Playing Pox 
by George  Rizen
   
   

We discovered a cigar box, its faded label stating simply “Pox,” hidden in the attic. Mary Jo, Margaret, and I found within a collection of picture cards, two roundish bones, a handful of unused lamp wicks, and three tattered pages of notes.

Each card bore a different ocher-inked scene, most of them unpleasant and violent, such as “The Babe in the Woods,” who was shown nailed sideways to a dead tree, still alive, or “The Unicorn,” which was actually a rotting goat.  Surely this was a cautionary game, as were all such children’s diversions of the day. Being curious girls, we immediately set about learning this game. We huddled in a dingy and secluded corner of the attic for those first few experiments. The instructions were incomplete and all in riddles, but we nevertheless dedicated ourselves to a study of these old notes.

Our first game was weeks in coming. The manner of play was hard to discern, but one morning we finally triumphed.  That afternoon we dragged the little wrought-iron table from the side yard into the garden near the prickly hedge and set upon that the corrugated tin part of an old washboard to use as our game board. 

Once we were used to the game it was easy to let our minds go, tuned in to the geometry, and so we played a few hands without much thought.
 

    

“Do you see that?” Margaret asked as we settled into our fourth game.

“What are you talking about?” Mary Jo whined, brow furrowed as she organized her hand.

“Just watch the cards as we play, the ones on the board.”

“Why should I?” Mary Jo demanded as she peeked suspiciously over her cards.

“There’s a strange pattern, certain cards coming up together.  It’s curious is all.”

“Hmph.”

Cowed by Mary Jo’s scorn, Margaret quieted and we continued play.  But as we laid down cards again, I began to see what she meant.  The way the illustrations referred to the cards’ names or numbers, the deliberate way one card would partly obscure another no matter how it was tossed down, the position of one card to the next: it was like a sort of language.  The patterns somehow did not seem to be random and were not so much patterns as statements, each card prompting the next in a sort of preordained commentary that we weren’t quite privy to.
 

I looked at Margaret, hoping my intensity would catch her eye, but she was focused solely on the cards.  Mary Jo noticed me instead.

“Maebelle, I see you! No conspiring!” our eldest sister hissed, eyes darting back and forth between Margaret and me across the tin board.  I lowered my eyes and tried to look innocent.  Mary Jo’s outburst at least caught Margaret’s attention and I shot her knowing glances as soon as Mary Jo looked away.  Her eyes widened a bit at my acknowledgment, then she turned back to her cards.

I then divided my thoughts between attacking Mary Jo and puzzling over what the cards were doing.  On and on we played, for hours it seemed, the flutter of cards against more cards against metal, droning on, lulling.  I remained entranced until I noticed through the haze in my mind that Margaret was breathing differently, panting with some unseen exertion.

Then I saw it too.  Emerging, evolving with each card. A phrase, a statement, a very long sentence: three children innocent game habit drawing in devouring time reading knowing. . .  On and on it went.  It was about us, and it knew we could read it!  Now that we had digested the rules, knew how to play the game, we could suddenly somehow read the cards’ subtle commentary.  We never considered how it could know that we knew.

Mary Jo did not believe us.  “Maybe I’ll just throw your cards in the fire.  Maybe then you can read me a poem from the scraps,” she snarled, throwing her cards on the table and crossing her arms.  But just then we looked at the cards she had just thrown: impertinent flogged child.  Mary Jo, following our eyes to the obvious response looking up at her, was quiet and a bit pale.  After we finished that game Mary Jo took one more long look at the deck and the bones and harrumphed.  “I won’t play that baby game any more!” she cried and stomped away.  Margaret and I alone saw the cards’ response: awaiting tomb.

Several weeks passed before Mary Jo would even come close to Margaret and me as we played, but she did return by and by to join us in the garden each afternoon, sometimes coming close enough to keep score, but refusing to ever touch any piece of the game again.

One day Mary Jo refused to help us keep score and instead sunned herself on a wicker chaise while Margaret and I played.  The cards and bones all hated her, and the feeling was mutual.  Margaret and I still could not get enough of the game.  Every spare moment was spent playing Pox and listening to what it told us, disgusting things about ourselves and others, which we faithfully recorded and hid from Mary Jo.  “Those cards house a chorus of devils!” she daily insisted.  Since she was now ignoring us completely, we kept our papers out in the open.

Mary Jo balled herself up on the chaise and dragged her fingers across the woven rattan, leonine claws raking the belly of a dead gazelle.  She growled once, low and throaty, but stopped as soon as we looked at her.  This was all wrong, unnerving. Mary Jo was the reasonable one.  Even in play she had always been the most proper us.  Her growl called a fog up in the surrounding foliage.

“It’s almost time to go in for tea,” Margaret said, looking toward the obscured sun.  The fog thickened with each moment.  “I wonder if we can even find our way out of the garden,” she warbled, panic-stricken.

“We’re tied.  We cannot stop until the proper end,” I said, the fog sticking in my mind.  
 

The one clear rule was that game must not be stopped, and we all knew it. It was not safe to leave some things, however repulsive, unsaid.  Still, it looked for a moment that she would actually walk away, dooming us both.

Youngest desire, the impatient cards repeated before us.

Margaret was about to roll the bones and commence the next turn when Mary Jo attacked.  She barked and howled as she flailed upon the table, scattering she touched across the lawn.

Margaret cried and flung herself under a bush, for purposes of self-preservation and locating our scattered game pieces.

 Mary Jo wailed, hopping up and down, kicking, tearing at her clothes, arms, and legs; she seemed insensible of the damage she inflicted on herself.  It was a marvelous, terrifying display.

The game pieces were all far from her reach now, but not the board.  Margaret and I scampered to collect the pieces while keeping half an eye each on our sister.  Mary Jo raised both her hands to the sky and moaned something neither of us could understand. Could she, perhaps, have been speaking the cards' own silent language?  Down came her hands, a hysterical blur, down onto the washboard, which bent when she hit it.  The sharp edges curled up as if the board felt the sting of that blow, a hand closing over an opposing fist in some fantastic metallurgical defense. 

She cut her hands on the washboard edges and continued flailing about, albeit with less vigor, there on the table. 

By the time we collected all the bones, cards, and lamp wicks, Mary Jo had expired, collapsed on the twisted washboard.  I marveled at the small amount of blood.  Margaret collected the Pox pieces and we both ran off to return them to the attic before anyone came to investigate the commotion.

Mother made us write encyclopedic poems as punishment that evening, and we were to have no dinner until the task was complete. No one thought that we were exactly to blame for our sister’s death, but we were not supposed to be outside taking the air in the first place.  Since Mary Jo was no longer with us to receive her share of the punishment, Margaret and I had to collaborate on a third poem in her stead.  Working together, we were in rare form.  So many arms and legs, so many words between the two of us.  We felt conjoined by the void created by the corpse being washed in the downstairs bath.

Mary Jo’s funeral took place the next day on the side lawn.  We dressed in finery reserved for preening at the dead.  Margaret had even sat still long enough for Aunt Stacey to braid her hair.  The day felt all wrong. Every second was separated by something slightly thicker than paper, something that impaled us all and left each of us thirsty and wan.

The eulogies were wistful as child eulogies tend to be, and it was not long before we had overseen Mary Jo’s burial in the shade of a stately catalpa. No one lingered at the grave, nor did anyone remain long with us after luncheon that day. We children were left alone while our parents went about whatever business one goes about after burying a daughter in the side yard.

“We shouldn’t go out to the garden today,” Margaret said as she looked out through the back window at our little game table, holding vigil at the scene of Mary Jo’s demise, “and I don’t know if we should play at Pox any more.” I held tightly to her arm as she repeated herself, shaking her head at the protestations I dared not utter. The game had caused Mary Jo’s fit somehow and perhaps was something too dangerous to indulge in again. We had lost both our best friends to each other. Neither of us spoke the rest of the day. We whiled away the hours in the library looking at the picture books we were both too old for.
 

A full month was so spent. We were not quite inconsolable. Margaret and I still made conversation with Mother and Father and we did smile and laugh at appropriate times, but without our game and our sister we simply leaned into each other, sure that there was now nothing else for us in the world. Our lives were over, we merely waited for our bodies to quit. Being young, we would not meet our ends many years unless we were lucky or industrious. It was this calm sense of worn despair that eventually led us back up to the attic again to look for our cards.

As is often the case with Pox, the game was not where we left it. We looked everywhere, panicked. When the game was in constant play it never had a chance to get too far, but now that it had a serious head start we worried that we might not ever find it. We were prevented from finishing our game. The rules were vague as to what exactly happens when one neglects to finish a game, but we were both quite aware that the effect would be negative and permanent. The only option we had was to find the game, play it through, and see what it had to tell us. We searched the house completely twice. We searched the garden and the driveway, too, but it was in the side yard that we finally made our discovery. Above Mary Jo’s grave in the rustling branches of the catalpa tree lurked the treasured cigar box.

“You have to climb up there, Maebelle.” Margaret peered up into the branches, shading her eyes with a trembling hand. “The cards spoke of you last.”

She was right about that, that the cards had been talking about me. I remembered that bit of the game with something like pride. I did not understand what that had to do with going up in the tree, but I didn’t want to argue. I wanted to play. I climbed onto the split-rail fence behind the tree, using the top rail to boost myself up to the lowest branch. The tree was not hard to navigate, the limbs being sturdy and plentiful, and very soon the box was within reach.

I looked down and saw Margaret standing atop the mound of still-bare earth. She met my yes and nodded. I took the box carefully from its perch. The contents rattled reassuringly as I shoved the whole thing into the front of my jumper. Before I reached the low branches I could already see Margaret running toward the garden. I followed slowly behind, careful not to tread upon the grave.

We looked at each other for a long time as we sat at the table then, the bones in my hands ready for the first throw.

Each turn was excruciating. The cards wouldn’t speak, or even hint. It was all silence or soft gibberish until the very last turn. Margaret took it; she had done poorly the entire game, but now had one trick, the very last one. It was duplicate traverse caught abyss repeating--barely intelligible, far too vague to tell us much of anything. We both rolled one last time, then began the final examination to see who won and why.

The game did not end well. Neither of us won, an outcome we did not think possible. Margaret frowned down at the board.

“I--it seems that I have seen this card come up once or twice before during this game,” Margaret said as she held up a card for me to see.

I shivered. “I’ve never seen a card like that,” I whispered. “It’s blank.”

“It’s not blank, it’s 'Six Curmudgeons',” she said and turned it around for a second look. The color fled from her when she saw the faceless card in her hand. She gaped, dumbfounded. Margaret began to lay the card on the table, but suddenly gasped and dropped it. She stared at her hand, quiet for a moment, then muttered something I could not understand.

I got up and moved toward her. I could see a deep gash across the palm of her paling hand and watched as blood now welled up and poured down her arm. So much more blood than with Mary Jo, and so fast. Margaret fell out of her chair onto the manicured lawn at my feet. I crouched beside her, holding her  injured hand to my chest.
 

 “It wants you for itself. That is what the cards were saying when Mary Jo stopped it. That’s what they mean now.” Tears rolled down her face as she spoke but she didn’t sob. I though she may have been jealous, she was after all the first of us who could read the cards, but she was too faint to say so.

The following day we buried her next to Mary Jo.

After that I never missed a chance to play. It’s harder alone, but I managed for a while until I could find other players. After Margaret died, my family moved often. That made my job easier--introducing Pox to new children. Always children. The cards insisted. We have an understanding now, the game and I, and we get along just fine. I cannot say the same for my opponents over these long years.

Mother died when I was fifteen. Father, always distant, became even more so. I was so surprised when he came to see me in the library on the morning of my twenty-first birthday. He merely shuffled in, handed me a small envelope addressed to me, and off he went again. I never knew what he did apart from eat, and only that because we still kept the tradition of family meals, though we were barely a family anymore.

The letter was composed in a shaky, elderly scrawl. I opened it carefully, as if the author's feebleness might be somehow contagious, weakening my note.

It was from Mother. Her health declined so rapidly toward the end that her writing aged prematurely.

“Daughter,” the note said, “My triumphant daughter. My survivor. You have succeeded, proven yourself strong enough to play our dear game, my mother's gift, created with my own birth blood. Share your treasure as I did. One day you will have your own children. They will not all live, but you only need one good, strong one.”

From that day on, I always felt Mother’s presence in the cards, inert and observing.

Today is my youngest son’s sixth birthday. So many years have passed since my sisters fell to Pox. The time has finally come, so the cards say, to pass them on to the next generation. Two fine, strong boys and two fine, strong daughters. They have many friends in the neighborhood, a benefit of living in town.

Some of them will be brave or foolish enough to join my children in a strange game of cards, a game they will find soon in a cigar box waiting in the bureau at the far end of the attic where they often dress in their grandparent’s musty clothes.

One by one they will feed my game.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

"By day, George Rizen is a Midwestern housewife and mother. By night she is a freelance copy editor and mouthpiece to the evil that keeps a nicely appointed room in her brain. Sometimes the evil sneaks out on
baking day for a muffin or two, but only because that sort of thing is better hot."
 
     
   
 
 

Copyright (c) 2008 Three Crow Press & Morrigan Books. All rights reserved.