The Single Die
Dreamed 1994/10/17 by Chris Wayan
My sisters and I are little again. I'm teaching Miriel, the youngest of us, to play a board game. You progress in a zigzag along a double row of squares like a suburban sidewalk. Because we lack the official gameboard, we imagine the square path around a chair, on the floor... Moves are determined by the roll of a single die. Looks like chance, but really you're supposed to influence the die telekinetically, using the power of synchronicity. That's what the game's for, of course--it trains you to will changes in luck itself!
My sisters and I know that "the single die" is a deliberate pun: you're psychically influencing Death itself! Each move represents one life--and one death. Squares are like years, or groups of them: whole phases of life. Some squares are good, some bad...
Althea, the middle kid of us three, teaches Miriel mind techniques, while I play referee and explain the rules. Miriel quickly gets frustrated and bored, partly because she gets bad rolls. It's not lack of psychic ability, which I know she has from previous tests, but sheer frustration at not being able to throw the die very well yet with her paws.
Did I mention both my sisters are kittens? We're cat people. And Miriel, being very young, still lacks fully opposable thumbs. They develop later in cat people than in humans. Her distractability may also be partly physical, a kitten's restlessness. She finds it frustrating to be so intelligent, an old soul, in a body so young it hasn't even had open eyes all that long...
And one more message, comforting or not. "Your maturation is so different, why do you even bother thinking of yourselves as human?"
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