Tag: games

Fiction Family 4

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes1 Comment

Pieces that precede can be read in order here:  FAMILY: A FICTION

Family 1

section three closing thus….

They build a monument, calling it travel.  Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum.  Humans tend to revert to familiar.  Habitude of experience.  With no experience, alteration comes to bear.  Predictable as weather.

No one’s leaving home.

Other words coming to mind.

4

            Resistance.

There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.

Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.

 

Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit.  In turn, she elucidates him.  Providing bases or cause – extrapolates.  Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters.  Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.

It’s good to be king.  Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks.  A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time.  Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother.  Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency).  He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.

These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same.  With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders.  Typify and characterize.  Declare it false.

Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze.  In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity.  Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.

Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo.  However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.

Thus every level its lingo.  Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child.  It comes clear.  There are altering thesauri of usage.

Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan.  With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.

A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present.  A thing to be explored or verified.  Corrected through each journey.  In several dictions.

The family edition.

The “Right” Word

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

            What are we waiting for?  And why?  It’ll never get any easier, and this is remedial.

I had thought we were awaiting the word.  The right one.  Any one, but right all the same.

I had thought that.  But I didn’t know why.

Since any old word would do.  Being all we had.

Still we waited, not quite believing.

How many words do you suppose there are? we wondered.  Given multiple spellings and various languages all – how many?  And their requisite alphabetical sourcings.  I reckon we could figure it out in an equation, don’t you?  Only so many letters rearranged so many ways with up to twenty-six (or however many) letters equals = ?  For every tongue?  There are limited options.  It’s certainly not infinite, this isn’t rocket science here, or religion, so to speak.

Still, we waited.  Because, well, because we didn’t know.  Know which of the any was “right.”  By which we meant, well, by which we meant “worked” for whatever it was we desired.  Which, again, we did not know.  Leastwise I certainly did not.

I had a feeling for how it might, or that I’d like it to, feel, but wouldn’t be able to tell you how that was until I found the right words, any words, but, you know, the right one(s).  I could kind of hear the sound, how it would wrinkle into the ear and swoosh down their canals, troubling the waters.  Or what textures the air would take as it blew up out of the lungs trembling the throat and over the tapping tongue.  Some idea or sense of it, but nothing particular, not knowing the word, only the anticipation and desire.

That’s what waiting is, after all.  A hunch without a reason or cause or an outcome.  Guesswork with some directed hope.  A running of options, but unable to identify.

So we waited, not knowing what we were waiting for or on, exactly, but also because we didn’t know.

And waited.

I could imagine its shape, the work of the muscles, the grip and the tracing of lines, but I couldn’t know how to begin, not knowing what or which curve happened first.  And was it dotted or crossed or simply angles and loops?  I had no way of telling, without the word, the one I’d keep waiting for, any word, the right one.

So I kept still.  Well, actually we paced.  Walked to and fro and back and forth, ahead and around, and sometimes sat down, sort of listening I guess, looking and listening for an outline or scrawl, whisper or code, some rhythm or sound that might bring on the term, any word, but not the ones we were using, no, the next one, the “just” or “proper” or appropriate word to our intake, our output, a resonance you know, what we were waiting on.  The “correct” as it were, word, sound shape texture intonation field of references emotive trail and so forth…that one.

The discreet utterance or image that would hear us out, carry us on, would solve us.

I’m waiting.