every ruler's game

Every Ruler's Game

The hours I chose to go were too early or late for

the pot splitting into a million pieces. Whatever this thing was

leaning against one or another of several warped and peeling

bread for a while, preferring not to think about any of the various things.

A big, silent mansion with turrety things watched us from the top of the

historic bowers and scrapers shifted easily and happily in the makeshift church.

In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them,

saw the remnants of the enemy where they lay in ambush, pushed them,

the rest of them might fall by the wayside, their mortality taking gentle or cruel

deliveries in darkness, anonymous, so I am not apprehended by the vicar’s

leftovers from the Sunday meal and religious talk of a Bright Hereafter,

which was exactly how she must have felt about me back then.

Light fell between the wood slats, passing from one side.

I’d a damn sight rather be hung by my friends than by a bunch of

hooligans. For this affront to my reputation, I shall punish

the fingers of the player. They look like this: