sits on the floor. the cd is skipping in the disc tray. what was playing? the soundtrack to something. some game or other. came with someone’s copy of a special edition. came out of a bargain box at a charity shop. fifty p per item, or five items for a pound fifty.
stardream’s awakening. or something. the flat is on the tenth floor of the old building. it was a building where if you lit a match in the wrong place it would come tumbling down. the air was full with moisture skimmed from the newly soaked ground. summer had relented. floods were coming. here. going. so much water.
she remembers the images as a child. the rising sea level, and what the coastline would come to look like, that’s all that people used to talk about. and it’s an idea that just went away. at least when she stopped watching television.
the cd is still skipping. in the damaged disc drive of the machine that’s about thirty years old. same as her. ability to comprehend the data being fed into it by laser scanning muddled and distorted. same as her. relaying a null signal.
floor is carpet and that machine played games once, and so did she. they did it together, for almost thirty years and now they are together there on the scratchy ground running fruitlessly in circles.
the song, at the start of the disc, is some melancholy thing, grand but dark, sweeping and turning evil. titled The Parade of the Shattered Crown it sets the stage for the game’s twist on fantasy. The child of a once noble, ousted in a power struggle, who was orphaned too young to know their status watches from the crowd, as the yearly celebration parade for the only King they’ve ever known occurs… and when it is soured by a cursed magic, their silent guardian, protecting them all these years, steps in to direct them towards a path for retaking the crown…
or something. she hasn’t played the game. that’s just what the song sounds like, evokes. a story. a set of tropes. of ideas. anything could happen really.
she takes the disc from the skipping drive. snaps it in half. throws the machine out the window. or. the action pattern in her body does. the map she dare not follow does. because what if you were to do something. sometimes.
what if? and who would write the soundtrack to that? and who would turn your life into a story? into a game? into a thing to be embodied and beaten a toy a training teaching tool a bit of sport of fun?
when does rubbing yourself against the grain of the carpet stop being enough stimulation to allay the fear that life will forever be a skipping scratched and unreadable thing? breathe on your own skin and rub it against an oversized t-shirt, make the things that used to work work again. walk out into a future made of rain and buckets and fire and float yourself down the new waterways on rafts made of laced together electrical goods.
maybe someone else has the parts you need.
GlitchOut 