Scrabble

We were playing Scrabble.  Me, my sister Bronwyn, my best friend Glen, and his girlfriend who's name, oddly enough, was also Bronwyn.  Normally when we played amongst our friends, Glen and I would allow people to use their own name as a word for score once during the game, but in the case of these two 16 point threats, we decided to forge a linguistic treaty disallowing this friendly exception.  I found myself wondering how these two girls could be so ridiculously good at Scrabble; it had to be partial luck, right?  I had never in my life played the game with a person who completely dominated the competition, but when these two girls played together, one of them always won and the other would stare at the winner with a face of pride as if they were somehow on a team together just because they shared the same awkward and uncommon first name.

Except this time was different.  I had just crushed two double word scores in a row, "dalmation" and "scarecrow", piggy-backing off my opponents weak word choices.  In the clear, I thought to myself.  My letter placement was relentless and sniperish.  I thought about using sniperish as a word.  I knew that it wasn't a word, but I thought that it should be one.  I thought about bureaucracy and paperwork and long phone calls and decided not to pursue this word any further.  I felt like the Garry Kasparov of Scrabble for a brief moment.  I started to brag, recalling the vocabulary drill sergeant who was my 7th grade English teacher at the St. Thomas Academy in some randomly affluent American suburb.  As my hot streak continued, wood slapped wood, grimaces were squeezed like ketchup out of previously glorious faces and the dictionary was opened and closed like a drawbridge in a port city during rush hour.  Obscure and archaic words made themselves available to me, I was in the zone:  pysmatic! manciple! rollerblade!  

Bronwyn #1 and Glen held hands tightly; they sensed that the end was near and that they would soon be able to retire to their room and perform acts that didn't require nearly as much thinking or physical dexterity.  Bronwyn #2 looked me in the eyes and I could see her frustration mounting.  Her embarrassment at losing was clear and it made me feel like the wind and she was wearing some horribly breezy skirt.  I had exposed her.  

Her concentration remained a taut fishing line, however, and this made me nervous.  The game had been going on for quite some time by now, and it felt like Michael Jackson had completed some long and complicated dance in which every square on the board that he touched turned into wood and rose up 1/8" from the surface.  

This was Bronwyn #2's last chance; the blocks in the strange gray bag were dwindling and the game had officially become a fire hazard.  Suddenly, her eyes brightened, she saw her in.  I tried to follow the logic, desperately, the path of her eyes as they averted my own, but I could only look on in horror as she performed the unthinkable.  She placed a "P" in the bottom left corner of the board and, then, at that very moment, I saw red in my head, with black letters: triple word score, I knew it was over.  "H", "Y", then made use of a "T" that tailed down from another previous word and finally, the hammer: she placed an "O" on the other side of the borrowed "T", and linked her move up to another previously existing word, "plankton."  The "O" had dropped like a slab of marble and I felt my chest decompress, the whole time thinking of fat blue whales, paradoxically and inefficiently eating "phytoplankton."  Triple word score.  Game over.  I sighed and put on of the blank Scrabble tiles in my mouth as if I was a giant wooden ibuprofen, and swallowed it down, the sharp right angles scraping my throat.  I thought about metaphors, something about an act of swallowing all possibility.  I choked a little bit on that thought, drank some water, and kept the piece down.

Years later, I would have a colonoscopy and the doctor would ask me if I had ever swallowed something unusual, as he stared at the tiny blue monitor that contained the contents of my stomach cavity.  I said yes, and asked him to leave it in there.  He nodded solemnly and went back to work.