PSYCHIC SISTER

One Sunday after church it started, and we kept at it for a few months.  The game started with everyone dividing the resources equally.  We gathered all the fort-building supplies we could find, every spare blanket, every spare board, and placed them in the center of the basement.  We doled out monopoly money in even stacks.  We parceled out the square footage of the basements concrete floor, bickering over the demarcations.    Each prospector dreamed in those moments.  The building of your store was the focus of the game’s level of achievement.  In the end, you were trying to have the baddest spread.

I took the nook under the stairs, and set up my home underneath, using the convenient stair steps as the shelves of my stuffed animal store.  I wasn’t in business long.  I felt like a fool.  I mostly distracted myself from the lack of customers by decorating my home.  Soon, I complained aloud to my customers, demanding they shop for their stuffed animals locally, but the overwhelming response was that they didn’t feel they needed stuffed animals, and asked me to carry something useful.  Disappointed, I pulled each little guy off the shelves finding them each a place of honor in my little hideaway.  I racked my brain for the solution, finally, I found it.  People needed tools, they needed tools to fix their forts.  So, I pulled together all my Dad’s tools, not many incidentally, not many, and set up a very meager store.

In the meantime, I’d had to sell my apartment under the stairs.  My brother had opened a bar, and the bar was very successful selling fruit juices.  I, myself spent a lot of time there.  Anyway, he’d offered me a pretty sizeable amount of money for my place, which he then spruced up beyond recognition as a side wing to his own gargantuan quarters.  I set my hardware store up in a small shack of the basement which I’d had to buy from my next door neighbor Josh, and there, after creating a small, but ambient fort, waited for some sales.  There were very few.  I think, mostly made out of pity, looking back.  I was desperate for cash, my ever saavy brother, had begun dealing cards at the cash only bar, and it was Blackjack that I thought could save me.  Blackjack, and blackjack alone.  When I was up, I was way way up, but, the house always wins, as my brother would say before I scrambled nine feet home to my dump of a stupid hardware store.

It was around this time that my brother, Jeb Adams, had announced his intentions to marry my best friend, Whitney Boyd, and consolidate their adjacent fortresses and fortunes.  I seethed with jealousy.  I knew it would be socially corrupt to marry that old bartender, seeing as he was my brother, and people would scoff.  But, I reasoned, given that this was a game, and given my situation; I found it hurt, like a knife in my back, that he had overlooked our possible partnership.  And her!  Married right into the lap of luxury!  He spent days tricking out her fortress into a convenience store that sold little sandwiches made of ritz crackers and peanut butter, on which I would spend my very last dime.  As I did so, I was invited into the fort to see what they had done to the place.  I sat down in the luxurious low-lit room on a divan-type blanket assemblage, very comfortable.  I almost screamed in envy, but I did not.  I politely ate my sandwich, and allowed myself to be inspired by what was their truly outrageously awesome home.  Okay, I get it.  I cannot sell goods, I must sell services.  That is what these people wanted.  Something for their money!  Something, something, something.  I held a brief meeting with my fellow bankruptees.  We were all in hoc to that saloon, what could we do to wrangle some of that economy our way?  We adjourned to our favorite barstools and after a couple of fruit juices and several hands of blackjack, and mostly by virtue of the barkeep’s power of suggestion, we came up with a few ideas.  Josh and I would get married.  This would be a marriage of convenience and necessity in order to throw what little we had left together and open up a massage parlor.  Customers would purchase expensive and very real massages from our greedy little hands.  Drew would open up a portrait studio.  There, a person of our village could have their face rendered by a very childlike hand.

We garnered all of our strength, and set to work.  The massage business was indeed lucrative, and not without its titillating moments, but it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, all my profits were eaten up, in the form of peanut butter ritz cracker sandwiches.  Oh, not just the sandwiches!  I’ll admit it, I was a slave to that bar stool!  I couldn’t keep away from that damned game!  I’d lose everything I had then solicit some chap to have themselves a massage, and the vicious cycle would begin all over again.  I was stumped.  I sat to have my portrait done.  As I hung this wizened version of myself on the wall of our home, I slumped onto the cardboard box chair.  My life was a shambles.  Trapped in this loveless marriage, in this ramshackle pit of wreckage.  The construction of our home had been held up considerably by my mother’s only request that we leave her a path to the washer and dryer, thus making my property the least desirable in the basement.  In addition, we’d sold every excellent blanket and board we’d ever owned, in debt to the mansion and millionaires across the street.  I felt true despair.  I continued to feel despair all that week, the game rattled around in my mind.  I lost sleep over it.

One day, sent downstairs to retrieve some frozen corn from the freezer in the basement, I found myself in Jeb and Whitney’s place, searching maniacally for their monopoly money cache.  I just wanted to see how much they had.  I just wanted to look.  I finally found it in their living room, in an old crayon box, hidden under their coffee table.  Cash abounded in all the colors of the rainbow.  We’d been playing the game for months now, and as it happens, new currency had slowly trickled into our economy.  When we’d drained all the Monopoly’s we could find, we started on the Life’s, then we found some stacks of cash for sale at a variety store somewhere, and there it all was, the precious horde.  I grabbed a fat stack, enough to pay rent and buy groceries and have a little something left over for the kids.  They’d never know it was missing.  I returned calmly to help my mom prepare dinner.

The following days were peppered with guilt, but also excitement, at the prospect of gaining new ground in the game.  When we returned the following Sunday, it wasn’t long before Whitney shrieked about missing money, and there was great consternation.  I played my hand as well as I could, but I was fingered.  I alleged my innocence defensively, and they shouted back with their charge.  Enough, yelled my brother, we take it to The People’s Court!  We hurriedly assembled The People’s Court upstairs with my brother presiding as the honorable Judge Wapturd.  My parents were seated in the back of the room as the jury, undertaking their responsibility gravely.  Court was quickly underway, and allegations flew.  Soon, the prosecution realized they needed evidence and called a brief recess.  In these moments, I confessed to my lawyer that I had in fact committed the crime.  Court resumed and to my great surprise, the prosecution entered photographic evidence of me stealing the money!  In the form of a drawing.  I took one look at that crudely rendered bilk, and demanded my lawyer intervene.  The objection was overruled, the evidence held up.  Outraged, we asked for a short recess.  My lawyer and I huddled together, they had photographic evidence of me committing the crime, we reasoned, but what if we submitted a drawing of them drawing the drawing, thus invalidating their evidence.  We quickly drew it up and when the court was back in session, we entered our plea.  With no hesitation, that compromised low down dirty dealing judge sustained the prosecution’s objection to the drawing of the drawers drawing.  I was furious and began to argue my own defense, but with two beats of the gavel and a truly corrupted grin, Judge Wapturd held me in contempt of court.  Silenced, I sat down while the prosecution and defense laid out their final arguments.  The jury briefly deliberated and the sentence was read aloud.  What came next was the horriblest of horrible feelings.  Guilty on all counts.  In this life, I had lost.