The Game of the Goose


1. The tile is cool and smooth beneath my feet. I am in the shadow of a De Chirico archway, through which yellow light rakes the path ahead. To be yellow can suggest cowardice, that one is gutless, pigeon-hearted, lily-livered, craven. I am pigeon-toed and trembling in the face of Fortuna, who places a pair of dice in my cupped hands and reminds me that chance shares a root with to fall.



5. I roll a one and a three. A fat goose strides toward me, buff-coloured feathers dappled in that same amber light. The goose exudes an air of authority; it greets me like an old friend. Its neck curves like a question mark. Pourquoi l’oie? It invites me to move forward again, and commends me on my good fortune.


9. O elegant blanched goose, second fortuitous fowl before me now. Feathers of snow, as if washed clean of the lost dreams of travellers past, my fellow fortune-seekers for whom this game tempted an escape from destiny.


19. Six and four. Advance to the Hotel. The Hotel is a corridor of many numbered doors. All the rooms on the right side of the corridor have views of the stuccoed Italianate city, and all the rooms on the left side have views of the courtyard cored out of the Hotel’s centre like an apple. The Hotel is a spiral in the form of a square, a closed loop of trodden carpet and wallpaper yellowed by cigarette smoke, and an old Madam behind the desk says I must stay here a while.


30. Five and six. I wandered the corridor for a day and a night, palm outstretched against the textured walls, trying to anchor my body to a place where each corner felt like the last. After a while I gave up, ordered a strong whisky to my room, rested my head on the eiderdown. When the first fronds of dawn crept under the puckered curtain, I returned to the corridor, and encountered a large illuminated sign I had not seen before. The sign read FIRE EXIT.


37. Five and two.


42. Three and two. I pass a goose who seems not to notice me at all. All of a sudden, great thickets tower up from the tiles, a geometry of walled hedgerows. I enter The Maze, all light blocked out but the smallest beads, all sound hushed now as though I had wrapped my head in furs. I begin to run, seeking a way out, darting this way and that. When at last I burst free, it is, inexplicably, back at


39.


46. Two and five.


53. One and six.


58. Four and one. A skeleton dances through the gloom like a jester, and places its hand on my shoulder. At the end, I feel less fear than I imagined I might. The yellow light at last gives way to a milky cirrus white. High overhead, a silver ball balances in an open window. Death is just a new beginning, and I bow my head, swallow my pride, pray for my soul, and return to


1.


- Phoebe Cripps