Card Castles

Diligent masons, their cards smelt of cards and fingers and a thousand rounds of rummy and jacks. And on a murky Saturday afternoon, when warty frogs raided their makeshift cricket grounds and the rain made it impossible to play without fuming moms and fever excuses for absentees on Monday, they squatted on the cold cement floor and built card castles against walls. One by one, they angled the cards seventy five, their dog-eared and bent edges precariously touching each other like a pariah dog and water.

Storey by storey, they exhausted each others' fifty sixes in hours of undying labour, until they could build no more for lack of material. They picked up their aching ten year old muscles and stared at their creation, as the frogs outside danced to the pitter-pattering of the feverish needle-sharp rain and chose their monsoon mates.

They marveled, sleepy eyed, at what they saw; a curiously huge castle that took an unnatural curve in the bottom few floors; gravity, as they put it, as the cards sagged under the weight of more above. The upper floors had the spoilsports; that dingle-dangled in drafts of chill rain air that swept in from an open window, and often toppled like idiots over blondes.

“Ok…so now what?”

“Should we kill it?”

“Of course!”