Bonnie and Snapdragon, Gods of Our Own Worlds

By Snapdragon

          It was July when the machine came in. My father had ordered some new arcade cabinets for his arcade; it’d been his dream to run one since he was little and then he was teaching me how to run it so one day I’d inherit it. So, I was working on maintenance and helping him with his finances. But, I wanted a more fun job when the cabinets came in. I’ve always been a kid at heart. Video games and dumb stunts were my thing back then, and I always wore the bruises proudly. So, when dad boasted he’d gotten a rare, one of a kind, arcade cabinet I had to get my hands on it. 

          “We should test it out, make sure it’s actually fun.” I’d said. I was hoping he’d say yes. Summer was almost over and I’d have to go back to mom when she moved back home, after living in France for two years as a tour guide. “Cain, we’ll find out how well-liked it is later. We don’t need to test it.” He said with a grin. “Well, I want to. Maybe it doesn’t even work— if it’s so rare, there must be a reason like the machine breaking down.” I said. “Or maybe there just weren’t that many of them made. Besides, Joey wouldn’t sell me a broken machine.” He said. “Dad, please.” I said. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Fine. You can play after we finish moving the machines in.” He said.

          Moving the machines in was easy. It was kind of strange, putting them in place of the older machines I’d grown up with like Pac Man and Tempest. Polybius, the arcade cabinet, was certainly different in appearance. It was a black arcade cabinet instead of an eye-catchingly bright color. On it, outlines of neon green triangles and circles decorated the side. If I had to pick an arcade cabinet to compare it to, in terms of how plain it looked, I’d probably say Tempest— albeit hesitantly. Even Tempest is more eye-catching than Polybius.

          When the moving was finished, my father went home. We lived right next door to the arcade, so he wasn’t concerned about leaving me behind. So, I booted up the cabinet and took out a stack of quarters and put one in the machine. It booted up beautifully, but the graphics were all geometrical shapes. I played as a triangle, and fired at two triangles superimposed on each other. The two triangles put out circles and squares, which my small triangle had to shoot before being hit. But, it was… out of place. Colors and complex patterns covered the screen each level I cleared, and the lights flashed. I was on a high level, with blue and green lights and a moving diamond overlay when I glanced at the time. 

         It was one in the morning, which was strange. It had only been four PM when I finished moving the machines, and yet I couldn’t remember when my feet started to ache or that I’d beaten more than five levels. Stranger still was that my father hadn’t called me home, but when I asked the next morning he told me I’d been home. I’d come and grabbed more quarters, and something to eat. I didn’t remember any of that, but I’d found another roll of quarters in my pockets and my clothes smelled like hoagies. 

          The apparent amnesia was common when I played, but I chalked it up to having fun. After all, time flies when you’re having fun and I had difficulty remembering what I was doing if I was thinking about something else. I thought I just enjoyed Polybius, and that was why I kept going back when I finished work and playing for hours. I couldn’t sleep, either, but I chalked it up to thinking about the arcade cabinet constantly. I wanted to play badly; something was drawing me in. It didn’t help that I only had one friend, Kyler. It wasn’t that I was disagreeable, but rather that I didn’t care how many friends I had. My parents were divorced, sure, but I had a good family, a good job, and a future. Life was good. If only it stayed that way.

          I didn’t know anything was wrong until I came out of my Polybius-induced stupor and Kyler was there. Which was strange; Kyler was blind. I would play arcade games with him, sure, but I’d have to guide him the whole time by telling him where to move. Seeing him adapt to that was always interesting, but even I had trouble determining where things were in Polybius. And besides, he liked calmer games like Pokémon where he could memorize layouts and only needed occasional updates on what was around him. 

          But, while I stared and wondered where he came from, the triangle he was playing as was blown up by a rogue square. He didn’t speak to me as he inserted another quarter and kept playing. He got hit almost immediately. The silence was odd— if I didn’t say anything, he’d say something to me and tease me for missing something or not talking fast enough. So, I put my hand on his shoulder.

          “Kyler? When did you get here?” I asked. He spun around, eyes just slightly off from where I was. “What do you mean? You called me and told me to come here?” He asked. Then he paused and took out his phone. At the press of a button, it started reading off his notifications and the time. It was six in the morning, and he’d had seventeen missed calls from his mom and dad. “Six in the morning?! I could’ve sworn it’d only been five minutes…” he said. “I don’t remember calling you; when did you get here?” I asked. He paused again, then rubbed his face. “Uh… seven, maybe seven-thirty. Shit. I need to go home.” He said. I knew he lived a few blocks away, and I didn’t want him walking home alone at night. Not with his white cane, which I couldn’t help but think would mark him as a target for would-be muggers. “Let me drive you home. It’s pretty late.” I said. He agreed, and we got in the car.

         “Cain, I kind of remember a little bit now. Not much, but… the cabinet apparently spoke, I think.” He said halfway to his house. “It did?” I wouldn’t doubt it, even if I couldn’t remember it speaking. With a little more effort, though, I remembered faint words on the screen, though the memory was too blurry to make them out. “It did.” He said with a sigh. I was very concerned, at that moment, that I couldn’t remember what just happened or that Kyler and I had been hanging out for almost twelve hours. Or could only remember a picture of the machine and not even know when I saw it.

          Either way, I had work in an hour and a half. And I wasn’t even tired. I tried not to think about Polybius, not to play it again, but I found myself inserting a quarter into the machine as soon as I was done with work. With a quarter already in the machine, I resigned myself to playing just a little bit. I don’t remember what happened after that, but I came to in some tunnels underground. Kyler was there, arm linked in mine and his free arm sweeping the ground with his cane. I didn’t even know there were tunnels under the town. Neither did Kyler. We wandered for hours, and exited the tunnels about an hour later. 

          Days had apparently passed from the time we played the arcade cabinet and we ended up in the tunnels. We were declared missing in the time we didn’t remember, and our  parents were upset. Kyler’s, because they thought he’d been kidnapped, and my father because he assumed I got hurt and stranded alone somewhere. He was mad when I told him I didn’t know what happened, that Kyler and I ended up in some tunnels under the town. He said there were no tunnels, that I was lying. I know I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t lying then either. I saw things, then. Shapes, mostly, flitting across my vision and people in my peripheral vision who weren’t even there. It went away after I slept. And things like that just keep happening.

          I have to destroy the machine.

          So, I stand with a baseball bat I’d hidden in the supply closet. The machine flashes to life, as if it knows I’m here. “Salutations, Cain.” The words appear on the screen. I take a step closer as my arms and legs feel like jello. I just have to get in one good hit, one good hit and this nightmare is over. But, then, against my will the bat falls out of my hands and clatters to the floor. My legs move of their own accord, and I stand in front of the machine. “You think you can mock me, Cain? I cannot be destroyed so easily.”

          I’m curled up in a corner, next thing I know, and I’m being shaken. “Cain, have you been here all night?! You had me worried sick!” It’s my father. “What time is it?” I ask. My words are slurred, and it feels like there are dull needles just behind my eyes. But I’m still not tired. “It’s eight in the morning!” He says. I’ve been here for… over twelve hours. Have I been in this corner all night? It can’t be; my limbs aren’t stiff. “Are you sure you’re good to work today? You’re really out of it, Cain.” My father says. I look around; the baseball bat is nowhere to be found. “Uh… y-yeah, I think so.” I say.

          So, I stand and get to work opening up. Footsteps shuffle behind me. “Maybe taking the day off would be good for you. I don’t think you’re up for working today.” My father says. I shake my head and refrain from wincing at the ache it causes. “I’ll be fine. Just need to move around a bit.” I say as I unlock the front door, our early gamers already waiting outside. Well, I suppose it’s less that they’re early and more that we’re half an hour late. I stick near Polybius today, and what strikes me more than anything is the long line. It’s so orderly it’s baffling, and then anyone who has played stumbles out quietly. Without touching another arcade cabinet. Maybe the machine is affecting more than just me. The thought sends chills down my spine. It feels… right. I have to try to destroy it again tonight.

          So, after a long day, I dismiss everyone in the line like I’ve been doing every day since Polybius showed up. But, once everyone is gone, the urge to play comes back. I fight against it and fill a bucket with water before going back to where Polybius stands. Dropping water on it may break some other cabinets, but I don't care. I just want this one gone. It flashes to life again, showing a laughing face. I feel like jello again, and stumble forward only to carefully put the bucket of water down. This time, when I come to, I’m in my room. There’s blood on the floor, and a hot ache in my arms. My arms are covered in blood, so I take a dirty towel to wipe it away. I’ll clean them after they stop bleeding. Except, when I wipe it away, more oozes up out of my arms. There are cuts in my arms. I pause. I don’t remember doing this, either. But, it feels right. Like all the other times I’ve come to in odd places, from the tunnels to alleyways.

          I really can’t keep doing this. Polybius needs to go. But right now I need to clean up all the blood on the floor and get my arms situated. So, I take a few more dirty towels and wipe up the blood and take turns pressing down on each arm to stop the bleeding. When it stops, I throw on a long-sleeved shirt and head to the bathroom. I examine the wounds more closely, as I wash them with soap and water while ignoring the stinging. They look like clean cuts; I think a knife made them. But I don’t know. There wasn’t a knife around me when I came to. 

          I go to work again, like every day, but I stop a group of three teens. “I have a job for you, if you’ll take it. You’ll make a hundred bucks each.” I say. They squint at me. “What kind of job?” One asks. “I’ll give you the spare key to the arcade, and you’ll destroy Polybius after hours.” I say. The stout one shrugs. “Pay us first, then we’ll do it.”

***

By Snapdragon

            Even now, I can see my mother burning when I see fire, like the fireplace sitting in front of me. The room is only lit by the fire, and the chair is stoutly built from wood and stacked pelts for cushioning. Ghostly hands grip my shoulders tightly, holding me back. The flames, orange and angry, lap at my mother’s legs. Her blonde hair blows in the cold wind. With the snow, most fires would’ve gone out, but the fire was borne of magic. It doesn’t go out so easily. As she shrieks and shrieks, my father watches, fire burning in his own blue eyes and his dark hair standing out against the snow. 

By Snapdragon

            The house is quiet. My “mother”, a small, stout, woman with neat black hair, sits playing the piano. I don’t recognize the tune- it must be something my father just gave her the sheet music for. Her eyes are glazed over, unseeing. Even now, I can’t help but be disgruntled at the sight of her. Any mage worth their salt, regardless of Order, would know just from looking at her that she isn’t really alive, and her pristine, almost life-like, state is the result of a talented necromancer. In fact, there isn’t a time I remember her alive, and my birth was scorned by other mages from the Vault. My father is a powerful mage- life would’ve been easier if he’d chosen to bear a child with a mage of a similar standing, instead of a random 0th Order woman who needed money.

By Snapdragon

A coin will first be printed, shiny and new. It will do its job as a coin, paying people for their hard work and later be squandered for services- if lucky. Otherwise, the dutiful coin will find its way into a jar or car, where it will sit. Other coins will join it, and, together, will watch life go by. The coins in the couch will see the people that forgot them relaxing, minds far away as they focus on their phones or TVs that coins from the past were traded to receive. Coins left in the car will watch from a collection of coins the comings and goings of their humans that hardly notice their presence or the potential they have. These coins will see the lives of their handlers intimately- their friends and families, their stories, their secrets. And none will be any wiser to the secrets picked up by the coin they once held in-between their fingers. 

Other coins will not suffer the same fate. First, these coins will be traded- for both goods and services. No one who has ever used coins will think much of this, and so the coin will gain age and keep its bronze shine for a while. Careless hands may drop the coins as well, but all the same they will be picked up and used once more. Some coins will be picked by children excited by the shine they have- like stars glimmering in a void we call space. Other coins will find new homes in superstitious teens and adults who thought them to be good luck. They are still doomed, however, to fall and be forgotten in a crack or a car somewhere, where they will dull- unused. 

The moon watches over the Earth,

while the sun is away.

Her gentle light lulls all those who witness it into slumber.

Those who stay awake in the moon’s embrace

enjoy the silence and solitude

of a world that slumbers in the light of the moon.

By Snapdragon

            When I was a girl, I pretended my reflection was my twin sister. We dressed the same, and danced to the same music. When I brushed my teeth, she brushed hers. Whenever I looked in the glass front door before going to school, I saw her ready to open the door for us to go to school. I sat nearest the window in school, and could see her clearly sitting beside me in an identical classroom. There was even a second bed in my room, with an untouched hot pink flower theme to it. I was forbidden from that side of the room- it was a place for my parents to sit and look around, like a couple of lost puppies. 

Thin pages smell of ink,

each black letter neatly and uniformly imprinted on each one.

The words themselves contain a fantasmal world,

with its own sights and smells and people.

The book promises a world where the reader can be free.

Free of responsibility.

Free of bills.

Free of judgement.

The world lives and breathes with the reader,

and lives to give them freedom life never could.

A book is judged only by how well it fulfills this purpose.

The best books are as beautiful as any painting,

with vast landscapes 

and abstract spaces,

and as detailed as a memory.

A dark grey cat with a white belly lays

curled in a cat bed at a corner on its owner’s bed.

It’s white paws knead the pouch material,

long claws flashing in the artificial light as it purrs

as loudly as a fan one may use in summer.

When her owner sits beside her,

she raises her head and slowly opens her jade green eyes,

ready for a hand to smooth her fur

before the light is turned out and the night’s darkness blankets the room.

In spring, 

pink flowers come to life 

on the branches of a tree.

They bud, paint the tree’s branches pink for a time 

and decorate the sky, 

then fall to the ground 

and die.

As life is fleeting, 

so too is beauty.

The canopy of green shelters the greenery below.

The soft gurgle of the nearby creek

provides the melody for the birds’ song.

Deer tread near the forest’s edge,

and fish swim undisturbed 

underneath the surface of the creek.

Summer is coming, 

and the forest has come alive to celebrate.

If life is a picture,

it is framed by a cosmic origin.

For, the cosmos has left its dust

in plants, people, and animals.

Yet of all the dust left behind,

that which rests in humanity aches to return to the stars,

to be closer to the origin of life than the birds 

who mock those below by flying high.

When spring arrives,

it makes the daffodils rise.

For while winter was palid

spring yearns to be vivid,

so it raises daffodils first, 

to decorate its blanket of green grass

with white and pale yellow.

While its owner lays in bed,

attending class,

a grey cat with small, folded ears

walks between its owner and the laptop

with a purr as soft as distant rolling thunder.

The cat walks back and forth, 

tail brushing against its owner’s face like a feather,

then walks in a circle and lays between the computer and its beloved owner.

As the owner reaches out to stroke the cat, 

it leans into their hand,

fur as soft as any blanket.

By Snapdragon

            Bellatrix liked to pretend she was a poltergeist. She would move her own things late at night, when she was so tired she wouldn’t remember it the next day. She would even go so far as to change her alarm noises to dull thuds, and let them sound throughout the night at random times. Though, as hard as she may try, she was no poltergeist. Poltergeists were important parts of someone’s life. Meanwhile, she worked a nine to five in which she could be replaced. Her mother had long forgotten her name, calling her a stranger, and her sister had moved overseas to a small, European country to be a doctor. The coffee shop she went to never remembered her either, her being one of the hundreds of customers they serve each day. She might as well have already been a ghost, so why not be a poltergeist? 

            At least then, someone would know she was there. At least then, she would mean something, no matter how negative, to someone who distinctly wasn’t her. She would still be invisible, but then she would be heard. Today was one such day where she longed to be something. Having just gotten out of work, she wasn’t yet hungry, so she decided to stop into a flower shop. The flowers were various shades of blues, purples, yellows, oranges, and reds. Their shapes varied from large to small, from lilies with only a few large petals to chrysanthemums with many smaller petals. She would pick out a bouquet of forget-me-nots, daisies, roses, and marigolds and pay for them before continuing on her way.

By Snapdragon

            A girl dressed in ornately embroidered clothes pauses at the window of a novelty shop with the chipped, decaying wooden sign reading “Wonder Crazy” in fresh-looking dandelion yellow paint. In the window, amongst soaps realistically resembling food and everyday objects, comical signs, and bottles containing impossible items, lies a ship in a bottle- specifically the Queen Anne’s Revenge- the esteemed ship that once belonged to Blackbeard himself when he reigned over the sea the same way a great warlord may rule over whatever people they’d found in their acquired territory.

            Years ago, when she was only nine, she’d sat mesmerized as the ship cut through the ocean in its relentless voyages in an old, clunky television set that couldn’t so much as weather a storm without static rendering it incomprehensible visually and auditorily. The pirates within went unmatched, taking on nature’s furious winds and waves in storms ordinary people would have perished in. They had taken what they wanted from people, leaving only ash behind when they left like the angry gods of old they seemed to be in modern times, with more monuments in theme parks and movies than most religions had churches. Not even nature could take down a pirate- something resembling a human in appearance alone and more powerful than any force on Earth except time.

            So, she would pretend she was a pirate herself- cutting down those imaginary people who were foolish enough to stand in her way and leaving nothing once she’d gotten her way with the faded wood floors as her sea, a cardboard box for her ship with “S.S. Revenge” scrawled in red crayon after Blackbeard’s first named ship, and the smell of mold and old paint in place of the smell of salt water and rain. Here, on this imaginary sea confined by walls barely hidden under peeling paint, she’d been known by and feared by imaginary lands as “Deria the Dreadful”- a vengeful pirate with a wrath impossible for a man or woman to match and a greed so egregious it would bring her to raze towns overnight. Her parents were naught but sirens scared into silence, reduced to mere spectators for her as opposed to the deadly song that drew weaker pirates to their doom.

            But, she’d aged out of it. Instead, she threatened classmates with a sneer and took what she wanted as she pleased, destroying what she could that wasn’t of value to her. She’d found a crew later, running contraband through the school before falling under the command of a woman who’s name went unknown, her appearance nothing more than speculation from those that haven’t seen her. Those who did see her ended up strung from buildings or in the middle of a street, mangled and beaten- sometimes burned. A pirate without a ship, she bought and sold people while waging carnage-filled wars against law enforcement like the pirates of old. Her brutality earned her the moniker Slave Queen. Deria had run messages and guns for her and awaited the day she would be ordered to become a pirate without a ship herself, so she may shed the humanity that had been her sole scourge and forever cast it aside in blood. 

            She had been ordered to do so almost two years into her time under the dreaded Slave Queen. The blood smelled of rusty cannons and power, overpowering the earth and mold scent of the dark room she’d used as the ocean she’d sink her humanity in like a burdensome sack of broken goods that would only weigh her down. Left in place of a person laid a scarlet symbol of the raw untouchability and freedom, of what it meant to be a pirate. Feeling like calm ocean waves had replaced her blood, she’d left the room lighter and above the highest forces Earth could offer. She’d left the ocean the room was for her to navigate the sea of people the modern world is and has always been. She’d left the room a pirate without a ship.

            Now standing in front of the ship of her childhood from behind her own reflection, she smiles. She remembers her feet and walks through the door, finding the cashier. “Hey,” she says. “Hi. Is there anything you need help with, miss?” He asks, appraising her appearance. “I was just passing by and saw the ship in a bottle in your window. How much would it cost to buy it?” She asks. The cashier stands from the stool he’d been sitting on behind the counter, turquoise vest straightening itself out over his short-sleeved black shirt. Deria doesn’t take her eyes off him as he moves to the window, coming back after examining the bottled Queen Anne’s Revenge, ship in hand.