from The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club
Ben stood in the basement and called upstairs, “Mom, have you seen my dice bag up there?”
“What dice bag, sweetheart?” His mother replied from the kitchen.
“My only dice bag.” He’d been using that same dice bag since high school. “It’s made of purple velvet. Ties with a string.”
“Where’d you leave it last?”
“I thought on my desk but—”
“Oh, well, that explains it.” His mother stepped into the doorway. She wore her glasses around her neck on a silver chain. “That place is such a mess down there, it’s a wonder you can even find your desk.”
“Mom, please, I’m in a hurry.” Ben slid on his yellow windbreaker. Of course she would bring this up now, as he was rushing to get out the door. “Can you help me look?”
“It’s not up here. I can tell you that.”
“Mom, please, just look.”
As Ben turned to continue his search, his cat, Onigiri, slipped through his legs and ran ahead of him.
Ben kicked past piles of dirty clothes, dirty dishes, and empty beer cans. He pushed aside stacks of books and comics on his desk. He dug past his pencil cup, crammed full, and moved around the dusty model of the Death Star he’d made in the seventh grade. But no dice bag.
Last Thursday after gaming he had come in through the front door, not the cellar door, because he was starving, and he wanted something to eat. He had slipped into the kitchen, warmed up some macaroni and cheese, and then crept downstairs without turning on a light. He’d dropped his backpack by the La-Z-Boy, put his books on the desk, his wallet by the empty aquarium and his dice bag?
Ben closed his eyes. He felt through the air with his fingers and stretched out his mind, expanding it into every nook and corner of the basement, under the bed, behind the bookshelves, through the dark and musty shadows of the storage room.
“Little dice, lucky dice, where art thee? Manifest before me on the count of three. One, two, three.” Ben glanced at the floor between his feet. Nothing. He looked at his desk. Onigiri looked back, blinking, as dust was settling upon the Death Star.
God, he was an idiot. What was he thinking? Magic doesn’t exist. Those dice were just dumb pieces of plastic. He knew that and still he was such a weirdo all the time. No wonder he couldn’t get a boyfriend. Ben collapsed onto the La-Z-Boy.
Above him, the basement door opened with a squeak. “Ben, honey, are these them?” From the top of the stairs came the sound of dice shaking in their bag.
“Yes!” He dashed up the steps and his mother dropped the velvet pouch into his hand. “Thanks. Where were they?”
“They were on the floor, next to the couch.”
“But I looked there.”
“Sometimes when you’re in a rush, you don’t see things that’re right in front of your face.”
“And sometimes,” Ben said, “objects of power don’t reveal themselves to the mortal plane unless called forth with a summoning spell.”
His mother tsked again. “You’ve been playing too many of those games.”
“But, it worked,” Ben said as he headed downstairs.
His mother called after him, “I only say that because I worry. You have to think about the real world too, you know. Think about your future. You’re almost thirty after all.”
“Mom, I’m twenty-five.”
“That’s almost thirty in my book.”
“Mom, stop.” They had already talked a million times about his “future.” “I’m going out the back. I’ll be home later.”
With that, Ben climbed up the creaky ladder, through the cellar doors and set out.
Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights was a power ballad, a nap, a rainbow, a dull noise, a cluster fuck, a nostalgia, a dream. Coventry Road was coming and going, brick, and steel and rust and graffiti and gum-stuck pavement, and tattered awnings and trash in the gutter. Mom-and-pop shops of eclectic attractions, bookstores, restaurants, head shops, and a lonely record store and noisy poetry readings and bars, taverns, pubs. Its inhabitants were, as the story goes, hippies, punks, dropouts, and deadbeats. Had the story been turned to another page, it might have read yuppies and hipsters and heroes, and it would have told the same tale.
Valerie propped open the front door of Readmore Comix and Games and pulled the large signboard in from the sidewalk.
Comics! it announced in big white letters with a yellow arrow underneath. Games, toys, collectibles, trading cards, fun!
Long into old age she would remember the sound and feel of that board scraping along the cement, so many times had she heard and felt its vibrations as she dragged it along. She propped it against the front counter with a thud.
Valerie was short, with thick brown hair that curled at the ends, especially if she didn’t wash it. Although she’d switched from glasses to contacts back in ninth grade, she still felt like she had glasses-face, which is to say the kind of face that looked like it had been wearing glasses all day even when it hadn’t. Working in a comic bookstore and reading all day probably didn’t help.
Polly, standing behind the register with Kyle, asked, “Will someone make the call?” She was wearing her foxy nurse outfit, which was the same as her regular nurse outfit but with fox ears and a tail.
“We’re closing in five minutes,” Kyle yelled at the three customers still slumped around the store reading. None of them moved an inch. It was well understood amongst employees that customers had the worst sense of hearing.
“Make that four minutes,” Valerie said, looking at the wall clock.
Valerie was ready to call it a day. She’d arrived a little late, just past ten, because she’d run up to the corner cafe to get a coffee and a Danish. Luckily, Kyle had arrived on time and already opened the shop.
Kyle was alright. He had worked at Readmore longer than Valerie or Polly. He had long black hair that he tied in a ponytail, and he somehow managed to be skinny and yet have a belly, which Valerie assumed was from drinking beer, because if he wasn’t talking about comic books, he was talking about microbrews. He usually wore a green army jacket over T-shirts with random sayings like, “Make Tea not War” or “Rogues do it from Behind,” and while Valerie didn’t hate those shirts, they didn’t make her laugh either, which generally summed up everything about Kyle.
Aside from arguing with a customer over the near-mint rating on an issue of The Amazing Spiderman and trying to recommend a graphic novel with strong female characters, the day had been uneventful. Walt, the store owner, had called around three to ask if any good mail had come in, and after a brief discussion of what exactly qualified as good mail, Valerie was disappointed to learn that the party supply catalogs she so fondly flipped through did not make the list.
Valerie had only started working at Readmore at the beginning of the summer, straight out of high school. She’d decided to give herself a year off after graduating as she wasn’t sure yet what she wanted to do about college. It was so expensive. And student loans were so intimidating and depressing. She had no idea what she wanted to major in, or what she was good at. And to make matters worse, her older sister Katie was studying abroad at Cambridge, sucking up all their parent’s adoration and being generally impossible to compete with. Valerie decided, after several heated debates with her parents, to take some time off and decide what she wanted to do with herself.
“Would you ever have sex with an alien?” she asked Polly and Kyle. They were standing behind the counter drumming their fingers on the glass and waiting for the last customer to leave.
“Haven’t we talked about this already?” Polly asked.
“Let’s say you met someone, and they were cool and attractive, but they told you they were an alien. Do you think they’d be dateable or would you think they’re crazy?”
“No, Valerie, no.” Polly had red hair, blue eyes, and lots of freckles. She wore vintage cardigans and canvas shoes, liked indie comics, the more obscure the better, and when she played board games, she played them to win. She and Valerie had been friends in high school but didn’t start fooling around until Valerie began working at Readmore.
“This question is more for Kyle than for you,” Valerie said.
“Why?” Polly asked.
“I already know your answer.”
“What are you saying?” Kyle asked. “You think I’m into freaky shit?”
“For the record,” Polly said, “I could date an alien. I could date anyone as long as they were a nice person.” She motioned toward Valerie with a flick of her hand.
“Then why did you say no?” Valerie asked.
“I said no for you. I don’t think you could date one. You couldn’t handle it.”
“Why not?”
Polly and Kyle exchanged a look and then Polly said, “I’m going to go count down this second register.” The cash drawer snapped open with a clang.
The clock struck seven and the last customer shuffled out.
“We open again tomorrow,” Valerie called. “Ten a.m., bright and early.” The door swung shut and the bell above it dinged.
Doug Henderson is the author of The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club, and winner of the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Short Édition, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, he received his MFA from the University of San Francisco. He lives in the Castro District with his husband and two children.