by Colin Powers
There Is a New Game
During childhood games of Tag, I never liked to be It.
I was never fast enough to tag and pass on what I saw as my affliction.
In hindsight, this was actually a very powerful position to be in.
I had the choice to stop chasing altogether.
To refuse to transfer my power.
I could bend the unchosen ones to my evil little will.
Instead of fleeing me, they’d be forced to come pleading for an end.
//
Taking out my trash the other day, I discovered a man (a living man) inside one of the cans in the courtyard of my apartment building.
He told me, whispering, that he was playing Sardines and no one had found him yet.
Please, just a little longer.
His beard was very long, and so was his hair.
There was a copy of Anna Karenina open at his feet.
Some soup cans. A flashlight.
I wanted to ask him how long he had been playing.
I tried to remember the last time I took out the trash.
Had I put it in this same bin?
The man couldn’t keep his eyes open against the sunlight.
Out of respect for his game, a game of concealment, I closed the lid and put my trash in one of the other bins.
I just met the greatest Sardines player of all time, I thought.
I wished to have thought this, at least.
I wished it had happened.
//
One of the nastier rumors I’m guilty of creating was telling people there was an “outbreak” of MRSA infections in my high school.
An event so severe and widespread it was covered by the local news.
This was my calling card in any conversation about staph infection or skin conditions in general.
In reality, there was only one person who contracted MRSA from a wrestling mat.
He had a quarter-sized area of skin removed from his knee by a medical professional.
I discovered this when I tried to tell him the rumor he was the center of.
//
After a first visit to a local spa, my friend Caleb described to me a type of plainclothes security guard who policed the main steam room.
The man was hired seemingly to prevent other men from having sex with each other in the steam room.
He would enter the room fully clothed at intervals and give everyone hard, suspicious looks, a tactic which only worked while he actually stood inside the steam room.
In the interim, men were having sex.
It sounds comedic, like a lost, erotic chapter of Indiana Jones in Weimar Berlin.
But it’s also a little mean.
For all involved, I hope that the fear of discovery only added to the pleasure.
//
If you don’t know about Sardines, and you’re still wondering, it’s Hide-and-Seek in reverse.
One person hides and everyone else goes looking for them.
If the player hiding is found, the finder must (quietly) join the hider in hiding.
They are recruited.
Absorbed.
The glory of the original hider is to remain unfound.
Or, to find a hiding place ample enough to conceal other players who discover you.
A charitable strategy.
Depending on the will of those left seeking, or the stamina of the expert, solitary hider, or the obscurity of the hiding place ample enough to fit all former seekers save for one, the game could go on forever.
Usually, a boundary is placed on available hiding spots.
Or a time limit.
Anywhere inside the cathedral sanctuary, for example.
Only Terminal B and NO bathrooms. Until the flight starts boarding.
An advanced player might relish a lack of boundaries, though.
Open world Sardines.
Free range.
Like the man in the trash can.
In my mind.
//
Somewhere in the cloud of the MRSA rumor is the story about my high school’s football team greasing the locker room benches with soap and sliding down them on naked asses.
This is part of the microeconomy of games invented while waiting for other games to begin.
Because of the exaggerated MRSA event, I still imagine this game as a terrible kind of roulette, in which you may or may not walk away with a MRSA infection on your scrotum, perineum, or ass cheeks.
Other than risking infection, I guess the challenge would be to see who can slide the entire length of the bench on their ass.
And once several players have accomplished that, to see who can slide the length of the bench fastest.
The game develops in real time.
Someone suggests a trial of different soaps and shampoos to increase speed.
Someone else puts on their football helmet and tries to dive into the wall after sliding.
Had I been there, I think I would have developed a signature technique.
Criss-cross. Cannonball.
Fedora on the very front of my head.
Something comedic to distract from my fear of failure.
Lord of my own category.
Ruler of my own private game.
From the judge, Julie Marie Wade:
This flash lyric essay defied all my expectations for what short-form writing can do, particularly the kind of experience it can create. I think we expect “flash” to be brief, yes, but also dense, even to appear visually compressed on the page. Instead, “There Is a New Game” embraces space, porosity, and the techniques I associate with much longer essays. There is deft braiding at work here–about the game of Sardines, for instance, about the speaker’s experiences in school. There are elements of memoir, of rumination, and also of speculation, e.g. wishful thinking. The reader isn’t always sure what really happened to the speaker or within the speaker’s purview, but the reader believes unabashedly that this speaker is worth following, worth listening to. Lists, fragments, potent images: poetics accrete into an essay that reverberates past its ending. “Please, just a little longer” might be what the man in the trash can says, but it is definitely what any reader of this essay will say. We’re satisfied and somehow still longing for more.
Author Colin Powers (he/him) is a writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he owns a plastering business. His most recent work can be found in b l u s h and Zona Motel.
Artist TJ Norris (he/him) is an award-winning conceptual artist based in Fort Worth. A graduate of MassArt and NSCAD, his photography deconstructs the urban environment to explore social complexity and personal loss. His work is held by the Amon Carter Museum and Harvard University, and he is the author of the monograph Shooting Blanks.
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