
As he climbed the ladder to the high wire, Lanelle wondered if her apology had been rebuffed—or even unnecessary. Did she think Gaffle desired her approval? And what was her high regard worth to him, really? Why should he want it? Embarrassed at having once again been so self-centered, she slipped from the wings to the middle of the theater.
Gaffle had her record all their practice routines, even the segments they did solo. With everything up and running, it only took a few button clicks and then all she had to do was watch. The blinking red dot jumped to the middle of her head, an insisting blip that eerily amplified the beating of her own heart.
Had she always watched Gaffle through a screen, or if she had ever allowed herself to actually get to know him? Flashing red lights usually meant some sort of danger, but Lanelle couldn’t help but think the red dot was damning. Accusing her narrow perspective, her lack of awareness, her utter disregard for anything outside of her own thinking.
V. H. King's Ink 
Leave a Reply