His username is among the list of players when I log on the server, with a blue tick at the end. His avatar is gliding across the pixel-terrain, hovering over other users’ multicolored cursors. I don’t intend to play this game again. Not with him. Our broken bodies, battling each other online and off for eternity. Our conversations revolved around some complicated topics the first time we met—cosmic inflation theory, renewable energy. It was never simple with us. With him.
He and I played this game over and over. He was one of the best on the server, no doubt about that. Many times I was offed by him, fiercely, indelibly. He knew how to buckle my body, twist his dagger into my soul. His was the kind of confidence who could get anyone into trouble, myself included. It was hard not to love him, not to dislike him, he a medicine to problems of his making.
And here he’s again for the millionth time, breaking everyone’s hearts on the server one after the other, just when I thought he’d quit it all.
In no time he materializes by my side, not hesitating to blow my head off with a rifle even before we had a chance to talk. I know that’s a part of his long game, how he combines cruelty with compassion.
Killing me softly, brutally, repeatedly.
I respawn by the catacombs.
One time he told me I was like a bug that could never be truly killed. He was right: every time I respawned, I lunged back on the offensive with a renewed perseverance, crying binary cries of revenge at him. We were on a mixed server, which meant he had to deal with a lot of lowlies like me. That day, I reloaded my rifle, centered his head behind the crosshair, brought my hand to the trigger, and counted to three.
Today, beyond the barracks on the map, there’s a cohort of players conspiring to off him for good, casting imaginative curses in made-up languages. The general idea is to entrap him by the graveyard, then close in on him in a crescent formation, emptying him of options. I remain quiet the whole time, not wanting to give either side any ideas.
I imagine the next time I’m reborn on a spawning point, I’ll consider giving him a second chance. I’ll consider finding a new language to express ourselves, one that’s beyond bullets or explosions, beyond words and promises, hoping he stops spraying me with his ammunition this time, giving us a chance to live, to be reunited as two stray lovers.
I imagine us dying and dying and dying, together.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Fractured Lit, Hobart, HAD, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
The Disappointed Housewife 