Nine of Cups

The Nine is the wish card. A well-fed man sits in front of nine cups with his arms folded and the smile of someone who got everything he asked for. People love drawing it. We'd like to ask who, exactly, made the wish.

Schistocephalus solidus starts life in a copepod, which a three-spined stickleback eats as a snack. The worm then settles into the fish's body cavity and grows, and grows, until parasite can make up a large share of what the fish weighs; one fish may carry several. None of this is the worm's destination. It is waiting for a bird, because only in a warm bird's gut can it mature and mate, which it does quickly once it arrives, as if it had been rehearsing. Infected sticklebacks tend to get bolder and slower to flee, easier for a heron. Scientists still argue whether the worm is steering the fish or the fish is just too heavy to care. The fish, if asked, would probably say it had never felt more itself.

Here's the dark joke underneath the card. The Nine really is the card of getting your wish. It's just that a wish can be swallowed small, long before you remember having it, and then grow until it fills the body. Ambition does this. So do other people's expectations, and so does an ad you saw at fourteen. The satisfied man on the card isn't lying. He's full. The question is what he's full of, and whether his new calm is peace or the calm of a fish that has stopped looking up.

After a long enough time, the wish is the one who wishes.