Pain. It is finally, totally, completely about pain.
They want to hurt you. That is all they want.
Listen to me. They will give you and your friends thirty minutes. They will give you an hour to collect small animals, small reptiles, insects, and bugs. I recommend doodlebugs—the ones that roll up into little pills—pill bugs they’re called. Collect as many as you can—twenty or thirty. I suggest looking under the stones in the front yard—that is where they live. Hundreds of them. The smaller, the better.
Do not play this game. Someone will draw a circle in the sand, and into this circle, you will pour your newts, your skinks, your spiders and snails, one-winged butterflies, beetles and toads—do you see? Instead of having a pot of chips, you will have a pot of bugs.
This is what will happen. Someone will shuffle the cards, someone will cut the cards, someone will deal the cards, and you will lose. Each and every last time you will lose. Do you know how to play poker? It doesn’t matter.
Trust me. Find yourself another game. Someone will shuffle, cut, and deal the cards, and you will lose. And when you lose—and you will—each and every last one of you must make a selection.
You cannot kill them. That is in the rules. They cannot be dead. I recommend doodlebugs—the ones that roll up into little pills—pill bugs they’re called. Trust me. They’re easiest to swallow.
I am warning you. You will run, only one of the first, and then—after four hands of poker, maybe five, after all the small bugs are gone—each and every last one of you. And when you run—and you will—they will chase you down. They will chase you down and hurt you, for you see, the object of this game is pain.
Glenn Blake has recently received the John T. Wall fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His story collection, Drowned Moon, has been nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He received the PEN Southwest Award for fiction and Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.
