Five of Cups

Bile River

Opisthorchis felineus, the cat liver fluke, also called the Siberian liver fluke

A cloaked figure mourns three spilled cups while two still stand behind him. Waite: "It is a card of loss, but something remains over." Franky named the mood: "It goes by many names: torpor, listlessness, melancholy, depression, apathy. There are as many names for this emotional state as there are for different breeds of feline." This card calls it anhedonia, the loss of pleasure itself.

The Greeks blamed bile. Melancholy means "black bile." They had the wrong bile but the right neighborhood, because in western Siberia something really does live in the bile. Opisthorchis felineus was described from cats and dogs in Pisa in 1884 and found in a person in Tomsk in 1891. Its eggs reach a river and are eaten by a snail. The larvae that swim out burrow into fish of the carp family and wait in the muscle. Eat the fish raw, sun-dried or cold-smoked, and the young flukes climb into your bile ducts and become leaves about a centimeter long, each one both male and female, sending eggs back to the river. In some Tomsk villages more than half the people carry it (60 percent in a 2020 survey). Most never feel a thing.

Franky blamed the fluke for Siberian sadness, and a lab in Novosibirsk has tested something close to that. Mice got the fluke, or four weeks of being beaten up by meaner mice, or both. The fluke and the bullying each did harm, but only the bullying produced despair. Sartre was nearly right: hell is other mice. Together they were worst, which is to say the mice lived like people.

Franky's best warning is that anhedonia ruins your instruments: "Just like there's a difference between boiling and tepid water, there's a difference between violent people and boring people. The anhedonic may not be able to tell them apart." Grief deserves its time. But this card is drawn with its consolation behind the mourner's back. And if the gray lasts for weeks, tell someone, preferably someone with a medical license.

Some of the cups are still standing; turn around.

Scene: a cloaked figure at a slow, gold-green river, three cups tipped over at his feet with bile-colored water running out, two cups upright behind him; small silver fish in the shallows; across the bridge, a cat waiting on the far bank.

Prompt: List three things you've lost that you keep looking at. Then turn around and list the two that are still standing. Write one sentence to each of them.