Games
- May 21, 2021
- 2 min read
by Stella Lei
1) Stabscotch. Bishop. Nerve. A million names for pressing our palms in dirt and stabbing between our outstretched fingers—an interlocking of sharpened air. We graduated from pencils to pocketknives as crabgrass choked our feet, our backyard a minefield of wounds. Knees denting against gravel, we danced our blades faster and timed how long we could go before metal met flesh and blood watered the weeds, sky splintering on our necks. Our emptiness flayed open as mouths. We pretended we could carve ourselves clean and thin as a knife. The blade—our teeth, angled for absence. Sheathing our hunger in earth.
2) We weighed ourselves against the heft of morning as it dragged itself above the hills. Balanced our toes against blinking numbers, cored our palms on our nails, and compared the hollowness of our skins. Our bones sharpened against flesh and we measured the differences between our bodies from one day to the next—minus 0.2, 0.5, 0.4 pounds—ran disappearance as a race with no finish line in sight.
3) After grocery shopping, we fought over who could carry the most. Bottles squeezed between arm and rib, fingers asphyxiating under bags, we filled the spaces in our hands with plastic and glass. Gorged them on the wrappers of rice crackers (twelve calories per serving) and bottles of hot sauce (speeds up metabolism; half a calorie per serving) that we would dump on the counter as soon as we got home, sweat pooling in the notches of our spines.
4) When summer stretched its languid heat across asphalt, we competed for mosquito kills. Raised our scabbed hands and crushed them against the wall, quenching our palms on another’s blood. The easiest mosquitos to hit were full and slow, slugging through the air after a meal. So we turned ourselves into bait—stood still as mosquitos alighted on our arms and siphoned our blood; squashed them as they dispersed—our skin a sacrifice for another tally, for the chance to say I win.
Stella Lei’s work is published or forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.
