Broken Rule

I nearly spilled my drink a few times shuffling down the row to my assignment, stepping over random garbage to SEAT 12FF, prioritizing my pretzel and little thing of mustard. Today is my day. Rules must be followed.

I bumped his elbow as I sat down.

“Hey, really?” He jerked his arm back, sighed. “Sorry.”

Nice guy. Good start.

”Hi.” I pointed with my snack to the iridescent clouds wafting in from the west, releasing a few crystals of awesomeness to the open sky. “Great day for a match, huh?” The salt rose upwards, caught in the antigrav and finally disintegrated with a lime-green pop.

Unspoken rule: you gotta watch the pop. But then he scrunched and hmm’d with a subtle head tilt of what the hell you talking about, idiot. We’re about to get sizzled soon.

Oh, the irony. If he knew.

“Hold this a sec?” I extended my beer, small drops still dripping down from my excursion getting here. Unspoken rule: unless it’s from a Cryptamian, you gotta hold someone’s beer if they ask nicely. 

He took the cup with little fanfare, extending it out in front of him to avoid the drips. 

The rule must be universal. I shuffled and moved a few things around in my bag, just for show. Needed to know who I was dealing with. “Thanks,” I said, taking back the cup of nastiness. I don’t like beer, messes with my chromosomes. Things we do.

”Sure thing, bud.” He shook off his hand.

”Oh, sorry, man. Here…” I handed him the beer again and he accepted again as I opened my bag to find the napkins I’d stashed.

Unspoken rules, after all.

I took back the beer, he shook off his hand again and reset himself in his seat, sitting more upright, his friendly ponch jiggling a little beneath his original Chicago Owls jersey.

I handed him a napkin then shook out my hand too, wiped the cup with my napkin.

He watched me wipe it off. Looked at the cup, then to me, back and forth. His eyebrows went up past his near-bald scalp, grey hints tight on the sides.

“HA!” We laughed together. 

“Yeah,” I said. “Should’ve done that first, huh?”

”Uh-huh.” His smile grinned genuine. “It’s okay, young pup, time will teach you a few things.”

Young pup. Cute. “Thanks, pop. You come to the games often? Who you rooting for?”

“Often?” He pushed further back into his seat. “This is the first match here in thirty years.” He looked left and right, leaned in and hushed, “not since the Feroxians came.” He looked forward, then behind. 

The stadium could fit tens of thousands, but only a relatively few pairs of people spotted the rows. No one sat within thirty yards of us. 

“Not sure why I got these tickets, but they just showed up. So, here I am. Not like I could ignore it.” He slumped into the back of his seat with a long exhale, muttering low, “thought things like this were gone forever.” 

“You remember the old games?” I said.

He clamped his eyes tight, swallowed and looked up to the purple and yellows that had moved right above us. “I used to come here with my boy, back before. Before we lost...before they…”

I placed my unwanted beer on the floor next to my vintage blue Jordans. No rule to say otherwise–I allowed myself these small fixations. Strange things, though. I took a bite of the pretzel and lost myself for a moment in the crisp buttery shell, the sparkle of saline crunching through. I dipped into my little plastic cup of mustard and took another bite. This is, singularly, their greatest accomplishment. 

I’m sure my face glowed from it.

“He loved those too,” Marcus said. “I got him one the last time we were here. The championship game against the Vapors. We won a close a one.” His eyes misted, his gaze faded off. “Back when California still existed. Go Owls!”

He turned to me, extending a hand from his shoulder deep in the seat. “Markus. I’m Markus.” 

“Hello, Markus.” I accepted his hand. “I never saw a match here before today. So your son had good taste, huh?”

He looked forward, smacked his teeth, acknowledging and avoiding the fact that I didn’t give him my name. I may look the part, but I saw the possibility of understanding creep in.

“They had a baby girl, just two years old. He and Sarah.” He swallowed hard. “When they came.”

My head nodded slow. 

“They had a little swingset in the backyard. This tiny rectangle of a yard spotted with dirty snow and peaks of brown grass. A few rattan chairs they found on discount.” He stared into the blue. “I helped him put that thing together in the spring before Lucy came. Six pounds, two ounces. Just the perfect darling. She had his laugh. This rat-tat-tat of joy, like she’d explode if she tried to hold it in.” 

He paused. “We lost them both in the first wave.”

“And you?”

“Me? I lost Marge the spring before all that, thank heavens so for cancer.”

“And he still fought in the second hour, your boy?”

“He gave it everything. We all did…didn't matter, though, did it?”

“What face did he show? Was he brave despite the horror?”

Markus sniffed in, straightened again, grasped the arms of his seat. His chest rose and fell, turned to me with a muffled throaty scream. “The bravest man I have ever seen, my boy!”

Symphonic bugles penetrated the sky, glowing orange, announcing the players’ entrance onto the field of blue before us. One team shining in purple, the other in deep blacks of obsidian. Forty at each end of the field armed with primitive stick-and-daggers, twenty behind them with sabers, ten behind them with lasers.

He shifted forward, gathering himself, squinted. “Oh, what the hell is this?”

He darted between me and the blue. “They took that too.”

“I’m sorry about Karl,” I said.

He whipped toward me. “You met my Karl?”

I breathed in, let him fall into my gentle expression. “No, not the honor to know him, sir.”

He stared at me, his chest rising and falling, harder at first, then softer. “Right, of course.” His eyes pleaded for someone to remember. “You’re too young to have been there then.”

I pressed my lips. Unspoken rule: allow them their limitations without judgment.

The first alarm of horns marked the match’s opening. Each team’s vanguard forayed toward the front line. I sat back to watch the advance, and him. One of the more important unspoken rules: you learn as much in the initial spray of bloods as you do in the last.

The front lines clashed at the center in a spectacle of glorious carnage. Daggers penetrated and blood sprayed almost up to our row.

He gasped, eyes wide. It’d been decades since blood had fallen before him. 

I watched.

“This…this is madness. I can’t. I can’t see more of this…”

He tried to stand but the seat held him. He struggled.

“You will only hurt yourself, Markus,” I said.

His breath stuttered in a rat-tat-tat. The second foray on the field began with limbs severing and flying from saber edges. Screams pierced the sky as the electric rain fell upon us, stinging my skin, frying his. He tried again to flee.

“Markus, stop. You need to watch this. You need to remember.”

He glared toward me with eyes afire. “Remember what? Who? When they came and took over? When Karl…”

The rains intensified. I placed my hand upon his blistering skin as he tried to pull away. “Your promise, Markus.”

His screams echoed with the others from the stands around us. Most of the others ended abruptly. He found the fortitude to exist in his pain. Good. Perhaps…

His neck strained against his spine, his veins pulsed blue and violet, his voice hoarse. “What promise?”

“To him. To Karl.”

His eyes teared from the pain of the electric rain and the memory wanting to surface.

“Your promise to your son, Karl. Your promise to live on, despite his fate. To maintain your kind. There are so few of you left deemed worthy for evaluation, Markus.”

He continued to scream. The last raid on the field glowed in the glory of green lasers. Only two remained at the end of it, their lasers spent; their fate before them to be decided in hand-to-hand battle.

He strained against the rain and the pain. Reached to me with the last of his strength in a throaty groan. “Why?”

There it was. Unspoken rule: If they ask in earnest, answer with truth.

I relaxed in the sting of the rain. “We test worlds, Markus.” I watched him try to make sense of this. “We believe that strength is an expression seen only through strife. That true intelligence is only revealed in the face of absolute terror. We are here to see if you are worthy to join us.”

He hyperventilated; I knew he had only a little left. I had rules to follow.

“Can you hold true to your promise, Markus? Can you honor your tribe and the last of your world, and persist? Markus?”

His screams now solitary. 

The lone player stood quiet in the blue, watching us. Both last.

He gasped for each breath and I saw the memory befall him. Holding the death of his son in his arms as I had stood above them. The one-day battle their world lost, like all the others.

His eyes looked at me with recognition.

“Yes, Markus. That was me. Can you hold true to your promise to your world. Now is the time, your only time.” I scanned the stands. “You are the last.”

He released and was gone, unable. He came closer than all the others.

Unspoken rule: you are here to observe and testify without judgment. 

I held the pretzel in my hand, raised it up to the purple haze in the stinging rain. This should persist. And maybe the blue Jordans. 

I also felt the pull to remember him, and his day on the swings, and the little girl, Sally. But that would be a rule broken.