Flash Fiction Friday : Turn Of A Friendly Card

Turn of a Friendly Card by Cassandra Curtis, © 2007 Keeley tapped her fingers on her lips, fighting the urge to pull open the drawer and take the deck of cards from her grandmother's writing desk. Better to put distance between herself and temptation, but curiosity won out. What'd she'd seen couldn't possibly be, right? People trapped by her grandmother's ancient magick, flattened into the dimensional space of a tarot card? When she'd first seen the deck of ensorcelled cards, she'd thrown them in the desk drawer, and slammed it shut. She wanted to deny the power of the dark magick, deny she was its heir. And yet if what she'd seen was real, then only she had the power to free those trapped within the alternate dimension, caught between worlds. Before she could stop herself, her hand reached out, opened the desk and took the deck from the drawer. She released the closure on the cardboard case and withdrew the pack of 78 black-edged cards. She placed them face down in a fan spread and let her hand hover over them, sweeping back and forth until one felt "hot" to her budding psychic senses. Keeley lifted it up with a single finger and flipped it over. The Magician. The fellow pictured looked none too happy. How long had he been trapped in the flatlands, imprisoned in the tarot card? Why had her Grandmother seen fit to act as this man's jailer? What had been his crime? He made small movements, his face twisted in anger. Perhaps she should release someone else less threatening? His dark eyes burned through the card, their intensity almost mesmerizing. She shivered and set his card away from her, then decided to flip over another card in the deck. A young girl sat uneasily on a seat of pentacles, her body fidgeting ever so slightly. Forever out of sync with the world beyond the flatlands. Keeley's world. She turned one last card and shuddered. The Tower. The man trapped inside was little more than a teenager. He wailed his anger and determination to escape his one-dimensional jail, as he silently fell to his death, frozen in time. This was insane. But it was no hallucination. She had to go back and reread her grandmother's journals. She had to know why such a sweet old woman would use such a foul magick. She gripped the red leather journal and scanned the pages...nothing about why or what these people had done to warrant such a cruel existence...nothing but the ritual needed to bind them to the tarot cards. At the last page, she saw the spell required to release them, the rite of unbinding. Should she? The girl looked so sad, but Keeley's eyes were drawn back to the Magician. His dark good looks pulled her. Decision made, she reached for her grandmother's athame and pricked the palm of her hand. She intoned the words of unbinding. Three precise droplets of her blood spotted the tarot card. It was too late to change her mind. Already, smoke rose from the card, a grayish swirling mass. She stood, and backed away from the desk. As the haze cleared, she gasped. A man, tall and lean, with black eyes, black hair and a goatee, and dressed in top hat and tails, stood not four feet from her. –to read more about Keeley and her Magician, watch for future installments at the Midnight Moon Cafe's Flash Fiction Friday... :)