The One Of Hearts (ePub)

After that show aired, I think everyone in the world started to see similar things going on in their world that mirrored the way that events flipped themselves and people reversed themselves in this first introduction to the 'Bizarro Universe'. It's become kind of a standard way of explaining things that don't make sense in our lives.

But, more recently, I was playing cards with a bunch of friends and noticed, for the first time that the packs of cards we were all fresh and new all had the '1's missing. There was no '1' of spades, no '1' of clubs, no '1' of Diamonds and no '1' of hearts. There were no '1's. The actual full decks of all the playing cards in this universe don't contain any '1's, and instead range from '2' to '10' and then there are the royals, and 'Aces' holding more value than the rest.

I asked everyone at the table why there were no '1's in any of our decks and the answers were as goofy as they were varied. No one knew, really, so as soon as I got home, I googled it.

For some crazy reason that hasn't been rectified in two hundred years of card-playing, some lesser-known Queen in Europe somewhere declared a law that playing cards would be taxed and taxed so heavily, that people took the '1's out in protest and this became the norm for all future card decks. Something like that. It's vague. I could make no sense out of it. There's also something about stamps in this non-sensical explanation.

Whatever, the reason, certainly someone after two hundred years of paying these outrageous 'Card Taxes' would change the rules so that the '1's could be recognized and put back in. But no one did because no one really noticed the difference. Think about that? In a rational universe, not this Bizarro one, this kind of blatant mistake would never happen in the first place, but if it did, it would have been rectified immediately.