Life's a Game for the Living [Board Game Plot]

A break from that idiot felt euphoric, but terrifying all the same. His apparent dislike for Axton bled through the thin sheets of fabric that was our household, every day Elverum managed to add fire to the burning hatred like the other boy struck it against his cigarettes. The question revolving around my head filed the same, because when I came back would a house still in stand or sit like charred ash from a cremation. Both boys were trustworthy, except around each other, since the tension is as easily seen as a pink dress at a funeral.

Still, this estranged forest felt less at peace than the house that was always too quiet for comfort, every narrow gap between the trees that fit like family led me further into a private green wonderland. It felt almost threatening, as if it was challenging me to find my way out without losing control. A unique spiral of floral avenues venture me to an empty lot of grass where nothing but fauna dared to cross. Maybe I could rule here instead, instead of teaching wild animals, the deer chasing each other like children would be simpler subjects.

Through incomplete veering aimlessly, the detour off my scenic empire brought me to a rundown factory, with each window busted like the frames of forgotten glasses. Paint seemed to be scraped off in sections implying either murder or a teenage heartbreak, while the wallpaper inside attempted to flee the scene like ghosts vanquishing off the walls. Each section of the setting felt like it connected like a puzzle to represent the home seemingly in a different planet, instead, the warehouse brought itself to be surreal, almost like I fell through a worm hole instead of a forest. Each palm of mine quivered with the feeling of losing the path home, vibrating like a clock alarming me that my home fails to exist anymore. Something happened, it must have, while I was away Elverum must have gotten reaped, or Axton went into a coma because his lungs could not grasp enough air.

As a child, Elverum use to ask me all these questions about what happens when people die. Usually my answers were equipped but nevertheless untactful, such as "I don't know" or "I don't care." One time he asked if he sit there and feel nothing, that we embrace the dirt and bugs attempt to devour us and our sanity, and I responded with "That's what living is." He never asked again after that, and my mother grounded me; however, she was the one grounded by reality, that death is some great relief only cherished by those who seek it.

The only thing I seek is a way home, for notification if it still exists after the minutes or hour I was away. You're over reacting, well oh well, it does not count as over reacting until I know the answer. My hands met the steel bars that was a ladder system back in its day, but now say as decor for Villa Decomposition. After breaking my gaze through the cracked frame of a window, my hands continue to shiver like cold puppies as I ascend.

Once landing on the strip of cracking cement serving as a covering, my hand burrows into a pocket to retrieve a cigarette that used to find home in Axton's collection. Hell, if I can't find home neither can it. A lighter I stole from a convent store earlier ignited the stick, like a match to glitter, and for a second I watched it like a show. As if the fire tasting paper-wrapped cancer was the best source of entertainment, but it was calming, like therapeutic needles. My knees break next to the skylight of the ceiling covered in a film of dust, decay and dirt.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

Stop.

Elverum rarely let's me smoke in the house, he says it makes me seem like Axton, or in other words, a dead beat who's wasting his last breathes. Luckily for me, us two are close enough to where I do not have to panic about setting the house on fire in anger with him. Fire. My palms begin to whimper again, and it becomes harder to breath, like my heart is stuck in my throat instead of air.

No, no, he's fine, they're both fine, it's going to be ok. Instead of seeing the house burn down, I bring my eyes to stare into the sun, the only fire burning that is proved. The sun is real, just over the tree line, I know it because it is there. Therefore my house still exists, I know it because it must be there. So I must also exist, because I know I am here.

It must be easy to know I'm here when that is all I have to control.