3. Ace of Spades:
A girl named Amanda lifts a porcelain teapot and pours. Honey streaked liquid splashes giddily from the spout and into a waiting cup. A clatter echoes as the delicate cup is laid to rest artfully atop its corresponding saucer.
Amanda doesn't smile.
Most would prefer it if she did. Her default expression consisted of a small pursed mouth set under mournful colorless eyes and topped by unruly brown shoulder-length hair. Most read her as unapproachable, and it'd be quite the hard-pressed challenge to disagree with them now. Oblivious to the world around her, she continues, methodically pouring the appropriate amount of tea into each of the six cups, and then stirring in the necessary cream and sugar. She neatly sets a single cookie at each place. Mexican wedding cookies, stuffed with sugar, butter, and almonds. The girl's favorite. But those eyes of hers are haunted.
And still she doesn't smile.
Her desolate tea party is staged on a home-sewn quilt stretched out in the middle of a meadow. Her invisible guests are kneeling beside her, at the center of summer's Siberia. Her dress is a lacey black spider web, complemented by a pair of shadowy arm-length gloves and a black feathered headpiece buried within the mass of her problematic hair. The sky looms above her, and like a wizened old grandfather, it watches her, through turbulent gray eyebrows and a deeply concerned frown.
"What are you doing?"
He appears out of nowhere, as he sometimes does. A tall man with stormcloud-flavored hair and a child's smile. Russia.
Amanda calmly looks up and out of her private world. Even now, upon seeing him, her expression remains hollow.
"I was feeling a bit nostalgic, though I couldn't begin to explain why. I never played tea party as a younger girl."
Russia says nothing. His amethyst eyes are tormented. An Eastern Orthodox crucifix on the blackest batwing of chains dangles from his neck, set against his suit-wearing chest. It had been a gift from Amanda. She always says he looks best with black. He's been wearing it loyally for just over two years now.
"Would you like some?" Amanda asks, miles away.
He takes a place at the party. He's her first visible guest, dressed in the most appropriate of Victorian suits and topped by a top hat. All his fellow guests stare at him haughtily with their nonexistent eyes. She fills for him the seventh cup. The lucky seventh.
"I'm glad you're here," she says.
"Where else would I be?" he asks.
"Oh, I don't know," she turns away, glancing at her left shoulder and the ink that colors it. A black spade with a red heart buried within. "I just felt that cliché premonition. The one you get when something bad is about to happen."
-xXx-