Ten of Cups

The Ten is the happy family under a rainbow of cups: parents with arms raised, children dancing, a little house on the hill. It's the most wholesome card in the deck, which is why the Franky edition hands it to shark parasites.

A shark doesn't have a long, coiled gut like ours. Many have a short one with a spiral valve inside, a corkscrew fold that slows the food down in a small space. To a tapeworm this is a cathedral, a spiral staircase of nourishment with a chapel on every landing. Calliobothrium verticillatum lives in the spiral valve of the smooth dogfish, gripping the wall with a head built of suckers and hooks, and it shares the building with other tapeworm species, each keeping to its own floor. Sharks turn out to be where tapeworm diversity runs richest, because the shark sits at the top of the food chain and everything eventually arrives there, including everyone's parasites.

So the Ten is belonging, and the belonging is real. Everyone has a floor. Everyone is fed. Nobody asks where the food came from, because in a good home you don't have to. That's the blessing and the indictment at once. Every happy household is also somebody's host, and a home at the top is fed by everything below it. The rainbow on the card is lovely. Somebody paid for it.

Look up at the skylight, and ask what's eating the house.