Her face shone with its ugliness. She wasn’t fat. No chub hung to her like a bad friend. Her glasses didn’t fit her frame, her chin protruded out. Her eyebrows bristled thick and bushy. Her skin reflected the moonlight. Her eyes embedded sunken into her features. Her lips looked like they’d been painted on by a tepid painter.

She didn’t look up from the ground. Her eyes stuck to the feet of the people who passed her by. And those people edged away from her. She thought sometimes that she had an aura, a thick uncontrollable stench.

Her arms stuck to her torso covering her large lumps, she was neither fat nor skinny. But all of the fat was in the wrong places. Her skin wasn’t tan, her hair wasn’t straight but it wasn’t curly either. Every trait that made up a woman, she seemed to get it worse.

Worse than looking at her funny, worse than pointing at her and laughing, not one person looked at her. There wasn’t an appraising glance, a friendly gesture. There wasn’t a hint of recognition even to the people that she recognized. There was a baseball boy in her class, Aiden Dershovitz, tall and lanky about to pass her by and he didn’t even look at her. She’d given him a pencil once.

Another girl, Alice Munro’s eyes shone through her face and out the otherside. They’d sat next to each other in History for four years. Sometimes she thought that even her teachers didn’t see her.

She walked into English. Not a head turned. She sat in her seat, notched with a million markings of teenagers long passed. Little hearts, half-chewed pieces of gum, the “cool” S. Their teacher hadn’t arrived. Little bits of chitter chatter passed throughout the class.

There were only seven seats occupied. Joseph Gold, bookish and tall, he talked to his friend Levi Nowak, short and bulky, with a crooked nose, and who spoke in what was obviously a put-on accent. She watched them talk, chatter. Joseph kept on tapping his feet and Levi kept on asking for a description of the book they were supposed to read for class.

In the corner was the bookish trio, Allison, Triage, and Paris. Each represented another form of nerdy attractiveness. Allison wore solely sweaters and green and was definitely a lesbian, Triage loved every single thing Allison did and worshiped all of the coolest weirdest writers, Paris didn’t talk and only nodded. She saw Paris once after school making out with a gangly sweaty bearded man who played left guard on the football team. Paris sometimes looked at her. But only in the way that shy people acknowledged the other shy people in a room.

Allen McHale or Mr. McHale or McHaley or McDaddy, or Teacher as the kids called him, sat at the front. His wardrobe consisted of only half-knit sweaters, jeans, and band t-shirts. He almost never talked to students and every class of his was full of tomes that nobody had read in 12th grade English in three millennia.

“Class is all here.” He said standing up from his lounging position. He put his hands on his hips and stared out at them. Each of them responded by saying “present” or “here” in different manners. The girls said: “Present”, “Here”, and “Also here”, in quick order. The guys said: “Present” and “Preeeee-sant” in a long drawn-out manner. She responded with just a “here.”

McHale launched into his class topic, an analysis of Pynchon’s prose in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the students talked and chattered in response. Each had their own different levels of insight and intelligence, but she never talked. Not even once. Not even a peep. Not even just a little word, or a yes, or a chortle. She remained completely silent.

Her body bulged over the chairs, she was too tall for the school chairs and her legs spilled out in uneven heaps. The room stunk with books and ash and dust. It hadn’t been cleaned in years.

Classes went by. New characters shone in each, and she watched the people interact. Watched them talk, watched them fantasize and romance, and flirt. Each of them had a different flavor, Neapolitan, and vanilla, some of them were chocolate and some of them were thick dark tobacco. And sometimes when a particularly interesting conversation came up, someone mentioned Mastery, or someone mentioned Magic, she’d almost want to enter in, say something insightful.

She ate lunch alone between two palm trees in front of the school. She watched the “statue kids” as they ate. They dressed funnily and wore too many rings and talked in low voices and smoked sometimes. They never ate normal packed lunches, always something too fancy, or too cheap. From just a banana to sushi.

Sometimes she’d just lie down in the grass and look at the blue California sky. Smell the sea breeze coming from just a mile down and she’d gaze as cars trickled on by. A school was a beautiful amoeba of which she wasn’t a part of, but she understood all of their roles. Her eyes took in all of their faces and games and smiles and everything about them.

At 3:10 PM school ended and exploded with people. In every direction, someone was talking and she couldn’t focus on anything besides walking out of school. Sometimes she bumped into someone but they didn’t even notice. She looked to her left. Did someone say her name?

What was going on? Her brain started to fry. To overload. Everything felt off, her stomach flipped, and her eyes kept on looking side to side, up and down, and finally just down. She knew the way back home by heart. She mapped it in her head already.

As she left the throng of humans, her brain reset to normal. She looked at the beautiful Southern California day, smelled the ocean fog, and meandered off.

She walked through the suburbs, looking at little townhouses and bungalows as she passed them. She avoided the eyes of everyone on the street and finally made it home. A two-story house made with stucco with a ratty patch of grass in front. She opened the door and the smell of books and tobacco filled her lungs. Little mites of dust drifted through a sunbeam. She called: “Mom? Are you here? Samantha? Mom?”. No response.

She rushed to her room. Inside was a perfectly organized, perfectly immaculate room. There was a desk in the corner and a single twin bed. Not a single poster laid on the walls. Not a single plant in any corner. A window overlooked an alleyway. A penguin plushie lay on the bed and above the bed was “The Plan”. “The Plan” was a twenty by twenty piece of poster board. Scribbles covered the board, from inch to inch, it looked like a ball of worms on a page.

Inscribed on the top of the board, in red crayon and childish scrawl, was: “Iona Ionesco’s Plan for Success”. Right in the middle of this paper was a singular worn, torn, beaten, playing card. It was a Queen of… and the shape was unintelligible. The queen’s face, unlike a simple Bicycle, was in the shape of Iona’s. Her crooked nose was almost three-dimensional in the light.

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As Iona entered the room, she lowered herself down to the bottom of her bed and yanked, pulled out a massive tome, and thumped it out onto her bed. She got onto the bed and sat crisscrossed in front of the book. The title read in gold inlay on the black felt background: “Ankgor Erwat’s Remedy for Remedying Any of All Your Wishes and Seeing the True Nature of All Things”. The title actually curved itself around the outline of the card in the center of it. She’d picked up the book in a magic antique shop. One of those places covered in artifacts that nobody knew what they did, and nobody particularly cared.

She walked into the store on a whim, she’d never been anywhere like it. Her mom didn’t let her touch high magic. The place smelled like magic. That faint sulfuric odor that wafted from every old runic book and from every ritual gone awry. Nobody sat at the front of the store and when she called out nobody answered. She noticed a small sign covered in cigarette ash on the front desk saying “Out for lunch, pay WHAT you WWWAAANNTTTTT fucker.” The only way to describe the place was that it was covered in stuff. In one corner sat all manner of staves, hazelwood staffs, gnarled walking sticks, staffs covered in runes and staffs, at closer inspection, where every gnarl on the wood was a rune.

On one wall of the place was a giant bookcase. It went from edge to edge and even curled around one of the edges to create a reading nook. The owner arranged the books by color, starting from left to right, first red, then purple, then blue, then aquamarine, then salmon, then black, then colors multicolored, then almost pixelated. Every color imaginable dotted the shelves. The titles of each laid out in small gold print. Little notecards stuck out from certain books with recommendations. One read: “My favorite new book, pushed my lore beyond it’s boundaries. The section on cake magic and preparation is incredible. -Quintisile the Baker”. Some of the recommendations were in Spanish and French, even one in Chinese, and others in languages that Iona didn’t know.

One recommendation caught her eye. Nobody signed it and it only had a single word and it wasn’t even a word but a name: “Iona”. She looked around the store, the person behind the counter still wasn’t back. She picked up the book and read the title. A remedy for remedying? She opened it up to the first page, she looked at the words, and then she read the words, then she looked at the words again. “For you. Yes you. If you write in this book every dream you ever have and every power you’d ever want and you repeat those thoughts in every language you might know and even some languages you don’t know and even some languages that don’t exist, you will get power, yes you Iona. I know you’ll take it. No it isn’t some trick if I wanted to kill you or subvert you I would.” She stared at the words. Sniffed the pages and smelled the familiar half-sulfuric scent. She took the book, put some spare change on the front desk and went back home.

That was three years ago. Now the book sat in front of her. Each page covered in text, from head to toe, from corner to corner, but not following any of the normal rules of lines. Words were here in the corner, there peering over another word. Iona heaved the book over and flipped to the last page. She put her face to each of the words and took a spyglass at the foot of her bed and started to write.

First in Arabic, then Aramaic, then English, then Old French, then Greek, then German, then something that couldn’t even be intelligible, then she colored in dots on the paper. Each word meant the same thing, each phrase held the same thought. “Beauty”. Belle. Belleza. 美女. جمال. Vanië. Hours went by, the day turned into night, and not a single soul entered the house. She didn’t move an inch while she spoke but once every hour she’d stop, take a sip from her water bottle, take a singular Saltine cracker from her dresser and put it in her mouth, and take a one-minute break. She made sure to keep time on her phone. Not once longer than a minute.

After twelve hours, thirty-five minutes, and fourteen seconds, she stopped. She looked down at the book and closed it. Took three deep breaths, one, two, three, fished out of her bag a small pocket knife, placed her left hand on the card in the center of the posterboard, and cut it off, holding the severed hand to the card with her other hand.

Iona stared at her severed hand. At the contours, at the flowing blood, the blood that flowed into the card. That covered her face, her suit and all of the words. Those words began to move, to turn and rotate at high speeds, all the L’s gathered on one end of the page. All of them began to move.

The card ate her hand. Swallowed it whole, it melded into it’s pages. The words too began to float into the card. What was happening? Was something going to…

Break?

She closed her eyes and when she opened them, the card was gone, so were all the words. Everything was gone, all of her work and the only thing left in her brain was a piercing brilliant headache. She screamed. The pain swelled and boiled in her brain, it cracked on it’s edges. It felt like she, it felt like she, it felt like she might die. It felt like everything was coming together.

Words resounded in her head. The voice oozed with snark but it didn’t sound unkind, only a bit nasaly and high pitched. It said: “You’ve completed my ritual and your heart has decided to pick it’s desires. You see the world in cards, you see it only in suits and ties. Everyone plays their roles, everyone plays their hands. I’m watching you. Everything you do now is a card. Play an instrument, get a card. Use the cards on your body, your mind, and your soul and you’ll finally blossom. You can never lose this deck because it belongs to you. You’ll obtain many cards for everything you do. Every new skill, every new ability, they’ll come to the deck. And these skills and cards that you get? They can be merged into one. Put a card onto a card and something new appears, the greatest magic of all. Put a card onto something and it’ll gain new traits. Put it on yourself and well, you’ll find out. I want to see you succeed. I want to see you blossom. I want to see you love. But I know you see only one path, only one road, but it’s not the only one and it’s not even yours. There are a thousand dharmas, pick the right one.”

The pain swarmed her vision, it felt red, it felt awful. It started to spread to her hands, she couldn’t even think. Awful, awful pain, in all sorts of colors. The pain spoke, it had words, it felt like everything she hated. Her emotions, her body, her face, the eyes. It spoke in the voices of her classmates who never spoke to her. She hated her life. She hated how it was. How everyone looked at her. How she knew that she wouldn’t go anywhere because of this face. The game was rigged from the start

“I fucking can’t do it. I am Iona Ionesco and I can’t do it this way anymore.” And her vision blackened.

Iona Ionesco woke up, she looked out her window, still dark out. She must’ve been asleep for only a second. Her brain felt amazing, it felt great. Her mind felt like clouds. But there was also something else. She blinked. In place of her hand, a deck of cards stood.

She flipped through the deck. Most of the cards were empty, except the card that held her face. What did it mean? “Everything you do now is a card.” Obviously not everything. She breathed in. No “breathing” card appeared.

“Everything you do now is a card.” Time to test that out. She pulled out her backpack and got out a notebook and a pencil. She started to write, and write and write. Words flowed out of her easy, she wrote everything she saw today. She looked down at her left hand or where the left hand should’ve been, only a stub looked back. She wrote about how she felt. How everything was. About her poor lost hand and everything it had done. Time flowed in and out. Her eyes locked on the page, her mind focused on it’s margins.

She blinked and nothing else came to her. It was the first time in forever that she’d written just to write, not to do anything else. After she finished writing, she looked back at the deck of cards. And right next to the card of herself another card appeared. A Two of Writing. Instead of the normal suits of cards little words squiggled around it. They moved around. Miscellaneous words, nothing important. She held the card up to the light. She looked around the room for something to apply it to. How would she even apply it? She looked at her old school notebook. Each page weathered and covered in notes. What better object to put a Two of Writing on?

She grabbed the notebook and placed the card on it and waited. Nothing happened. She whispered a word and placed the card on it again and nothing happened. She tried putting the book into the Two of Writing and again nothing happened. She sat and thought for a minute. She shoved the Two of Writing into the seams of the book and at once a transformation took hold. The book jutted out an inch. The colors started to shift, the pages flipped and rustled. Filigree and gold appeared on it’s edges, it rumbled a bit and then it stopped. A faint smell of sulfur filled the air. Magic.

After a couple of shakes and a couple of minutes it stopped and Iona reached out to touch it. Nothing happened. She flipped through a couple of pages. Nothing changed about the content, actually that wasn’t true. Something changed. Her notes read differently. The words seemed off. In a couple of places, words shifted. She caught a couple of “the”’s she hadn’t written. The book corrected her grammar. She took up a pencil and wrote a couple of incomplete sentences. As soon as she set the pencil down ink appeared as if from some far-off distant place. A comma appeared in the middle of a sentence, a word she’d forgotten apparated into the blank white page. The book fixed itself.

This was magic. All of her work had paid off. Those hours of dedication reading to the card. Hours of dedication writing in the margins of the book. The research beforehand. Studying pronunciation in strange bookshops. Talking to her English teacher over and over again. Over three years of pure work and she’d finally done it and it’d given her the tools to make her life again. The deck of cards could make anything magical. She couldn’t even comprehend the level of runic work she’d need to make this artifact on her own. Nothing on the market could compare to it. She’d made an artifact out of thin air. She could do anything.

Iona Ionesco fell into her bed a changed women, a new women, with a world at her finger tips, if she played her cards right.