2 SQUARE
The boat slid onto sand with a hiss. The figure rowing let the oars drop and tilted his face back. He was an older, grizzled man with something of the outback about him. The dollar bills were lifted from Kyu’s eyes and both men stood up and walked a ways into the gloomy cave. The man signaled curtly with his hand to the right.
A girl sat there in a puddle. She was wearing a lacey white summer dress, looking despondent. It was Alex Derahla, Kyu remembered; a girl he had loved years ago while studying undergrad psychology.
Kyu recalled then that he and the older man held her captive here, to have sex with as wanted. He glanced anxiously out of the corner of his eye, trying to catch the man’s expression, only to find his stern face and black eyes waiting like tripwire. Kyu fumbled. He understood clearly that although they could both have their pleasure with the girl, she belonged first to the older one. He was the master; Kyu only the accomplice.
Looking over at Alex, Kyu remembered them sprawled on opposite sides of a couch, legs loosely twined, sketching comics on loose printer paper. Once he shared one of a confused flower sat on a therapist’s couch, saying “how is this about my mother’s pistil, again?” Alex laughed, head tossed back, white throat delicately exposed. She flipped over her own comic: a grave with a skeletal arm jutting from the dirt and flipping off the sky; gravestone reading “rest in oppositional defiance.” Kyu stared mock-indignantly into the distance for a second but couldn’t hold it up, letting out a snorting laugh.
As Alex sat there, her dress limp in the dingy wet, her eyes widened and narrowed as if she could sense Kyu remembering. Abruptly the grizzled man moved, stalking towards her with predatory deliberateness.
She jumped up and ran, her white heels showing like bicycle pedals in rotation, flying into the dark with lace streaming behind her. Anxious beats sped through the cavern like a palpitating heart valve and the scenery dissolved.
Alex was in the woods now, stepping silently through a green forest with curling white flowers and vines surrounding. She had lost them. But somehow it was understood that she would never escape the old man. It was understood she could disappear to any corner of earth or heaven and he would appear, and take her again as a prisoner for his pleasure.
At that moment the old man appeared in the forest, his face appearing in a soft sweaty sheen within the foliage, watching Alex from the edge of a brushline. He studied her while she stood naively between the flowers. Then he disappeared—and in his place a long white snake, thick as a muscled bicep, slipped across the dirt and green moss towards her ankles.
Kyu remembered then that years ago he had written a letter to Alex, but left it unsent.
[As the reader you must now decide:
A.) Continue in the dream as the snake approaches, at 3 Square, or
B.) Step outside of the 9-Square grid and read the letter on the coffee table by the flowers]