The Card Everyone Fears

Welcome to the Spot Writers. Today’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit Corgi Capers mystery series. She’ll have some illustrated children’s books out soon!

The prompt is: your character looks outside the window and sees something strange.

The Card Everyone Fears

by Val Muller

Mrs. June flipped through the last folder in her file cabinet. She sorted most of the papers into the recycling bin but kept two worksheets for her successor. Then she took the last item out of the drawer—a cardstock image of Hamlet created as a tarot card years ago by a student.

Mrs. June remembered the student’s face—but never her name. She’d not signed her artwork, and if Mrs. June remembered correctly, she had not been one to remember her name on any assignment. Or to show up for her yearbook photo.

The girl had been a terrible student, but she really stepped it up for this project. She had never picked up the project after it was graded—she had turned it in late and then disappeared after graduation. But the 8x10 was so beautifully created that Mrs. June had kept it all these years. She looked at it at the start of each school year but never had the courage to display it. It was, after all, the tarot card for Death. Not sure her school admin would appreciate that lingering over students every day.

And it was funny, too. Mrs. June always joked she would never retire—she said she would always keep working and would die there at her job. And yet, here she was. She made it through the tears of her final graduation and had only this last teacher workday until she walked out of this building for the last time as an employee.

There was a strange sound outside—it reminded her of the sound of a forest moving. She thought instantly of MacBeth—of Birnam Wood coming to life and approaching the castle. Stranger things had happened in all her decades of teaching. She went to the window to look.

There was indeed a snapped branch—the tree right outside her window. A group of students were hustling to untangle something from the fallen limb.

“She’s there!” they screamed, all eyes snapping to her window.

The crowd re-formed, and the tangled object—a white banner—unfurled, revealing a message:

Mrs. June, we love you!

She looked out over the crowd. There were some of yesterday’s graduates and then—no, it wasn’t their parents, not exactly. It was—students from last year. And the year before. And from a decade ago. Some she’d kept up with on social media. Others, no, but she recognized their faces at once.

They beckoned her.

When she emerged from the building and entered the crowd, she was all tears as they shared stories of the ways she inspired them. At the end, they handed her a book, a written account of what they just shared, from them and many others who had reached over the ether of the internet to share their memories, their stories, their thanks. It was a book she could revisit countless times.

As she clutched the book, she looked out at the crowd. There she was. The girl’s name came back to her in an instant. Girl? No, woman now. Dare she say, middle aged.

Carissa Schaefer, the student artist who had created the Hamlet tarot. They spent time catching up, and she learned that Carissa had gone on to become a therapist, crediting Mrs. June as one of her inspirations.

“I have something for you,” Mrs. June told Carissa and led her up to the classroom where she showed her the carefully-kept tarot card.

“My goodness,” Carissa said. “I barely remember creating that, but it’s all coming back to me now. The final scene in Hamlet and how it’s all just death, death, death.” She smiled. “Back then, I was a morbid teenager.”

“I’ll admit I was afraid to hang this on the wall. I didn’t want students to have the wrong idea about me, or the class.”

Carissa laughed. “I didn’t know much about tarot cards back then. The Death card always scares everyone, but it’s actually an optimistic one.”

“Optimistic.” Mrs. June pondered this as she studied the artwork.

“It’s like a rebirth. Something dies, metaphorically—unless you’re Hamlet, I guess—but then something else begins. Like winter melting to spring. Or the other guy becoming king after Hamlet.”

“Fortinbras,” Mrs. June said.

“Or someone retiring from teaching and going on to open the next chapter.”

Mrs. June smiled.

“You’ve held onto that card so long, I’d like you to keep it,” Carissa said.

Mrs. June smiled. “Only if you sign it.”

As Carissa put her name on her assignment decades after the due date, Mrs. June made plans to stop at the craft store on the way home. She wanted to frame the card, and she had the perfect place to display it at home, right in the kitchen where she could always think about all she’d accomplished in the career she was leaving behind, and about new beginnings.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:
Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/
Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/
Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com
Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/