Flash Fiction Anthology

Linda's cards

I remembered it all now, when it was too late.

As I stood petrified, paralyzed by fear and the memory, stunned like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to move a muscle to get out of the way of the car speeding towards me from the darkness.

"Make sure you'll stay in on the sixth of June in ten years time, Lara."

The words spoken in a sing-song, little girl's voice suddenly echoed in my mind. I had forgotten them completely, until now.

The girl was Linda, the neighbours' daughter I babysat every Saturday night for nearly two years, before the family moved away. She was seven then, and I had never seen her since... Only her sentence remained with me for a long while after she was gone, scribbled on a page of my diary. But as the years passed, it faded away like the majority of my memories of Ethelinda.

All that I remembered of her now, ten years later, were her jet black hair and eyes, and her fascination with that strange deck of cards.

Sometimes she would engage me in a card game she invented the moment her parents left, other times she would only talk about the cards she caressed lovingly with her fingertips as she laid them side by side on the round carpet in the middle of her room where she sat cross-legged, whispering about their meaning and her grandma, to whom they belonged before Ethelinda.

Some nights she would make me draw a few of them from the deck and frown or giggle endlessly when she looked at those that coincidence guided my fingers to.

Then, ten years ago precisely, I drew the card with the hooded... creature, and for once Linda did not laugh. The little girl's shoulders slumped as she observed the picture printed in bold, disturbing colours. She looked age-old as she sighed, running her finger along the card's edge.

"Make sure you'll stay at home on this day, in ten years time," she muttered in a voice that did not sound like hers, creeping me out.

But then she shrugged and giggled, "I wish I had such a cloak, it would make me look like a witch. I bet all kids at school would be frightened..."

That was all. I had never seen that card in her deck since and Ethelinda never spoke about it again. I wrote her sentence down in my diary only so I could banish the memory of that evening from my mind.

Now, as the car's tires sent the puddes drowning the asphalt flying high in sheets, I remembered. It rained that night, ten years ago, too. Like Linda, I wished to have such a cloak then, to protect me from the water falling from the sky...