by Peter Jones
Monopoly
when he woke up his father was dead.
Completely drained of colour, he lay next to him on the bed they had made from a door that had been gathering dust in the far corner of their cellar. His father had instructed the boy to fetch bricks from the yard and bring them down, one by one, so that he could prop his makeshift bed up against the dry section of wall at the far end. The boy had been proud of carrying two bricks on the last of his journeys, and his father managed a warm smile as he dropped them at his feet. “Good lad, good lad” he murmured. Then, groaning, with his hand clamped on his wounded rib cage, he had stooped to put the last two bricks into place. Now his father lay, ash-grey skin tugged across the bones of his face. The boy went to tear some more material to replace the bloodied pad on his father’s side, as he had done every morning for a month now. As he eased the pad away from the skin no blood oozed. He was able to touch the wound’s jagged edge, and his nostrils could sense that the blood was no longer fresh. He left that afternoon. He was going to his grandfather’s house, outside the city. His father had talked of that house as he slid in and out of consciousness in his final hours, and the boy had joined in these musings. He liked to visit his grandfather and sit out on his patio, the two of them playing Monopoly by the light of some candles. He was always allowed Park Lane and Mayfair – the two most expensive properties – as a head start. As he emerged from the cellar, his battered Monopoly box under his arm, he remembered his father’s advice. Stay away from the riders. Listen for their engines. He knew that the riders had wounded his father, who had staggered into the yard some four weeks previously bleeding heavily from his side. His father had told him that he must not leave the cellar from that point on. That it was too dangerous. Things had got out of hand, he said. At the end of the garden path, the boy paused, inhaling the scent of the lavender bush for the first time in a month. He listened. All was quiet. He began to trot along the road, wishing that the Monopoly set would stop its dull rattle. It caused him to stop every ten paces to listen again, so he decided it would be safer to walk. Thirty minutes later he had another decision to make. Should he walk along the main road out of the city? He knew there would be sections of it where there would be no cover, where riders would be able to catch him out in the open. The boy knew no other route, however. He was following the journey he used to take in the back of his father’s car. After looking left and right down the empty lanes, and scrunching up his face in an effort to hear any distant engines, he set off towards the North. His Monopoly set pieces rattled softly under his arm, and he settled into a pattern of