Game of Charades

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Is something wrong?” she says in a low, mocking voice. She waves around her cigarette in a circle like a baton. Little puffs of circular smoke spiral across the air. Though ash is fluttering off the end of her cigarette, she does not bother with the little pile of black and gray embers in a flaky lump on the ashtray. “Is something right?”

She pauses and stretches her pale arms. She looks like she is about to embrace the world, limb to limb, blooming. Then she says, “Oh little pretty, where do you keep the knives?”

This is your house, I think. I should be asking you that.

She makes long, exaggerated gestures like she is playing charades. I stare at her, dim smile plastered to my face. “You’re drunk,” I say bluntly. She shrugs and traces the rim of her glass with her finger, round and round, careful and discreet. Her hair is brimming over her face, covering her catty features.

“Drrrrunk?” she says, emptying the glass in one prolonged gulp. “Yep, I’m drunk!” She says it loudly with a high, proud tone, clumsily pouring herself another drink. She flicks one of the rough table legs with her finger and leans back, taking a relieved breath.

I just watch her sitting in the corner of the dark room, her eyes leaving wisps of pale light as she clumsily shifts about. The towering shadow of the glass on the table and her lorn cigarette color the chalked walls an impossible shade darker. Though the walls are leaden and ancient, looking like they are about to collapse upon her, she is so serene, her hands folded, her face clinging to this serpentine smile—Game of charades.

She stares at me for a long time, as if waiting for the clock to start ticking. The clock that has been broken for a long time…

She abruptly gasps for breath after holding it for a long time for no apparent reason (perhaps she had merely forgotten?) and then resumes her spell-slanting, hand-woven, red-calling, lemon-sour words:

“Here’s a little story, which is great, ‘specially when told by a, by a drrrrrunk! Okay okay, so once, I was at this park. Just hanging around. So yeah, it’s calm, it’s quiet, when suddenly this guy yells that his dog just spoke. And everyone gathers ‘round and the dog says in a low, dark, raspy little doggy voice, ‘I’m gonna eat you.’ And then he says, ‘I’m gonna eat you right up!’ and everyone’s like… what? Wow, I’m really wasted!”

Remember when she flicked her finger over the leg of the table? She carved something into it. What did she engrave into the poor, cheap table leg, you ask? You don’t want to know, and I don’t want to tell you.

Then she laughs at herself, bending over, then sees that it’s not funny. She freezes and looks out with a locked, dead gaze at the space ahead of her like an old portrait of someone who has been staring into the interior lid of a casket for a long time. She takes a drag on her cigarette and then rests it on the ashtray. Then her face unfurls, and she looks happy again. Or woozy. It’s hard to tell which.

“Let’s play charades. I go first. Three syllables,” she says.

She pauses, biting her lip. Then she starts. She crosses her fingers over the air, then parts them to make a lined-up row of three tall digits. She straightens out and runs a finger thinly over her throat. Her nail leaves a tiny line of pale eraser-skin, and she closes her eyes tightly and adjusts her mouth as if she is silently screaming. I can almost hear her say something…

“Murderer?” I say, screwing up my face. She shakes her head. I shrug. She smiles and twirls around her drink in her hand and gets some on her shirt, and it drips down slowly without her noticing. It looms over the threads of her sweater like blood, weaving in and out in damp movement… “Well, I’m… see, I’m a little non compos mentis, but,” she says, “The word was dictator.”

The End.

 

She pauses and takes a breath, posing a high, destructive smile over her narrow face. Her eyes are grey as late September clouds in the falling dark of the room. “But I forgot what the word dictator meant,” she says, “In like, fourth grade.”

But I don’t care.

It can’t be undone.

She also says that her life is turning into a poem or rather a poetic story later on, but that’s a different bottle of velvety wine. It’s outside by a wavering fire and cindered logs. This time, it’s in this room, at the tip of a knife.

 

(There are no credits, and I made it all up. Good luck with your midlife crisis and the teenaged witch hovering at the mercy of the rattling glass of your window, the moon burdening her sloped shoulders.)