'Gameplay' by Emily Rinkema

My boyfriend’s thirteen year-old daughter challenges me to a game of Scrabble as her father, my lover, makes my favorite dessert, a berry pie that’s more bitter than sweet. She confidently places her first word, GOOSE, and her father says something celebratory. She gives me the look she’s been practicing for months, a look she first flashed when her father flirted with me in the restaurant where I work, a look that says, “He’s mine, bitch.”

I know that look from both sides and I know who he’ll choose every time.

I drink my wine and play the word FLING and then rack up the points, word after word: CHERUB and MOVE and NYMPH on a triple letter, and I keep eye contact with her, this creature who’s still young enough to cry when she loses, but old enough to do it in her room, who will soon cross lines she isn’t even aware of, who will learn to express her anger in a way that’s invisible to the world, but visible on her body, and I lay JEZEBEL onto a double word and lean back and watch her place tiles that open the board wide, that set me up for QUEEN down the left side triple word, and I can see her holding in her tears, the physical pain of it on her little face. 

She has so much to learn, and I know I won’t be around long enough to teach her.

“Pie,” her father says, placing a perfect slice in front of me and kissing the top of my head, and she knows I’ve won, that she never had a chance, and even though she hates me for it, I can see in her glassy eyes that she’s grateful, at least, for the clarity.   

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Emily lives in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG @emilyrinkema.