Story a Day

Randall lay on the new Sleep Country double bed, lightly clutching the small plastic controller to an old 8-bit console. The TV on Margot’s dresser showed his progress through the video game. This was one of the best parts of being unemployed: he could do lame, embarrassing things like play 20-year-old video games, and no one would see. It was cathartic and nostalgic. The previous week, he had even put together a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle was a picture of kittens. He had stuck the last few pieces in the rosebud wallpaper behind the kittens just in time. By the time he had swept it all into the box and was checking his Gmail (a normal thing to be doing), Margot was home.

“How was your day?” she had asked him.

“Same old,” he had said. “Got a few applications out. How was yours, babe?”

Playing video games and doing jigsaw puzzles had this in common: Randall was normally too hip, too physically active, too social, for both of them. But oh, what guilty pleasures.

Sprawled on the bed in front of Margot’s dresser, Randall was playing a game where he had to save a princess from a castle. It was one of a long line of Mario Brothers rip-offs—jump over the holes, jump on the right platforms at the right times, jump on the bad guys, rescue the chick at the end. Randall was about halfway through the game. This game had save-files, which meant he had created a character with a name and everything. His character was RANDALL.

RANDALL ran through the castle, his leather-soled boots flapping on the cold, worn flagstones. Patches of brown moss grew improbably on the dark, damp walls. He jumped on three malevolent, tentacle-covered purple things. Their thin skins ruptured under his weight, and large air-bladders deflated within them, leaving twitching piles of tentacles on the floor. The purple things’ juicy innards squished under his feet. RANDALL’s soles were so thin, he could feel textures inside the purple things’ guts. He felt something burst wetly in one of them, some kind of organ, maybe whatever the purple things had to pass for kidneys.

Leaving the purple monsters to die, RANDALL dashed up some crumbling stairs, slipping a little on his now-slick footwear.

At the top of the stairs was a hole. Nervous about his slippery, entrails-covered shoes, unsure whether he could stick the landing, RANDALL almost psyched himself into falling. But he leapt over the hole and continued on.

Past the hole was a door. Feeling cautious, RANDALL fished a wooden flask out of his pocket. He drank a restorative beverage, which healed his nicks and scratches and even made his boots feel dry again. Then, with a deep breath, he opened the door.

That’s what RANDALL saw. Randall, however, saw something different. Cotton-batting pillows behind his neck, stocking feet lost in unmade bedclothes, stripes of sunlight from behind venetian blinds pinstriping his Hanes-sporting pudge, Randall saw something more like this: Read the rest of this entry »