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A piece I wrote a few weeks ago in response to the prompt: However long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this.

Enjoy!

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A new dawn is just beginning to break as I stare down at the card. It’s light in my hands but its meaning weighs heavily on my mind as I run my fingers over its sides. Something about hope and courage, as my sister used to tell me when we were younger. Back then, when the cards hadn’t yet been faded by the sun or had their edges worn down by our excitable hands, tarot didn’t have much of a meaning.

Now it’s become a matter of life or death.

The woman in the card is facing away from me, staring into a deep abyss of blue. In the background, a star swirls and stardust rains down from it. From two cups, light pours out, one drenching the woman and the other fertilising the ground beneath her. The Star is at one with herself and the elements, and a pang of jealousy makes itself known in my chest.

I’ve never pulled this card before, but tarot tends to reveal all sorts of uncomfortable truths that, more often than not, I find myself too scared to admit without its help. The woman on the card harbours a sense of liberation that I’ve been searching for my whole life. Standing in this empty room, with nothing to show of my old life, is starting to convince me that maybe I’ve found it. I exhale a shaky breath as excitement begins to build within me. I used to long for this type of freedom and having it in my grasp is almost too great to comprehend.

The rest of the deck is scattered along the windowsill. I pocket the card and collect the rest. A sharp chill runs through the empty apartment, but the curtains don’t move. The sound of blood dripping onto the floorboards echoes around me. I glance down, and his body makes me jump. I’d forgotten he was there, too transfixed by the illustration in front of me to notice his pained cries.

I restrain myself from feeling too sorry for him as he squirms at my feet. He got what was coming to him, I remind myself. Tarot said this will set you free.

When I was twenty, I pulled the card of the Devil, and the Devil looked like him. And if there’s one major truth I’ve kept with me through all these years of turmoil, it’s that tarot never lies.

Time hasn’t been so kind to the both of us, but more so him. As my knife danced over his throat just a few minutes ago those same crows-feet he tugged at in the mirror the night before our wedding glimmered in the moonlight. Fate is a strange thing, I suppose. It was always meant to end like this, I just didn’t know it back then.

As his face contracts so do his frown lines and wrinkles. He’s pulling himself towards me, streaking blood across the floorboards. I wince. We’d spent so much on renovations, just for him to stain the place scarlet.

I can’t stay for long. He was only the first check box on the to-do list that rebuilds my life after this new dawn. I have a lot more tarot cards to pull before the day is done, and the sun is quickly emerging over the rooftops of the buildings opposite us.

I step over his body and speak, both to him and to myself. “However long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this.”