NOW I
JUMP
TO EARTH, CLUTCHING AN UMBRELLA
and again my avatar lands lightfooted. Unfamiliar terrain—no birdsong or windchime. When they say infinite procedural generation it means the boulders I pickaxe into oblivion will reincarnate just as each muscled mercenary rent by blue light melts and rejoins the universe of pixels. Really, the game is elegy to the sandbox. The plastic rake & the water gun. To the west, the zombie palace, and in that crunched-grass corner, the gold mine. After all the screen-adhesive hours passed, I dreamed that my brain shed its blood-pink vines & began floating, an unhanded balloon bumping the ceiling of my skull. The pebbles in my spine rolled like an abacus and I felt lightweight and bird-boned, gymnastic again. Shrunk down to my four-year-old form, I could pedal & propel wildly— and now when I wake up I feel like an empty schoolbus whose wheels don’t spin, an impossible physics keeping her afloat. When I dream now I dream about each day a miracle in a new body easily demolished and restored with blue potion, Band-Aid, butterfly kiss.
BY CAROLINE FAIREY • DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION BY GRACIE NEWTON