The cards were oak. The four chairs were maple. The table was from something that no one could remember, because it and all its relatives had been extinct for at least three hundred million years.
As always, Spring shuffled and dealt the first hand, flipping each card out with happy carefreeness that never failed to send them spinning across the table and into laps. The other three took it with varying degrees of grace: Summer smiled politely, Winter’s lips pursed, and Autumn…well, autumn glowered, but he did that at anything. The sight of a chipmunk consuming an acorn under an apple tree on a sunny day would’ve merely deepened his scowl.
“So!” said Spring brightly as she laid the deck down on the table. “Who cuts?”
“It’s always Summer,” said Winter, clutching his robe around himself so the drafts clung to him like children. “It was Summer last time and all the times before, and it will be Summer next time and all the times after.”
“But what about this time?” asked Spring, as Summer gently plucked the deck from her fingers.
“That too,” Summer said as she cut the deck. Warmth spread across the age-smoothed surface of the cards as her wooden hands touched them.
“And might I add,” said Winter, “that it is customary to cut the deck before you deal.”
“Oh,” said Spring, crestfallen. The flowers in her hair brightened a little in an attempt to cheer her up.
“Leave off her,” snapped Summer, surreptitiously sliding a few extra cards off the deck and passing them around to even out the hands. “Right then, game’s open. I’ll ante in a warm afternoon. Autumn?”
He sneezed sulphuously, spreading patches of mould across his end of the table like slimy spiderwebs and making the great wheezing root-filled gape in his chest yawn like a second mouth. “I’ll raise you ten acres of rotting hardwoods,” he declared, and slapped the shoulder of the frozen man next to him. “Winter, hurry up.”
Winter raised one stiff corpse’s eyebrow in distaste at the gnarled paw on his shoulder until it was removed nonchalantly. “Six hours of light snow,” he said, testily. “Spring, your turn.”
She jumped. “Oh! Already? Ummm….. let me see.” She chewed her lip as she examined the old, old, old playing cards clutched in her bright green fingers. “Ummm… Umm.. Um. Uh, I’ll raise it,” she declared.
There was a pause.
“By what, dear?” asked Summer, as gently as possible.
“Oh! Umm, a blooming cherry tree!” she said.
“Marvellous. Right then, time to draw.”
Summer took two cards. Autumn took none. Winter took one. Spring chewed a nail, hesitated, then replaced all five.
“Don’t do that dear, it’s a nasty habit,” said Summer. “I’ll put in a sunny weekend; Autumn, your go.”
“A foggy fortnight,” he wheezed, then banged his twisted walking stick. “Winter! Hurry up you miserable old coot!”
“Be quiet,” said Winter. “I’ll wager… a storm of sleet. Spring, it’s your bet.”
“Ummmmmmmmmmmm….” Spring looked at the small glowing flickers of something-or-other that had congealed in the center of the table. They weren’t quite all not there, and were shaded various colours of imagination. “Did you say a whole sleet storm?”
“Yes,” said Winter.
“Not just a shower?”
“No,” said Winter.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Winter, something in the hiss of the syllable trailing off into hints of unspeakable deeds.
“Um. I fold,” she said.
Summer sighed. “Spring, honey, let me look at your cards for a moment.”
“Here now! That’s cheating!” snapped Winter.
“Stuff your miserable lungs,” said Summer, examining Spring’s reluctantly proffered cards with a critical eye. “The girl’s still learning, and there’s no shame in getting a little help. Dear, this is an excellent hand. I’d keep a tight grip on this one.”
“She’s always learning – that’s the entire point of Spring. You’re being absurd and unbalancing the game,” said Winter.
“Act your age.”
“Insufferable,” whined Autumn.
“Quiet!” said Winter and Summer. He gurgled grumpily at them.
“Okay,” said Spring. “I’ll put in… a rainy week.”
“A whole week! See what happens when you indulge them?” said Winter.
“Shut up and show the cards,” said Autumn, dumping his hand unceremoniously on the table, where it sprawled like an infestation of toadstools. “I’ve got three-of-a-kind tree stumps, and the lumberjack’s axe.”
“A pair of ewes and a pair of rams, shepherd-high,” said Summer, over Winter’s attempts at protest.
“Jack Frost and thirty-four snowflakes,” he said, putting as much bitter venom into his voice as he could. It was surprisingly little – frozen vocal chords are even less expressive than they sound.
“Um,” said Spring as she laid down her hand. “Here’s my cards. I’ve got a budding forest, a flowery meadow, green grass, a blooming rose, and a freshly-laid robin’s egg. What is this called again, Summer?”
“A flush, dear,” said Summer. “And the highest hand, too! The pot’s yours – go on, take it.”
Spring hesitated for a moment under Winter’s baleful eye, then reached out and gently poked the nearest of the… things in the center of the tabletop. They vanished into her hand with nary a whisper.
Summer accepted the cards and shuffled them with a businesslike manner. “My turn to cut,” chuckled Autumn, moistly. The cards nearly stuck to his palms as he separated them clumsily, turning over and over with gross slurping sounds. He handed them back, and Summer wiped off each one she dealt without really noticing.
“A midafternoon chill,” Autumn said, eyes spilling over his cards. “Winter, you’re up.”
“A blustering blizzard,” said Winter, glaring at Summer.
“I fold,” said Spring quickly, shoving her cards away as if they’d grown red hot. She felt the urge to chew her nails again.
“Oh, but you don’t have to, dear,” Summer told her without making eye contact and in a slightly absent tone. She was busy glaring back at Winter.
“No. Um. I’m fine. Go on.”
“Right,” said Summer in the nastiest voice she’d used all evening. “A blazing heat wave. Draw, and draw well, boys.”
The cards were picked up by the three players, in one case haphazardly and in the others with a great deal of deliberate menace and enough tension to crack a wineglass from forty paces.
“Eight thousand tons of rotting leaves,” croaked Autumn. “Go on then, Frosty.”
“An advancing glaciation,” said Winter, poker faced as only a frozen body can be.
There was a long, significant pause, in which Spring nearly bit off a finger. No one noticed (including her) because they were all watching Summer very carefully.
“A global spike in temperature, leading to the vanishing of the polar ice caps. A rise in sea levels. And. General. Humidity,” said Summer, each word delivered as if it were a brick being bashed into the back of someone’s skull.
The cards dropped.
“A mother grizzly, a subadult, and three cubs,” said Autumn.
“Four glaciers,” said Winter. The hoarfrost around his eyes had thickened to the point where his face was nearly full again.
Summer’s expression was wooden, as befitted her skin, but her face had turned a deep red that typically heralded one of the more colourful skin cancers. “Four forest fires.”
There was an even longer and more significant pause as the bets were silently whisked back to their original owners, and it ended when both Summer and Winter stood up.
“I think,” said Summer, “that we should take this outside.”
“I concur,” said Winter, icicles now dripping from his mouth.
The door banged shut behind them, leaving Spring and Autumn alone. Almost immediately afterward, there was a heavy thud.
“I do hope they won’t be too hard on each other,” said Spring, still nursing her wounded finger. She winced at the sound of ripping cloth.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Autumn, leering absently as he examined the bottom of the deck. He removed the card, then replaced it, then took it out and put it back in the centre of the stack with a satisfied grunt.
“I just hate it when they fight like this,” she explained. A sudden crash and yell made the table quiver.
“Eh?” said Autumn as he fished in first his chest cavity, then his boot for something murky and thankfully unidentifiable. “Oh? Yes, fighting. Terrible thing. Terrible. Awful really. Say, you deal a lot with, heh, blooming buds and such, right?”
“Yes.”
Autumn raised his voice over the increasingly noisy sounds coming from outside. “Birds courting, bears shambling out of dens all ready to pair off, flowers screaming to each other “Fertilize me! FERTILIZE ME!” right?”
“Oh of course,” said Spring.
“Are you sure?” asked Autumn, stuffing the glob-shaped object he’d extracted up his sleeve.
“Pardon?” It had gone quiet beyond the room.
“Oh, never mind.”
The door swung open again and both Summer and Winter reentered. Winter was breathing unusually heavily – that is, at all – and Summer was still unusually red.
“Right,” she said, sitting down heavily. “Whose deal was it again?”
“Mine,” breathed Autumn, a messy grin on his face. The cards slopped heavily through his hands for a scant collection of seconds before he tossed them to Winter, nearly decking him. “Cut them up fast then, will you?”
Winter barely had the energy to give him more than a weary look as he crisply sliced the pile into two and rearranged it, the faint traces of sludge freezing in place. “A perfect icicle,” he said.
“Back to trinkets again, are we?” taunted Autumn.
“Shut up,” said Winter, without much force or care behind it.
“A sprouting seedling,” said Spring, examining her finger with care. She’d wrapped a small leaf around it as a bandage, and was watching it bloom happily.
“A cooling midday breeze,” said Summer, slowly stretching her shoulders and working out a kink in her neck.
“The first snow of the year,” said Autumn.
Summer nearly sprained her neck.
“Well,” said Winter, whose eyebrow had raised an entire inch. “I take it you preferred the big stakes then, eh? Fine. A night that drops fifty degrees Celsius below zero.”
Spring was rearranging her cards frantically, looking at one, then two, then the other three, then four of the lot, as if it would change them into something she could understand. “Uh, one second, um. Um. Err… I’ll put in… one moment…”
“While we’re still young, girl!” shouted Autumn, then he guffawed.
“Hush!” said Winter and Summer simultaneously. He merely snickered.
“Right!” said Spring, spots of tulip-red anger appearing on her cheeks. “A whole two months of rain! And stop laughing at me!”
“A windless three weeks with no clouds in the sky,” said Summer. “And yes, stop that for goodness’ sake, you sound like a crow choking on a toad.”
“Every ripened nut in all of the Americas,” said Autumn. He threw his hand down. “Three fat squirrels and a pair of sleepy skunks! Top that!”
“That will be rather difficult,” said Summer, “As I’m sure you know, having marked all the cards with that raw rot of yours.”
A third pause, somehow contriving to be more awkward than the other two.
“Ah?” said Autumn, part disbelief, part question.
“The smell,” clarified Summer. “Of course you can’t tell, or Winter, and Spring’s a good girl – just a bit distracted. But some of us can use our noses just fine, thank you very much.”
“Ah,” said Autumn, shrinking a little in his seat. Winter began to stand up again, rolling up the sleeves of his robe.
“Please don’t,” said Spring. “Please.”
“He cheated,” said Winter, icicles beginning to form on his knuckles as he flexed them.
“He’s old and just wanted some nice weather, I’m sure,” begged Spring. “I can lend him some afternoon showers and a few rainbows. Please.”
Winter looked to Autumn, cowering in his high-backed maple chair, then over to Summer. She shrugged, then nodded very slightly.
“All right,” he said. “Fine. For the sake of ending the game peacefully.” He picked up the deck and gathered his quarter of the cards from it, stuffing them into one of his pockets. “Same time next year?”
“Of course,” said Summer. Her cards she slipped onto her arms, where they soaked into her skin, wood on wood.
Spring made a second garland from hers, earth tones and bright flowers mixed in green hair. Autumn stuffed his into his chest, clutched amidst the roots, then caught the little flickering mess of complicated things that Spring tossed to him. He nearly dropped it in surprise.
“You don’t have to do that, you know,” he said.
“It’s all right,” she replied. “I’ve got plenty, and you need them more than I do.” She hugged him on the way out. The slime took a bit of scrubbing, but the look on his face was worth it.
They parted ways immediately after leaving the playing room, farewells and waves slung over shoulders like old sacks. Where they each spent the rest of the year was quite different, and not at all nice for any of them to play visitors with each other.
Still, there was always the next game to look forward to.