Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ How to Win at Monopoly ❯ Win, Lose, or Draw ( Chapter 1 )

How to Win at Monopoly

 

She thinks it's funny, this game we play. She calls it `Life'.

 

“We're all little Monopoly pieces,” she tells me as her fingers draw patterns of chaos and forgotten things on the fogged up windows in my car. “And we never know where we'll land, or what will happen. Maybe we'll end up on Park Place, and everything will be fine and dandy and you can brag about your big line of plastic red motels. Or you could roll an unlucky number and end up on `Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two-Hundred Dollars,' and the next thing you know, your little thimble or Scottish terrier is in jail.”

 

I don't know what to make of this speech, so I just press my lips to hers and swallow her fading whispers of `Luxury Tax' spaces.

 

Sometimes she forgets that she's real. I'm dropping her off in front of her house, watching her ascend her porch stairs from the front seat of my vehicle. She trips on the last step and falls to her knees. I rush to her, and she looks at me with her blue eyes as though we had not just been making out half an hour ago - as though we don't see each other every day. Her left leg is bleeding.

 

Fluttery black eyelashes, like spiders' legs, move wildly as she blinks in rapid succession. The rich red seeping slowly from her cut is a stark contrast to her pale skin. She is flesh and blood, and she forgets.

 

Sometimes, I do too. More like a faerie out of a child's nightmare than any human being, she is ethereal. Crystalline eyes, big as saucers, with skin that would make Snow White jealous. Her hair is an entity all its own. Sometimes, it is a curtain of dark acid that protects her from seeing the outside world. Other times, it is a bat, flying madly around her while she dances in circles under a full moon, by a castle in a lush field.

 

But the moon is the fluorescent bug light hanging in my back yard, the castle is my little brother's swing set, and the field is just the dying yellow grass that stubbornly tries to grow in my long-dead lawn.

 

She is her own escape from this Monopoly Life. There is a space in her that no one can reach, not even me, but I can see it. It's in the light of her pupils. It's the freckle on her shoulder. The blush on her chest that blossoms when I undress her in her bedroom. She will never welcome anyone into that private place. When she goes there, hiding from the Things that go Bump in the Night, I know I've lost her.

 

“I want to be a Queen,” she says, and she is unbuttoning my jeans. I am fire embodied, and nothing she says makes sense through the roar in my ears. Her nails, which are painted sparkly pink and are chipped at the edges, press into my bare hips.

 

“If I was a Queen,” she kisses the hollow of my outer thigh, “I could make everything not boring and not mean. I could get rid of the monsters and the bad men, and then everyone would be so happy that they would forget about how they needed those things. They would forget their addictions to sadness and be happy. Even if it was just a little while.”

 

Then her hands and mouth are doing things that make my mother blush to talk about, and we are both gone.

 

This charade we've fallen into was never my intent. Our meeting two years ago, in the greasy burger place down the road from the mall, was what I believed to be fate. I stood behind the register, called, “Next customer, please,” and there she was. Beautiful, magical, terrifying. She ordered the number six combo, and before I handed over her receipt, I scrawled my number across the bottom. She pretended not to notice.

 

Ten days later, my cell phone rang, and my ears were greeted by a chorus of glorious death, chiming tones as dark as sunlight; shivers coursed over my spine.

 

We made a date, and after that we were a couple. That's when the game started, she tells me. “We were playing make-believe, pretending that we had never set eyes on a more beautiful person, and that we were made for each other. Just like we pretend that the world is okay, and that we aren't already dead. And now we've been playing so long that we've absorbed our fantasies. We wear them like skins, part of our very beings. We couldn't shed them even if we wanted to, because we would die.”

 

The game stops when you declare bankruptcy. That is, when you've mortgaged off all your properties, and all you have left to give is your life. When you die, the game is over.

 

“There is another option,” she whispers, falling asleep on top of me, the both of us splayed across the dirty leather couch in my living room. “You can end it yourself before they come to take your houses away.”

 

This idea scares me, and I tell her to shut up and go to bed.

 

But even I, with all my rationalizing and struggling for normalcy, can't escape this never-ending antic. I arrive at her home to find her alone, lying lifelessly on the cold and unforgiving kitchen floor in pools of red and waves of black. A piece of paper, soggy with blood but still legible, if only just, is sitting innocently by her messy hair.

 

`I lost,' it reads in her familiar and horrifying handwriting. I run.

 

Back at my place, hiding in my room from the haunting shadows of rich old men with monocles and top hats, I realize that all of my assets have been seized. I have only one card left to play.

 

In my dresser there sits the key to my victory. It is heavy and chilling in my hands, and I almost drop it. My fingers curl around the trigger, set in place to trump the darkness of defeat. The feel of the barrel on my temple, reassuring and satisfying, tells me it is time. Her words echo in my skull, loud and so clear, now that the end of this debacle is near.

 

I close my eyes. Apply the pressure.

 

Game over.

 

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Disclaimer: Everything is mine. Any similarities in the story with real things or people are coincidental.

 

BobbyJustGotSheared