The One Man Game

The kitchen was still and the bathrooms rocked themselves to the sleep as the wind gingerly brushed the normal suburban house. All the bedroom doors were shut and the living room was still dimly lit as Alice Norway stood in the middle of the door frame, convincing her parents to leave. When they finally agreed and walked out joyfully, hand in hand, Alice turned around and started preparations for her activity.

You see, Alice was a troubled girl. She had had such an admirable personality and perfect grades. Her teachers had high expectations for her and her parents had big dreams. Luscious, long hair and brown eyes, combined with her excellent skills in math and outrageous grades in science, she was almost the perfect human being. Everyone liked Alice except: her peers.

Alice usually stayed home and never did much. On long weekends she helped clean the house and on random days off, she sat around and studied. And she always told everyone it was the fact that she wasn’t a people’s person, but it was actually the truth that she had no friends.

Yes, Alice was a very disturbed individual who searched for the love from people her age. It was always like this. It started in first grade, and led to that unbelievably annoying stage in her tweens, and followed her to her late teens. Alice was unbearably lonely.

So when she read on the internet a way to play hide and seek alone, also known as Hitori Kakurenbo, the intrigued Alice sat up and went through the steps carefully. It originated in Japan and was a mixture of Western voodoo and Japanese ancestry. She needed a doll that she had no emotional attachments to, salt water, any sort of weapon, red thread, dry rice, time, and most importantly, a hiding place. Alice was more than infatuated with the unordinary plan to channel a spirit/demon and play a dandy game of hide and seek; she was obsessed.

And days later, she came up with a thoroughly thought out plan to do it. She convinced her parents to leave for the night, got all the needed items and mustered enough courage to actually do it.

Tip-toeing silently upstairs, she walked into her room and grabbed the doll that she would be using: a small teddy-bear that she had had for the longest time. She already knew that she wasn’t supposed to use something she was emotionally attached to, but she wanted to feel like she was playing with a real friend; someone who cared.

Running back down to her spot downstairs, she began to prepare the doll the way the instructions called for. Empty it of all its cotton and stuff it with dry rice. While she followed this simple process, she hummed a familiar tune. In the odd sense, it was all coming to together. She was finally going to play the game of hide and seek that no one promised her; the game she deserved. Excitement was in the air as she filled up the last of the ripped teddy bear.

Next, she had to put a piece of her inside the bear. She reached up and plucked a couple of strands from her long brown hair and stuffed it inside the bear’s chest. After repeating this process several times, Alice’s head hurt from the amount of picked strands. Satisfied with it, she picked the bear up by the arms and smiled at it like a little girl.

This otta bind us together, she thought and laid it back on the table.

Then, very carefully, just as careful as she ripped it, she sewed it back together with the red thread the game called for. The needle pricked her finger several times. But she paid no attention to it because of the calmness she felt.

Poor Alice was so mentally unstable. She was willing to do anything. Anything. It didn’t make sense, since the entire thing was foolish and none of it would work in the end. The girl who seemed indestructible was actually broken and her pieces were left behind her. Everybody witnessed it, but nobody cared: her parents, teachers, peers. She was drifting apart. She still had her sanity, but loneliness was another thing she carried around, and loneliness was something that called for desperate measures.