Read Three Moments of an Explosion for Free Online Page B

wave. As if I wasn’t a hypocrite. As if all of us, all players, don’t live in a dense forest of might’ves.
    The kind of event for which I’d hoped when I was young and endlessly practicing passes, turning cards around my fingers, didn’t come. I couldn’t have said what it was exactly anyway—some chimera, something epochal, valuable, ostentatious, and secret.
    I didn’t cheat often or big enough to attract notice, my big wins I won straight, but occasionally, depending on the stakes, the game, my opponents, my finances, and whim, I’d twist my fingers according to muscle memory and take a trick that would otherwise have escaped me, withhold from my opponent some card I knew they needed.
    If I was very drunk I might show Belinda a trick or two. She loved seeing them and I loved to see her look when I showed her. Sometimes I called her the Chains. Sometimes she called me Bees.
    She had more luck than me, and she bet higher, and she knew hands and odds and combinations better, but she lost more, too. We once worked out that our earnings were almost identical.
    We went to Paris for the art. We went to Brazil and took pictures of the Jesus. We played Go Fish in Bucharest. We loved watching each other at the tables but didn’t play against each other often because we knew we wouldn’t hold back.
    We’d swapped numbers that day in Manchester, but it was a few weeks later that she called, and her mood was good when she did, so I figured she’d got through the forfeit.
    She didn’t ask me if I ever cheated and I didn’t volunteer any information and I never did it against her but she was too good a player not to suspect.
    For the first year or so we didn’t talk overmuch about the hidden suits, though we said enough to start to use those pet names, shyly. Every once in a long while she’d disappear for a day or two and come back tired and thoughtful. I knew it was the terms of the forfeit and I didn’t say anything.
    Once in Vegas a Canadian oncologist blithely told us there were hidden suits in the Baraja deck too. I was appalled by the conversation and we made our excuses.
    I understand the interest in the Baraja, the Italian deck, the German with its other colors, the Ganjifa, and so on, but I was always a devotee of the standard modern Rouennaise fifty-two. I loved the history that led to what we play with, the misprisions, the errors of copying that got us suicide kings and one-eyed Jacks. I loved the innovation of the rotational symmetry that isn’t a reflection. I loved the black and the red, against which the colors of the hidden suits are so stark—blue, gray, green, the white of Chains, the yellow of the Bees.
    “I only saw one other,” Belinda told me once, carefully. “The Nine of Teeth. But just for an instant.”
    The difficulty is that it’s bad form to talk about them brazenly, but once you’re inducted it’s also a good idea to learn as many rules for as many hands featuring as many cards in as many suits in as many games as you might ever play, just in case. And you can’t exactly look them up most of the time.
    No matter how proper you are, there are questions you’ll end up hearing asked, or asking. What bird is it flying above the Detective of Scissors? Where’s the missing link on the Nine of Chains? Why does the Ace of Ivy grow on bones?
    You might feel you know these cards, whether you’ve seen them or not. “We all end up getting to know certain cards pretty well, I guess,” Belinda said to me once. “One way or another.” You might have a favorite.
    The third time was Lublin.
    We were playing Bourré in a deconsecrated church. I’d faced two of my opponents before, and had had a fistfight with one. Belinda and I were taking turns: she stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder. She could see my cards but no one else’s.
    I picked up my hand. Five cards. One of them I’d never seen before.
    One two three four blue smokestacks, protruding into blue sky, gushing stylized