All the dreaded cards

We played our hearts out at the kitchen table in games of Life, Diplomacy, and Scrabble, and built with cards our own Tower of Bable, and talked, of work, days, dreams, the family fable we used as sacred writ to guide our choices, texts never written by hands but with speech that flittered above us, beyond our reach, scrawled onto the kitchen walls with our voices. We bent the cards like words to build our home. We never touched heaven, and when we fell a hanging Jack of Spades let loose a hell that sent us to stagger, sea to sea, roam across the earth. I think about those cards. They read us more than we read them. We fit their stories we thought fit us. Beneath lit ceiling fixtures, we sang their songs like bards.