Tag Archives: fictions

The Board Game Based on Your Life

When they make the board game based on your life, what will the playing pieces look like? Will you roll dice to move around the board? Draw tiles? Play cards with pictures of your friends, your uncles, your pets on them?

Which areas of the board are safe, and which are dangerous? The room that was yours when you were a child. The room you couldn’t bear to step foot in. Maybe: a patch of grass somewhere. Maybe: grandmother’s porch. Maybe: aquarium field trip.

Will you keep score on a pad of paper? Collect sheets of paper money? Count tokens to represent jobs, road trips, arguments, books, loves, food, conversations, births? Mistakes, illnesses, sports events? Drugs, drinks, jogs, degrees? Paintings, sunsets, ceremonies, puppet shows?

How will the board game based on your life represent the board games you’ve played in your life? How long is the timer set for? Is it an hourglass or a ticking clock?

When they make the board game based on your life, they’ll thank you for being a playtester. You’ll get a complimentary copy in the mail. Will you leave it on the shelf with the others? Or will you unwrap it and set it up on the kitchen table, just to see if it looks any good?

Once you understand all the rules, will you play the board game based on your life? Who will be there to play it with you?

Abandoned Landscapes Abandoned

A few of us have been playing a game of consequences, each contributing a 250-word story that begins with the last sentence of the previous entry. The theme is “Abandoned Landscapes,” and my piece is the last of eleven. Here’s what came before: 1. Sam J. Miller, 2. Jade Park, 3. Jane Voodikon, 4. Lisa Silverman, 5. Anna Shapiro, 6. Mark Krotov, 7. Wah-Ming Chang, 8. Alex Chee, 9. Viet Dinh,10. Lucas Green.

Especially if the other guy is your son. Especially if the other guy, hangdog and big-eared in the front yard, grinding his teeth the way you’ve always ground yours when life opens its jaws at you—especially if the other guy, leaning against the rock with a concavity in its windward side, as though the wind itself had carved a limestone substitute for the embrace the father cannot afford to give the son—especially if he, heat-dazed and sullen, says, “But you’ll think of me sometimes, won’t you, Bill?”

Then, “Never, Oscar,” you have to tell him. “I’ll never think of you sometimes, and neither will your mother, and if that old tabby comes around again, I’m sure she won’t think of you sometimes either.”

This finally gets him moving, gets him to yank the goggles down over his eyes and ascend by means of rope and pulley, with a heroic flourish that leaves you startled, to the deck of his dirigible, gets him off your lawn and away from this mean ghost of a city, the city you built and let slide into ruin while learning to despise everything you create.

Afterward, leaning into the limestone, seeking what warmth your son left there, you are proud of him, so proud, because you know he’ll return under the enemy’s banner, and perfect with brute will the devastation you begat with mere neglect. And when you stand against him, and fall, you’ll know him precisely as well as you know yourself.

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Fin!

Further Adventures of Mr. Bluemoon

Some weeks ago, Wah-Ming Chang and I started writing a sentence together. We took turns writing it, one word at a time, in the comments section of this post, and completed it yesterday. Here it is:

Mr. Bluemoon, of that exceptional tribe named for its perpetually growing sense of devotion towards miniature galaxies, never once imagined he himself would stand, with thirteen engines sounding like thirteen ghoulish mourners, aboard the Flying Wastrel, hand flat against the lever that directed heaven’s temperament.

We’ve decided not to abandon Mr. Bluemoon quite yet, so the rest of his story will be written right here, using the same method. I for one am curious to find out what happens to him.