Card Night

It was card night again.

That’s when this all started, the six of us sitting down with our glasses of amber Poi and clear blue Kait and a deck of cards around a circular table. Plesurum sat at my right, Mala at my left. Keika was across from me as always with Meshka to his right and Doneika dealing cards and drinks to his left. Doneika always took dealer. It was a rule that he made up to keep us from wasting time choosing one. Meshka made him the official drink dispenser after he proved to have the highest tolerence and the steadiest hand of all of us. No use wasting good Poi and Kait by careless pouring.

Some unspoken law of culture states that you never mix Poi and Kait together. No one bothers to ask why. You just don’t do it. They taste and look completely different, and once you’ve gotten a taste for one, you tend to stick to it. Why would you want to mix them anyway? They’re fine on their own. Unfortunately, once one of them goes to your head you start thinking in odd ways. We were about to start our last card game of the night when Mala got the bright idea to make the loser mix the two together. Even Doneika had enough Poi in his system by that time to make him think it was a good idea.

The goal of the game we played last that night was to get rid of your cards before the other people. Eventually there would be two people left, and one would lose. I got out first. What can I say, Keika had me playing that game since I was eight. In the end we were left with Mala and Plesurum. We all wanted Mala to lose to see what he thought of his brilliant drink idea, but he beat Plesu by two cards. Lucky break. Plesu slid his glass to his right, and Doneika filled it up. The liquid turned a sickly opaque green with the two classics put together. Plesu looked at it, and took a testing sip. I don’t really understand what happened after that.

I’ve known about the Bemahshtaveh for most of my life. Officially, it never happened, and the population has a new generation now that actually believes that. I don’t like to think about it too much. Millions of people, far more than I can imagine, were rounded up over the course of about a decade and shot. We’ve found records of it. They recorded every name on every day before they lined them up and killed them. It was the purebloods, mainly. Bloods that the new generation think are just myths. Men, women, and teenagers. No children. We never found those records. We tried to find them, and we tried to avoid finding them. Millions of adults is one thing, but millions of children… it adds a new horrific dimension to the event just to think about it.

We knew Plesurum went into an orphanage when he was three, but his sheer existence didn’t make sense to us. Pure Keimahk was one of those myths now, and yet there he was: blue-tinted skin, beautiful blue hair, and those damned feathers on his back. There shouldn’t be any way that he could have survived this long. Based on everything we know, he should have “disappeared” like all the others in this messed-up country that shared his blood. He didn’t remember anything before the orphanage, though.

Well, at least not until Mala’s drunken ideas landed a glass of mixed Poi and Kait in front of him.

After that first sip he suddenly started to gulp it down. He finished half the glass in one take, and those glasses are tall. Before he slammed it down on the table he took one more long take and drained it of all but maybe a sip or two. Meshka had stopped cheering him on by then. As Plesu stared down the empty glass Meshka asked me in some serious tone if we were about to learn another horror story from the Bemahshtaveh. Turns out we would get two. Plesu mumbled something about nap time never being so early in the day. He was talking nonsense, and Meshka helped me carry him back to our room. I hated seeing my lover like this.

At least an hour passed of Plesu rambling off bits of memory that were coming back to him thanks to Mala’s concoction. He was three; he couldn’t have been any older. He went to a kindergarten everyday. One day a man in dark clothes and a black hat came and gave all the children a green drink- Poi and Kait. He told them to drink all that was in their cups and then to take their nap. The strength of those two put together knocked them all out cold in a couple minutes. Plesu stayed awake for some reason. He never got to explaining that bit. When everyone was asleep he heard noise and got up. After that all he could remember was blood being everywhere. He said he ran until he couldn’t breathe anymore. I don’t blame him. I did the same thing when I was four.

Keika never saw what I witnessed. He saw the school building afterwards, charred and black and all collaped in on itself, but he never saw the flames. He never saw all the blood that decorated the inside of it before the flames took over. He never saw the men who did it. All Keika saw was the remnants of the building and the remnants of my carefree child self. I had reason to be scared now, and it gave me nightmares for years. I never talked about it outloud, not to Keika or anyone else. I tried to believe that if I ignored it the memory would go away. For years I thought my technique had worked. I could look at a fire or a flame and not feel the panic in my blood anymore, and I hardly even remembered that day until Plesu threw his own massacre memory in my face.

I started having nightmares again, and they tore me apart inside. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I didn’t want to go to bed, and I didn’t want Plesu to turn the lights off at night. With the help of a naughty little substance called teim I stayed awake for six days all together before Plesu finally tired me out enough to make my body give in to the darkness. I actually slept well that night, and it just might have continued had an old demon from my past not tried to claim me all over again right afterwards. The next two months were hell dealing with him again, but at least the nightmares were mild and vague. When at last he was forced out of Underground I thought I was finally free of all the torment from my past.

Two weeks later it was card night again.

We all sat down around that table in the same order as before. Tall glasses of amber Poi sat in front of Doneika, Mala, Meshka, and myself. Plesu and Keika had their glasses of Kait. I was taking teim again to keep myself from succuming to the terror of sleep, and I hadn’t slept in seven days. Plesu had confronted me three times already to no avail, and the tension between us kept growing because of it. I didn’t want to upset him so much. I didn’t want to put our relationship into such risky territory. More than that, though, I simply did not want to live through all those sharp sensations that came more alive in every new nightmare. The crimson blood splashing onto the floor, the heat of the flames as they consumed the building, the overpowering smell of burning wood, and the crackling of the beams as the building collapsed… I couldn’t take it. If using teim beyond what was logical could keep me awake and out of that nightmare, then that was the best option. Plesu could deal with it. He already was.

My turn came around on our fourth game. Play passed from left to right, and Mala tossed me a glance. “You’re up.”

I looked at my cards and tried to concentrate. My body was aching with exhaustion, and I made a mental note to pull out a double dose of teim as soon as we all retired for the night.

“I fold.”

Plesu’s voice surprised me, and I looked to my right to see him toss his hand of cards into the center discard pile. He stood up and pushed his chair to the table’s edge. He was walking out of card night. My heart fell into my stomach.

He paused at my side and brought his face down to my ear. “Seven days is enough. When you’re ready to sleep again, find me. Until then I don’t want to see you.” He looked at my card hand then and pulled out a two. He tossed it into the discard pile and made eye contact with Doneika. “Two cards down.”

The room was silent as Doneika dealt two cards face-down in front of him and slid them across the surface of the table to me.

The sound of the door closing as Plesu left echoed in my ears. My vision blurred as the cards fell out of my hands.