Line up every single pair of shoes in the entryway by size, colour, and design. After you have organized them, pick one pair and trade its laces for those of its mate. Their owner will not be able to tell the difference by looking, but when they put the shoes on again, they will feel just slightly less comfortable than they did before. This feeling will persist whenever the person wears that pair of shoes, resulting in blisters and ingrown nails and agonizing spasms of muscle, until one day they finally rip them off and abandon them on the sidewalk, choosing to walk home barefoot. Over the course of this walk a small sliver of glass will work its way into their heel, poisoning their blood. Find the abandoned shoes. Wear them to their owner's funeral.

Using a black felt pen, draw a tic-tac-toe grid on your stomach and invite everyone to play. If a person gets three in a row, the pen will turn into a scalpel, and the line they draw through their victory will open your guts to the room. The winner may then immerse their hands in your body and divine the future through the shapeless piles of your intestines.

Find the tallest man in the room and sit in his shadow. While he is engaged in conversation, mutter a string of absurdities in a voice so low only he can hear it. When he stops speaking and turns to find the source of the noise, shut your mouth and treat him to your widest smile. Repeat until he leaves to hail a cab, shaken and more upset than he will ever admit. This game can also be played with tall women, but they are notoriously difficult to rattle and therefore not amusing targets.

Turn to the person on your left and spit your ugliest secret into their drink. Observe them for the rest of the evening as they slowly consume your shame.

Remove as many women's earrings as you can without being detected. Keep them safe in your left palm, warming the metal with your flesh. When you get home, scatter the earrings under your pillow with the petals of a newly bloomed geranium, then go to sleep. In your dreams you will see a series of porcelain masks laid out on a wooden table, each one resembling a woman whose earrings you stole. Put a mask on and see the world through her eyes. They are your eyes now. You will always be able to see through them. When a woman whose eyes you own sees you in the grocery store or across a crowded restaurant or passing on a city bus, she will freeze, and horror will settle into her bones. That horror is you, seeing yourself and recoiling.

Approach a stranger and slip your hand into theirs. When they ask who you are and what you are doing, act baffled and hurt. Tell them that you have a history together, a home, a life; illustrate this with so many anecdotes and asides that the person begins to believe you. Pluck their drink from their hand and drink it with the casual intimacy of a lover. Kiss them with just the right amount of abandon, your wine-sticky mouth blooming open under theirs. Take them home. Fall in love with them. Marry them. At your wedding reception, after cake and before your first dance, find another stranger and begin the game over again.

Draw in a deep lungful of air and imagine that you are breathing in the whole world. Watch as the scene around you flickers for an instant. See it steady as you exhale.


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Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Halifax, with fiction appearing in The Dalhousie Review and Understorey.

"Games to Play at Parties" is a finalist for the Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Read EG's postcard.

Detail of collage on main page courtesy of Joana Coccarelli.

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