Dwelling Solo RPG Session 3: The Honey-Chili Heart
Probe the temperature of a chicken and ambient human anger with the ghosts of the Dwelling solo RPG. Session 3: The Dining Room.
DINING ROOM
In this scene, the narrator wanders into the dining room to check windows after his living room encounter with a spectral ex. There is no draft, but he’s stopped cold when he notices the dining room table is set. He is compelled to sit. From the prompt on page 32: “I can feel the presence of others. Far away, but pressing into me, in the moments it takes me to look up and around I feel surrounded, as if all the empty space around me summoned long-reaching shadows to fill it. In each seat is a tall looming presence, jutting hands that cut at empty plates and reach across the table and over my head, prodding into one another, the tangle of limbs cutting off my view of anything else.”
Summon
I am pinned in the chair. At my right, at the head of the table, a restless and nauseous form. Across the table from me, two more shadows, smaller and stiller. They extend themselves, gingerly exploring the surface and the dishes. I know a roast chicken and a basket of cornbread by outline only in the room’s borrowed light, but the arms evaporate from the distal points inward until the figures are neat columns at right angles to the floor, in abeyance to the writhing night geometry of the thing to my right.
The groans from the head of the table are constant: ohhh what are we going to drone about today at the book club, those stacks of baked dog turds on your desk, you don’t need an editor you need a priest
The being at the head of the table extends out, its shadows crossing us, prodding at the plates and finding no satisfaction, spinning a butter knife crooked.
you don’t trust people like that with their energy and becoming and presence talk, people like that are either sick or lost or they’re hoping whoever’s listening is sick or lost
Worst of all is the contempt I feel. I am disgusted with the mute pillars across the table. This is the most shameful of the obscure family of emotions.
you’re all terrified of writing a single thing except ira, he knows what he’s here for with that yogi smirk putting his chin up in the air with his thumb like this, why don’t you just write your next draft with his dick in your mouth, that’s the breakthrough everybody’s waiting for
It stretches a pseudopod across the table. The band of its shadow thins with the effort. It grabs the chicken shape overhand and lifts it up and I gasp. Against the wash of grays the chicken now hovers at center, full-color and wet as a human heart. The red chile-honey bird implodes here, bulges there as it is squeezed with great force; a leg quarter thumps on the tablecloth, the crisp skin crumples. It finds something it’s looking for in the dorsal, scoops it out and lets the rest hit the plate. In the low light I can’t see what it throws, but the rightmost shadow across from me ripples violently.
here have it its the oyster you love the oyster here stuff this in one of your paradigms
I feel a hand clamp my forearm: “Have you been drinking?” and panic turns me to stone.
Memory
On page 33 of the book I’m prompted to compose a memory, so I took the liberty of using the kitchen for a scene so we could see, at least in part, what led up to the horror in the dining room:
It started out as fun, at least for the boys.
“What we’re going for here is well-constructed comfort food,” J said, putting an extra splash of vodka in my half-full screwdriver. “I need you in a mindset conducive to training.”
It was the the second screwdriver I’d ever had in my life. The first one 10 minutes prior. The elation: having J to myself, the field promotion to kitchen assistant and a rocketing sense of confidence and well-being.
It was easy to drink and it climbed all over me. I decided I very much liked the way my shoes looked against the kitchen floor. They weren’t so beat up or ugly after all, they were ready to dance me far above my station. My shoes were cool and had me planted at the global nerve center of a cynosure that drizzled honeyed success over all who could witness or imagine it.
If AB could only see this, the phone back in Aurora would ring at 10:35 p.m. Her voice would be soft and curious.
“Here, here, see…” J planted his shoulder against me and nudged me along the counter, undoing my sloppy string and beginning again. “Once you start dating more interesting women, you’ll get better at this.”
I caught the joke, tried to tack one on. Typically a good try would get a knowing hmmm that was all in the throat. A laugh, never. I didn’t care if I could cook like him, but I wanted to riff at his level very badly.
“Is Jason going to be able to make this for us at home now?” A delighted Mom face was poking in the door.
“He’s already been scouted once by Arby’s and the Joseph Mengele Culinary Institute,” he purred absently. He ignored Mom’s reprimand and continued amusing himself with some patter to the chicken, smoothly looping the string and tightening. “‘I’m gonna finish you before I’m through with you…’”
I failed my way sideways to other prep jobs in his kitchen. He seemed more amused by my increasing intoxication than my comedy bullpen skills or the battered LL Cool J tape I dug out of my duffel and put on. I tried to show off how many of the rhymes I knew and explain other Def Jam artists. When I thrust the cassette case in front of him, all he said was, “What’s he planning in that hat.”
He had big brown eyes like my Mom that you could read for sensitive if it weren’t for the default expression of mild surprise and boredom that never quite tipped to either. He was tall with a solid medium build and dark curly hair that he left a little longer in the back, but tightly trimmed.
At least once every visit, he’d have us to Genevieve’s, one of three restaurants at the golf resort and hotel where he worked. It always surprised and intimidated me, that exquisite little city appearing out of the woods, which would have remained hidden without J having us in, usually during the tail end of a weekday lunch.
He’d appear in his black chef’s jacket at the kitchen door, directing the waiters with whatever it was that he had, that thing that was coiled in reserve that let him command an entire dinner without being fazed by or invested in any of it. He’d show up with the courses for sly lectures and sit with us late in the meal for a glass of wine once he had the back-of-house crew on track for closing. He might as well have been a decorated war hero to me.
When we went to eat at other places — he always chose — that’s when he’d play, usually at some poor server’s expense:
• Pointing at the menu: “Has this lamb ever faced extradition?”
• Sharing notes on the shrimp during the server’s table checkin: “These taste like dried coat buttons.”
• Resting his knife and fork parallel on the nearly full plate as the manager on duty froze with distress: “This…has no merit.” Mom’s lips pursed in a solemn way at that one. J and Beverly fought about it on the way home.
The lark in the kitchen ended when he sent me out with the blue-and-yellow cornbread with specific instructions on how to present it: “The chicken will be ready shortly,” I slurred after weaving to the table. “Right now it is being evasive and smug.”
That was the end of the music and sneaking drinks in the kitchen. It was functionally the end of the trip. Everybody was in trouble.
Mom rarely put her hands on me. Her grip on my wrist was firm this time: “Have you been drinking?”
***
It was 300 miles back home in Mom’s so-so car, staring at my grimy sneakers during the talk that usually comes in the wake of anger. About Dad’s drinking and that being one of the reasons why he wasn’t at that table anymore; another being that he despised J and didn’t hide it well. Stories from their adolescence. About how he treated Beverly. She said he was hovering in the kitchen doorway, his hand over his mouth and his face ruby red when I brought the cornbread out with the triggering phrase from their last big row. My first laugh line from J, and he’d had to write it.
As I looked back and forth between my shoes and the foothills that meant Denver was soon, I quietly anchored myself on one spot: My Mom was a drag; cerebral, boring Beverly was a drag and my Dad was a drag. I was going to be my own kid after this.
***
I snap back to. There’s a greasy blotch on the right thigh of my sweatpants. The murdered chicken is gone, the figures in the chairs dry into the known hues of an empty dining room at night. I feel the blotch in the fabric; it’s an oil that turns into a bigger smear when I touch it. There’s nothing to wipe it on there’s nothing to wash it with…I hold my right hand up, fingers spread out, scanning the table.
I peer at a noise: There’s a soft sizzle coming from the table. No, not quite a sizzle, more like what you’d imagine to be the sound of mycelia squelching their way through poison soil. It’s the slaw, the pepper slaw is collapsing and rotting. I can hear it fall by sections. I get a bulging surge of pain in my stomach. The sound flattens, then moves. It passes on my right. I turn to track it as it gets louder, heading for the kitchen. This movement and nothing else is what will free me from the chair.
Next: The Kitchen
Dwelling Solo RPG Session 2: Come Sit By Me
Her ghost appears at the couch end and she pats the middle cushion: Come sit by me.
This is the living room scene generated from the prompts on pages 28-29 of Dwelling, a solo journaling RPG about facing spirits and memories in a haunted house. You can read the first installment here. In this passage, the narrator has just descended a staircase into the living room…read or listen below!
LIVING ROOM
Scene-Setting: “The living room is dimly lit by the glow from the streetlights and moon filtering into the room. I start to walk through the room, but with each step, my legs feel shaky, like they’re no longer as sure in the knees as they usually are.”
The shift in scent is utter, it’s her curated mix of all the bright and fussy cans and bottles you’d see in advertisements with white backgrounds like rock videos, plus the sum of her mom’s house dust and what she cooked. It is like a cannonball of beach coconut, steam and gravies, candy-flower room deodorizers. I am felled.
I am still on the floor when an arm reaches out from the shadows on the couch end and pats the middle cushion: Come sit by me. I go where I am bidden. I gape at her as she forms, legs tucked in at the end of the couch, hair bound in back, working her cuticles. She could vanish into those for an afternoon, so absolute that I wasn’t sure which one of us had disappeared.
The scent-envelope lasts about as long as an FM summer hit. The harder I peer, the quicker the scent weakens, and her outline with it. There’s just a small depression in the cushion left when the TV comes on. The chunky green numbers don’t match the style of what I know J’s TV to display. His TV is old, but not as old as these green numbers.
Channel 84: The blond wood coffee table with the oval frame that had a hollow for magazines that you could see through the inline glass panels at either end. That should have tipped me off.
Skinny kid with brown eyes and cropped hair, underweight at about six feet, cap with some kind of golf resort logo parked on the back of his head. He’s side-lit from the sliding glass door by a summer sun’s mid-afternoon arson, its smoke a colossal column of boredom that breeds the legion of usual aches. You can beat the first ache with lunch, the second with masturbation, but they multiply regardless. He lifts the needle on a record player on a shelf behind him. The bookshelf matches the coffee table.
It’s “Trust” by 7 Seconds, their love song, last track on The Crew from 1984. He can never pick which part he’s air banding, he switches between bass, guitar, drums and vocals several times. It’s just 2:17 long.
He cues it up again. This mope is tireless. On the third play I recognize it’s me and I watch the fourth and fifth play through my fingers, sick with shame. The scene isn’t supposed to be lit like this, the world outside so bleached with light that dusk doesn’t seem possible even though there was one just the day before. It was lit by footlights in a small music club. When the chorus hit I’d look down — I’d have to be on bass or guitar for this one — and see her in the front row. Somehow it mattered that my band had booked the gig and I hadn’t known she’d be there.
That poor over-freighted melody. The sentiment of the lyrics was all stolen, they were show-home staging tricks. The idea was always the melody that would corkscrew us inside each other. It’s always the melody. Hijacking that was the false voice that you think will make you understood at 17. Because you still wouldn’t know what to say to her or do with her before or after the song.
I just wanted her to call me once that summer, I wasn’t even excited about going to college.
Channel 130-142: I recognize myself immediately this time.
Good God Almighty, I even dreamed myself up an eye patch in this one, pulling up next to her at a stoplight on one of those night-cooled four-laners with landscaped medians that connect master-planned stretches of this and that. What would be playing. Maybe Funkdoobiest if I wanted it dangerous and cavalier, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin if I wanted to instill uptempo regret in her. In Version One I’d turn slowly from behind the wheel of my astonishing vehicle and regard her with dead eyes, because what do you do for vindication except stare at them from a distance greater than the span of their retreat, one-up them for scars, accomplishments and mystery? Streak like metal and liquid across the dome of their dream world like they did yours.
In Version Two on Channel 131 she has girlfriends in the car to witness what a dreary plane she’d confined herself to when she let me go; they gawk as I light a cigarette just before the green light and the hookiest part of the sample hits and vroom, that’s that. The channels advance faster. Apparently I devised a whole career’s worth of these.
Oh look, now I’m in a track suit with bodyguards in a resort town where she happens to be staying with her family, again with the eye patch, not very imaginative to keep replicating that touch. The channels keep flipping through one tawdry coup de théâtre after another, all shows of strength and indifference, you’d think this I could have worked a rescue or two in there. I feel sick, but I stay on the couch.
Channel 187: I look like I’m in my late 20s now in the pool hall. It’s a well-appointed one: The regulation tables have beautiful felt, the rails are lustrous, the lights are even and the rafters high. I’m overdressed for Denver as usual.
Her cousin is there with her boyfriend and there is a lot of laughter. Nobody besides me gets too invested in their turn during our doubles game. Those couples’ games would stretch, the last seven balls invincible. We’d try to coach, but it would be seven balls perpetually because the girls weren’t that interested and the boys were too drunk.
The pool hall is crowded, young professional kids on a Friday night and there seems to be a lot of people we don’t know forming a gallery around our table. What is it with these onlookers? They’re almost all men, a cluster of ectomorphs.
Then I notice Bryce is there, looking at ease, he’ll be the one on her arm at her little sister’s wedding, ropy and tan as a lifeguard. There’s Andrew, for whom she jilted me before Bryce. Gentle Karl is there in a tartan driving cap and his long, brown hair.
I sink the 10 ball with a beautiful cut that rockets it neatly to a corner, magnetized to the cushion for what looks like a gymnasium’s length. I leave the 20 oz. cue on the table and walk away unnoticed.
Channel 102: That same pulverizing sun except it lights the respiratory junk of the desert gambling tower roofs and the awful concrete that boils and the cars are its lava. Drawing the thick inner shades, it’s 10 a.m. At some point the rolling chatter of the machines turned into the choir of Mammon as the night we had T-boned the oncoming morning.
Please stay here with me.
What is sold to you as fun under the dead sun and the concrete. She is as calm as a cultist. There’s no need for a fight because there’s nothing to fight about, she is going to walk right back into the heart of that thing that whispers in the spaces between $1 coins hitting the metal troughs; throbs behind the lit ad panels, their jumbo lobsters and necropolis summers; gurgles beneath the green water that conjures the free 11:15 show up out of the synthetic lagoon.
Please stay here with me. It’s been all night, I just want to clasp her under the sheets and drift off together. It’s very important, but her smile is fixed for sacrifice.
She goes out the door and into the hall of the 15th floor to find the elevator down.
I can’t leave the room. I should be hungry. I’m not looking out the window or watching TV, that’s just another window, except worse.
The TV turns off. There’s a trace of artificial berry lip balm and cigarette smoke on my mouth.
Next: The Dining Room
Dwelling Solo RPG Session and Review: My Ghost Story So Far
“My heartbeat feels like a finger being drawn around in circles on the skin of a snare drum.” My first session of Dwelling, a solo RPG for ghosts from Good Luck Press.
This is excerpted from the script of “Episode 93: Dwelling Solo Journaling RPG aka The Human Heart is Spooky AF” if you’d rather hear this than read it.
I have to tell you about a dream I had.
My lifelong heartache and love — to the degree which I ever experienced love — was in an out of my life for 20 years. Nobody else has been in my life that long or in so many forms: high school prom date and heartbreak, occasional lover and then girlfriend again (and heartbreak again) and a few sad richochets of each other in our in 30s.
In the dream, I was in one of those very bright corporate office building lobbies, overbright really, that also housed an art gallery. I saw her crossing it 20 feet from me. I knew she wouldn’t turn her head unless I hailed her. The sighting brought the same where-did-she-go-and-why-doesn’t-she-want-me-anymore ache.
In the next scene we were at a small, circular table in the lobby. We had already talked for a time. I was entreating her. It became clear that the only love I would be getting was a universal one — one of her best qualities was a general deep tenderness and empathy for others — not the kind I wanted.
The explanation didn’t gel into words or none I can remember; I only remember the knock-you-over sun of her smile, her dimples forming…and becoming aware of a document on the table before me, upon which sat one of those crappy Bics with a blue cap.
I knew at once that I was to sign this document, which would not only surrender the addictive, selfish, and transactional “love” I demanded, but release me from everything I’ve hauled around over the decades. All of it, down to the clutching at life itself.
I did not sign. I slammed the pen on the table, raised my voice.
I don’t remember her at the end because I’d attracted the attention of a security guard, a husky dude with a mustache, a shoulder-length haircut that suggested he was in a band that played taverns on the unfashionable strip of South Broadway in Denver, white shirt and gray slacks, explaining that I would indeed have to go, gracefully or not, ready or not.
It was the kind of dream to which you want to remain in service for the entirety of the day after it occurs. She had appeared to me as a psychopomp, a figure that offers a mortal soul transport to the afterlife, and she had tried to be nice about it, transcending my wants and becoming a passing teacher, a door to something else. It riveted me for days.
I was sad, but also felt like I my time in the country had given me a signpost in the gallery of lost faces that I recall and query too often. There’s so many of them, they blot out the stars.
I also felt like it’s been too long since Breakup Gaming Society featured an indie creation. The past year has featured mostly popular titles from widely known publishers. So when I stumbled across Tabletop Tokki — check her out on YouTube, she’s an underrated creator, IMO — talking about Dwelling, a solo game for ghosts, created by Seb Pines and published by Good Luck Press, I ordered a copy immediately. I was overdue for this.
What follows is the the first few rooms of my encounters from Dwelling’s prompts. The backstory: Your character in this solo journaling RPG is somebody who has just inherited a house from an uncle.
Unsettled, you move room to room on a restless night and are fed prompts to describe the nature of the many spirits you find there as you track down sounds or oblique forms in shadow: What they look like, even. You can draw them in the book if you want, but I skipped that part because I wanted to focus on the writing. What memories do they dredge up? What marks do their appearance leave on you?
What follows is my ghost story so far. I’ve had an encounters in the bedroom, the guest room, the staircase to downstairs, and the living room. For each room I’m going to set you up with a bit of the prompt for book, then what I wrote for the encounter.
Dwelling Solo Journaling Game: The first prompt happens in a nearly bare bedroom in a house recently acquired by the narrator from an uncle.
BEDROOM
The first spectral appearance is cued up like this: “I let my eyes languidly take in the walls and make sense of the still-unfamiliar shadows, tracing the shapes with my unfocused eyes and still hazy from sleep. In my sleep-addled imagination, my mind conjures a shape in the shadows, the way the darkness piles at the end of my bed, making the dark shapes against the wall look as if something is peering over the edge of my bed, looking up at me.”
Here’s how I managed that prompt: Just off my left foot, something with eyes on stalks, a repulsive density in the folds of the summer-weight comforter that carries over from the dream. Its unverifiable teeth and opacity of intent…was it jostling for its corner of the bed or working its way up my leg? I was unable to move in the dream, but I manage a kick. The dune-folds of the comforter returned now, innocuous.
Throwing the comforter off me, there’s the high contrast of cooling moisture on my left pec. I test it with my fingers — it’s a small puddle — then my armpits with my other hand and find them more or less dry.
I lay there with my forearms pointed up for the better part of a minute, rubbing either thumb against index and middle, in the wonder of a backslide. TDF would not permit herself to fall asleep on me because she was mortified at the thought of being observed while drooling.
Such was my wonder on the day she did, I stayed awake to bear witness as she slipped into her noiseless slumber, black hair splayed out, for a full hour, drooling slightly.
It felt like the most important thing she’d ever told me, but I’ve always had a bad habit of assuming that more was exchanged in shared silence than had actually changed hands.
GUEST ROOM
The story next takes our narrator back off the lip of sleep to investigate a sound in the hallway. We locate the guest room as the source, which was the primary bedroom of the uncle who left you the house.
It is still furnished with many of his things, and the book feeds us another encounter with this cue: “Uneasy in this space so personal to someone else, I find myself tiptoeing through the room. Moving through the room slowly, it feels like my stomach could drop. Then—I hear a sound: A small, startled inhale.
This sets up the following encounter as the being who made it forms in sight and action:
Tsk-huhhhh
I am seized with fear and shame.
Tsk-huhhhh
A diminutive form regards me, glaring.
Tsk-huhhhh
The sudden need to placate it trumps the fear of its wrong-presence; I release the muscles in my clenched feet and wamble forward. It vibrates with impatience.
I peer at it, trying to find some outline at the edge of the simmering seven-shades-of-dark that ought to be its center. I test the air between us with a slowly raised hand. My heartbeat feels like a finger being drawn around in circles on the skin of a snare drum.
I rummage for mollifying words. It will not wait for the words. A hand reaches out, grabs my wrist loosely, thumb playing along my radius with a tentative, imploring pressure, then darts straight for the left pocket of my sweats, digging for something. I am rapt with its anger.
Tsk-huhhhh
The hand darts away, and with it the thonk of whatever it was fishing for. The noise preempts the hiss of the snare drum’s skin; I find a lamp, turn it on and see my Motorola on the floor, screen spiderwebbed from edge to edge.
I did not. I did not carry that in here, I can never relax with that in my pockets. I wouldn’t do that any more than I would wear plate armor to bed.
I did not. I know it.
Only the phone’s date and time display clearly now. I am able to unlock it, my skin dismayed at the new microcontinent of jagged fissures on its face. Key app icons occluded by milky cloud of errant pixels, like a mind trying to gnrrr out its last few sentences in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Half-digested juices of 10 years of sudden-onset arguments, resolved by fatigue and breakage, if not reason.
I cannot afford to replace the phone nor think too long about replacing the phone. I place it on Uncle Jay’s dresser, my eyes fixing on the top leftmost drawer. That’s where I found as a boy what I would later learn is called a Moleskine notebook.
Was I five, six, seven? On visits here to see Jay and Beverly with my parents: I was better than average at verbal stuff for my age, but unable to penetrate the atmosphere they generated around themselves in the evenings, when Facts in Five would come out and they would play far into the night, smoking joints and drinking red wine and bantering in a tongue I badly wanted to acquire.
Sometimes I would try to yip out things that sounded like they belonged in the category they were working on, but I would usually be left to entertain myself after tiring of staring at the box cover on the floor and failing to puzzle out how I could gain entry into a world where Abraham Lincoln, some kind of Asian princess, and a rushing football player all waited for you in a city of skyscrapers and old temples.
Glum with being excluded and tired of the box that suggested everything and told me nothing, I’d wander the house. That’s when I found the Moleskine and Jay’s block type and recognized some of the words: “savage,” “gray,” and “sicknesses,” but the sentences only resolved to the growing boredom weighing on me and the increasingly enchanted gulf between me — too tired to know I was past bedtime — and the laughter from downstairs. When the laughter tipped to fighting, Jay’s voice was always knifing over the top of everyone.
Something snags or tickles inside my sweats. I reach in and pull out a long, dark hair from the seam between my thigh and crotch. I whip it away backhanded.
I did not. I did not bring this in here with me.
Despite the displacement and anger, pure exhaustion, sweet and total, beckons me like a maritime wreck at peace in the silt.
And that’s the way the Guest Room encounter concludes. But no rest for our narrator, dear reader, because this long night is full of more sounds.
Ready to go downstairs? Me either, but fuck it, because we hear the loud creaking of a door hinge from down there.
Dwelling Solo RPG Prompts: Uh oh, we’re headed downstairs because there was a sound. There’s always a sound.
The next exercise is the descending staircase, where you’re invited to recount the scenes from the day that led to this moment in time. I count eight steps in the illustration on pages 24-25, so I do eight memories. But not before my character yells at the source of the noise.
STAIRCASE/DOWNSTAIRS
“For Godssakes can we please not have any more Krakatoas or Hindenburgs in the remaining seven minutes of this fucking day?” I shout back at the unmistakable long creak of a door from downstairs. I know the cadence of those lumbar pops by now. That was a door. Yelling back seems the strongest defensive spell I can cast. Good old annoyance, even as bravado, helps resituate me.
I wait for an answer, for it to duplicate itself, then head downstairs, policing slowness, ears on high alert:
A List of Happenings aka This Fucking Day
Step 1
I entered this house again from the dream of the debauch in the loft, steel and glass like I imagined I’d have one day, the city off its balcony a pile of fulvous jeweled yellow, friends and employers there. There was a curtain of force that kept me at 15’ remove from the faces. It would give at first when I moved near them, then swell and repulse me and I’d find myself in stairwells, pushed into the wrong clothes, trying to avert or start emergencies in fuseboxes, looking at drywall and olive drab diamond plate steel landings, talking to undercover cannibals full of ruses and sinister half-formed phonemes, sentences fused together and rolling, rolling. An enduring feeling of failure that kept me in bed long after I woke.
Step 2
Noticing the welts on the insides of both wrists like an allergic reaction, raised, red, like pollens went at me with claws.
Step 3
Washed my server uniform and jeans in Uncle Jay’s ancient Kenmore; it works fine, but I was so unsettled about taking ownership of this museum that I was still using laundromats a month after moving in. While doing this, I worked out a few more lines about the realtor bluegrass jingle where you get blown if you close on a house: Stomp your hands, clap and scream/It’s the #1 Dicksuckin’ Realty Team/Wrap your lips ‘round the ‘Murican Dream…
Step 4
I only have one freelance client left, so I should have done a better job. I used to crush stuff like that article in 45 minutes, now it takes 3 hours. The writing is easy. Caring about it is nearly impossible. 45 minutes of breaks in between every few paragraphs: Yahtzee on the phone, hunting for a pair of cufflinks — cufflinks! — in the living room’s unpacked boxes. I was seized with fear at the thought of not having those cufflinks anymore.
Step 5
Again I daydreamed until my body was past hungry and tipping into rage, shrugged at the kitchen — still the only fully unpacked and operational room after three months — then drove up and down Welty Boulevard., unable to make a decision about lunch as if if there were a firing squad waiting for me after the meal. Wound up at Sonic, four cars deep with four heads each and they all looked like bearded dads in UnderArmor hats with full vehicles modding every single thing in every single bag, can you fuckers die. Reminded me of that time Uncle Jay took me to Yosemite and we got caught behind some cross-country cyclists on a two-laner while trying to exit the park. After 15 minutes of glaring over the top of his steering wheel in silence, the exquisite groan: “Uuungh, can’t they just hop tree to tree and leave me alone?”
Step 6
I gorged at home and attempted a half page of the book about the Byzantines. It was chief in J’s collection and he’d package what he thought were the funny parts for me over the years. Sometimes when I’d get on his nerves he’d tell me to comply or get the Byzantine Retirement Plan, which by then I knew was having your eyes gouged out. I still can’t get through it; I’ll read a book a month sometimes then stick on one for a year even if it’s labor. The bare bedroom was getting too warm in September’s late heat. I am at ease when the weather is pleasant enough not to think about and beset the other 10 months of the year. I know I should read but all I could see was a shifting scribble of a brain trying to read.
Step 7
I tried to relax with a walk at dusk, tracing a halfhearted three-block rectangle, the horizon opening up briefly on the shortest leg of the rectangle, 23rd Street. I saw a disintegrating colossus of thunderheads in the west but drizzled with pink on the outer rinds, green on the bottom where the edge of the municipal golf course began blocks away. I passed the janitorial supply store and the bleached cutout of the woman and the mop; I’ve walked by that shop since I was a kid and I still can’t tell if it’s in business or not.
Step 8
I found A.B. on Instagram because cycling tabs for a dribble of likes starts crushing you after the sun goes down. It was the same smile from when she asked me in the HS library where the pencil sharpener was, she knew damn well where the pencil sharpener was. Still a lovely dresser, stylish without being trendy. When she asked me about the pencil sharpener I remember she had a turquoise bandana rolled into a perfect hairband and I didn’t understand in my panic what she was asking for at the time, but I did understand, or thought I did, that if you had a girlfriend with a turquoise bandana hairband and a smile like that, you were all right, you had a foothold on something.
Next comes the living room, where we see the first manifestation of A.B. I’ve got the living room scene written, but I’m going to pin this for now because I want to refine the scene a bit and talk about my impressions of the game so far.
As a writer, I’m a fountain of jokes, complaints, opinions and stories. That comes easy enough. I’m good at scenes, bits and fragments, but rarely attempt the discipline of longer stories. And when I do, it’s usually show-off observation and ideas and riffs without much shape.
Dwelling — and the way it nudges you to triangulate the book’s cues with things you remember and things you can embellish — has got me writing an actual goddamn story. Much more of one than I set out to do.
I had to quietly eat some crow about my contempt for people who workshop stuff, go to conferences and do guided exercises and the like. But what pure stories have I ever written with my big, manic imagination? Almost none. Yet here I am, several thousand words in to one. Turns out I needed a prod in my ass after all, just like all the earnest amateurs I mocked to my friends. So I’m walking that one back. QED. Score one for you, Seb Pines.
The fact that it’s a former uncle’s house is also rich ground. Because of the dream I had, I more or less know the outcome and the arc I want — the intoxication of attachment and desire, its awful fulfillment and the grace of letting go. But now I’ve got a subplot on my hands with the lingering presence of an uncle that has me thinking hard about the encounters as chapters and how Uncle Jay’s strand mirrors or diverges from the narrator’s wanderings. It’s almost overwhelming. This is turning into a workout.
This goes for the emotional processing, too. I’ve noticed something else cool happening in the past few weeks: I’m revisiting scenes of my old self with less recrimination, less shame, less bitterness. I don’t want to oversell this as some replacement for more formal means of care, but grinding through these scenes transmutes the poison tang of how I recall things, at least lately. I feel lighter. I can sift a bit more dispassionately. Not picture everything as evidence against myself or others.
So where does this sit in the tableau of experiences we would call games? I can’t tell you yet. It’s categorically different and I’m incredibly glad I sought it out. And I intend to stick with it.