Laid out on the cabin floor were my daddy’s Parsnit cards. That must have been what was in the knapsack, what Pop had entrusted me to keep safe from Mr. Hugo and Cecily Bob. The cards had been floating in water for hours and hours. They should have been soaked through, the colors all run, the cards bent and faded. But nope, they were shining, pristine, same as if they were brand-new.

“Capital deck of cards you got there,” she said. “Go on. Ain’t a one of them missing, not by my count.”

There they all were, and I had them for the first time to myself. I flipped each card over one by one, watched them dazzle in the sunlight. The Corpse Laugher with his dead mouth all twisted and that cackle you could practically hear, the sort of thing that could give a boy nightmares if he dwelt on it too long. The Brightly Shining Dancer with her red cheeks and dark eyes, pigtails coming undone as she twirls. The Lowdown Howler with his pants ripped at the knees, his old mangy hound bawling out the night. I turned over the Plains of Plenty with their rustling fields of golden brown and the Hermit’s Woods, a hawk flying black over the treetops. I saw the Far Yonder Mountains and the snow falling calm and quiet over them, a little puff of black smoke coming up from a cabin hidden somewhere deep in those crags.

What was it about these cards that sent a shiver right over me, and had ever since I was just a little kid sitting in Pop’s lap? Was it really only a game, something grown folks do for money, or was there more to it than that?

I knew it was hard to get a real good honest-to-God Parsnit deck, though Pop never quite told me the specifics. It wasn’t like there was anybody I could ask around our little town after Mom dragged me away from Pop. No, Parsnit was a swamp-folks game, one the townsfolk frowned on if ever they’d even heard of it. Rumor was a witch had to make them for you, a special mix of hexes and conjuration.

Staring at those cards in that old lady’s shack brought to mind a memory, like they were speaking the images back to me, straight into my mind.

I wasn’t more than four but it came to me in that moment, clear as yesterday. It was an endless winter’s night, cold and rainy, fire burning bright, Mom reading a book, Pop with that wild shut-in look glistening his eyes. Pop hated winter, hated being hemmed in by the cold. We’d been sitting like that in peace and quiet all night. It was like Pop couldn’t take it anymore. Suddenly he broke the silence of the evening and spoke.

“It takes a great art to make a true deck of Parsnit cards,” said Pop.

Pop was sometimes of a mind to make pronouncements like this, and I always waited eagerly for them, especially on boring winter nights like these.