Thalia Floros
Somewhere in Manhattan | Cold hands (warm heart?) | Hungry for dinner
It was difficult to say how much time would have passed, were it not frozen, as I sat in my seat and calculated the odds before me. I had four clubs, and was waiting for the last one to fall on the river so I could win the pot with a flush. There are 13 clubs in a 52-card deck - two of them were in my hand, two were on the board, and nine were god knows where. There were 46 cards that could come on the river, and nine of them would give me a win. The odds were 37 to 9 or about 4 to 1. Not bad. I nervously tucked my curls behind my ear and adjusted the black blazer I was wearing over a low cut velvet blouse. Women in poker had to take any advantage available, and as a rather diminutive, inexperienced, and young looking player, it meant trying to blend in with the confident, well-dressed and expensive looking Manhattan poker club’s attendees.
I looked around the table at the four other players. One woman, and three men. The woman was gorgeous, with glossy black hair that fell in waves down her back and a tiny red cocktail dress. Her elegantly done face was frozen in a slight frown. Of the three men, two had folded. One, tuxedo clad, was side-eyeing the woman’s breasts, which were practically spilling from the top of her tight dress, and the other, an older gentleman, was picking his nose and had been removing his finger when time had stopped. The man who was still playing wore a mask - his face held this self-satisfied smirk for the past three hours that we’d played, and it must have been his default poker face. Picture Justin Bieber’s mug but a million times more punchable.
I calculated the odds again, just to make sure, and reviewed the other player’s faces. The woman most likely had a weak hand, the man - very hard to say. It was freezing in here, even when time was stopped. Though the temperature of the room was a constant, it was eerily silent, and my mind made phantom sounds as my ears tried to hear sounds that weren’t there. Sometimes the whole scene flickered, and my vision went black, before the same frozen world re-appeared around me. My hands felt numb and I set my cards down to rub them together. I tried picking them back up again, but they had become part of the scene, and my hand went right through them, as well the entire table itself. I’d known of this ability of mine for a decade now, but I had come no closer to figuring out how it worked. I wanted to wrap this up quickly though, and I starting focusing on re-animating everything. It was like trying to awake from sleep paralysis; squeezing my eyes open and closed, focusing on breathing steadily, listening for sounds that should be there and watching for movement that was supposed to be happening all around me.
“Your turn, Tiny,” the woman said, her voice was silky, but I could sense a hint of irritation. Good.
“Raise,” I said, confidently, meeting her eyes. My stomach rumbled. Ugh, I just wanted to go. Sometimes I wish I could speed up time instead. Actually, I wished that all the time. Then, I drew a club.
About 20 minutes later I exited the building, $2,500 richer, leaving behind its brightly colored lights and bouts of uproarious conversation, laughter and arguments behind. New York in the winter was devastatingly frigid. It was a wet and clinging cold that made me want to return to my apartment, bundle up in a mountain of blankets and never go outside again.
But... I had an AA meeting to go to. I had promised Erina I’d go tonight, as she seemed confident that there’d be new faces. While I was always excited to meet new people, the high amount of turnover in the past year was concerning. Actually, I was the only one of the original gang left from when AA had started, a little over a year and a half ago. It wasn’t uncommon for people to go to only one or two meetings every once in a while, or just stop appearing, but I had lost touch with nearly everyone who had been in the initial group of eight that spring. Erina had said that people come and go, but I could see that she was concerned as well. And she was supposed to be like a homing beacon for people like us, so what was that supposed to mean?
And yes, I know what you’re thinking. Alcoholics are supposed to get better and move on, that’s what Alcoholics Anonymous is all about. But this wasn’t that AA. It was Atypicals Anonymous, a term Erina had coined, given that it catered to those with strange and unusual abilities. It was meant to be a support group, and while Erina had helped me control my powers, I hadn’t made a single friend who hadn’t disappeared since that first meeting. People just came and went, or, if you were a bit anxious like myself, you could say they vanished. It was kind of funny, in a sad way: the image of myself sitting in the same chair, seemingly frozen in time, as a rotating cast of atypicals appeared and disappeared week after week.
Later
Central Park | Cold Everywhere | Stomach an Empty Void
Erina was...complicated. Even after a year of knowing her through AA meetings, I never felt a single step closer to her. She would arrive dressed like a senioritis plagued college student, which in the Winter mean an oversized fluffy parka over an old sweatshirt and leggings. She was brilliant, I had attended one of her psychology lectures at Brown, and she was almost uncomfortably apt at getting to the root of whatever problem you asked her about. She truly seemed truly committed to building the first Atypical community of its kind. But anyone could tell you that behind that laid-back demeanor and bright mind, there was something weighing on her that she wasn’t ready to open up about, and maybe never would be.
Erina also moved a hundred miles a minute. She would be going on long, unannounced trips to investigate “atypical activity” (in her words), she seemed to be collecting all the info she possibly could on an organization called Obsidian, and she spent a good deal of time on “community outreach,” which is how she described her methods for finding and inviting new atypicals. I was both fascinated, and alarmed, at her dedication.
I was the first to arrive at the meeting, which was typical for me. I was always early to everything, and I felt like the icy wind nearly blew me into the small, cozy building that was the Central Park Community Center. Erina had booked the latest slot in the schedule, and there were no meetings before ours, so this remote area of the park, concealed by a dense stand of trees, was desolate. It was already getting dark, and and the only lights were the ones emanating from the wood and stone structure that seemed in this moment like the only warm place in the universe. Erina was blasting Rush as she set up about twelve folding chairs in a neat ring. She'd turn it off when the meeting started, but it seemed to get her in a contemplative mood or something. Somehow she always knew how many people were coming, even if someone stumbled in late or had seemingly come by accident. It was one of those times when I wondered if she was leaving out some important details about her powers. She was dressed in yoga pants and a grey sweatshirt, and her short brown hair was windblown.
“Thalia! So good to see you!" She said before turning around. When she did, and she saw me, she sighed. "You wore nothing but a blazer and that skirt out in this weather? Poker night?"
"Every night's poker night..." I responded, a little sheepishly. Yeah, we'd talked about poker a lot. She found my gameplay philosophy fascinating. However, I sometimes felt like a lab rat when she asked me all sorts of questions about my thought process and emotional state while playing, and if it effected my abilities. Was I tempted to cheat? Did I consider giving myself extra time to evaluate each hand to be cheating? This time though, she seemed to sense that I wasn't in the mood and shrugged it off.
"We have a lot of new faces tonight! And I believe Lan, from last week, will be returning!” She gave me one of her terse smiles, and then kept setting up. We small-talked a bit as I passed her a couple of chairs.
When she finished, she began setting up the snack table. Danishes, it was always danishes. But for some reason she had also included a carton of whole milk, and a carton of soy milk. That was new. I grabbed a cream cheese danish and settled into my favorite chair, and waited for the others to arrive.
Erina always left about a half an hour in the beginning for socializing. Then, the meeting would start out like usual, with Erina reminding us of the motto of AA (“Benign Anarchy”) and the three pillars (Unity, Stability and Responsibility). Then we would go around in a circle and introduce ourselves. She would usually have interesting prompts, and we would be able to share how we were feeling. Her prompts were sometimes basic, like “What was one good thing, and one bad thing that happened to you this week.” But they could also be incredibly odd, like “What inanimate object do you wish you could eliminate from existence.” Newcomers could ask questions, or just listen. And then, at the end, we would stuff our face with more danishes, and just get to know one another. It could be truly benign anarchy, but what do you expect when you invite a group of atypicals into a small room to talk about feelings?
