God help you, this board game night has a parliamentarian.

You had thought you were getting cruised by a grad student you met at a party and her husband for a threesome or a poly situationship, but somehow or other here you are, in a room full of sixteen people you don’t know and two you do. The game has been going on for years, across multiple sessions, and is some extremely complicated affair that involves dice and deeds of title and letters of marque and reprisal and frequent trips to other rooms to tensely negotiate with other players. You’ve spent the last hour haggling over Montenegrin forest futures with a widespread black poet and you’re not even sure you could find Montenegro on a map.

Some people seem to be in character, but you can’t get a handle on whether that’s a requirement or just a commitment to the bit; more folks aren’t in character than are, but both camps are sniffy about the other. You’re three beers in at this point and you’ve had the game explained to you by at least five different people, but it sounds like they’re all playing different games. One of them involved a lot of cones. Someone said vlet at one point, but they were shouted down by everyone else in the room, you haven’t figured out if that was a rule you aren’t familiar with or just rudeness or what. The room spins around you, and your palms sweat so that the paper money you’ve been holding on to since you walked in bleeds into your skin.

The parliamentarian sits in a chair in the corner, watching everything, saying nothing, a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order tucked threateningly under one stiletto heel.

Coming home late that night, Carlisle finds a man waiting for him in the dark, bleeding gently into the upholstery of his one good chair. “They found me,” says the man. “I’m sorry… take this…” and drops a thumb drive on the floor. “Trust… no… one…”

He’s dead, and that’s upsetting, but that’s what the police are for, or so he’s heard. So he calls them, and they send over a detective, and they give him a blanket and a cup of coffee and they have a nice little chat while the paramedics take care of the body. He tells them about the thumb drive, but they don’t care, so when everyone is gone he connects it to his laptop and would you believe it’s full of games? and books?

He feels bad about the man dying, but it was nice of him to give him a present to apologize for making a mess of his chair. He spends the evening shooting little frogs in a tank in a pixel sewer, and that’s pretty fun. Not worldshaking, or anything, but it’s a cute little game.

The books are all pretty terrible, uniformly lousy science fiction from the 1970s written by men who clearly had a problem with Women Today, so he just ignores them. A few days later, a heavyset fellow in a bloodstained coat shows up and asks for the drive, so Carlisle gives it to him. The games weren’t that interesting.

The batter steps up to the plate and the crowd gets baroque with it.

“Heyyyyyy, 25, you’ve got too many things in your pockets!”

“What do you have in there? Your cell phone?”

“A pack of cigarettes?”

“A deck of playing cards?”

Strike one.

“Is that a walky-talky?”

“You can’t bring your copy of House of Leaves to the plate, 25!”

“25, you’re supposed to put the potato down the front of your pants!”

Strike two.

“How do you slide with all that junk in your trunk?”

“There’s just too much in your pockets! It’s spilling out right now!”

“Aren’t you worried about tearing your pants? With everything you own in your pockets?”

“Emp! ty! out! your! pock! ets!” Clap clap clap clap clap.

A long smash to deep right field and—well, it’s a homerun, what did you expect? 25 rounds the bases, high fives his teammates, avoids eye contact with the crowd. Alas, it doesn’t work. As he returns to the dugout, one final chirp is handed down: “Good thing you hit a homerun, you might have lost your keys if you’d had to really run!”

They go on to win 16-4, but, you know, baseball’s about the journey, not the destination, or so I’m told.

for Cody

An oppressive heat, the air still and hot as an oven, and the distant mountains, the lake, the hummingbirds buzzing around the railing, and the railing itself have become as flat as a painting. The sunset striped and gridded, a pixel vision of evening. In the horizontal light, familiar faces blur uncertain, hang slack or twist unexpected like the grain in a piece of wood. Eyes are everywhere, in the curl of a breathing fern, in the pulse of a watching cactus, in the open beak of a hovering bird.

Nighttime, stars stir unsettled through the bronchial branches of a juniper tree, an amber shape that might be a cat crouched atop a wooden fence. Numb inside the gate we weigh it with our eyes, count the limbs, count the tails, count them again as the numbers run away. Is it known? Is it knowable? A dog, five eyes arranged in an arc, wary beside us, fur aglow in the darkness.

Later still, and earlier, time slipping between our fingers, boundaries blur and bleed, ink leeching into paper, into chairs, into the deck of splintered wood, into the glass we struggle to raise to our lips, the cigarette pack we cannot reach. In the darkness, the click of a plastic lighter, the shock of recognition, the distant song of frogs.

It’s been a real bullshit day for Carolyn, and being damned to hell was really just the capper. “This sucks,” she tells the demon slowly flensing the skin off her lower leg.

“Tuesdays, amirite?” says the demon, who doesn’t stop flensing.

“No, really, I hate this. I don’t like any part of this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just life in late stage capitalism, ain’t it? Life’s a bitch like that. Still—” the demon has the chipper nonemotive voice of a high quality voicemail system— “we struggle on the best we can. Other leg, please!”

Carolyn holds out her leg. “It’s just—” she screams hoarsely as the knife slips skillfully but incredibly painfully between the skin and the muscle of her calf— “I had plans this morning, you know? I was going to go to the bank.“

The demon pauses, looks sympathetically into her eyes for a second. “Oh, honey,” it says, not unkindly, “we both know you were never going to go to the bank.”