Ace of Hearts

This week’s miCRo is an international collaboration: It was chosen by a class at Amsterdam University College (under the guidance of their professor Huan Hsu). They had this to say about it:

Giulia Cenni and Myrielle Winkelmann: “Ace of Hearts” stages the multiplicity of grief as a final, intimate game between father and daughter. Julia Hou does not provide consolation but leaves us in the knowledge that even if the round was lost, the time spent playing it was not. The game continues as a language of love, in spite of death changing the rules.

Listen to Hou read the story:

Ace of Hearts

You, my girl, blink of an eye, yi zhuan yan, and you’re grown up, no longer a girl. Girls don’t organize their fathers’ funerals, don’t put on mourning dresses and stammer eulogies. Girls don’t curve their spines, don’t wear hard, blank eyes like yours. Long after the guests leave, you linger over the remains of my body, as though waiting for me to rise. From your pocket, you produce the deck of cards we used to play with, start counting them.

Two three four—you know, your Ye Ye taught me how to play cards, how to catch, gut, and scale a fish, boil its intestines into a soup so salty it was reminiscent of the ocean. When I lost, which was often, my father would catch my fists in his sea-glass hands and hold them away from the table. “You weren’t thinking,” he’d say. “You have to think. Have a plan. Or you will always lose.”

Five six seven—which is what I’ve always told you when you lost at cards, which was often, your temper flaring as you slammed the table. I raised you to believe you deserved to win, but you didn’t always listen when I taught you how.

Eight nine jack—my advice was simple: Come up with a plan. As a child I studied even when my classmates were outside playing. I dreamed of America, a packed fridge, a sturdy house, a family unsplintered. My genius girl, you can beat me the way I beat my father, play the game so well that I won’t be able to catch up.

Queen king—“was this your plan?” you asked me once, near the end, after the doctor decided there was nothing else to do. You slept on the couch beside my cot, both of us waiting. “To die?” I looked at you, too weak to speak. You put your hands on my arm, gripping it tightly. “You’re not trying.” You cried, shaking me. “Try harder.”

I tried. I swear to God, I tried.

You stop counting. You toss the ace into the fire along with the last of your folded joss, watch it singe and shrink. That was the card I’d hide up my sleeve, to teach you one more lesson about winning. Sometimes the other person cheats. Sometimes you’re unlucky. Sometimes, even when you’ve played perfectly, yi zhuan yan—you lose.