The Ordinary Haunting II

22. The Death Wish - Part 2

"Let's begin." Ayre placed her mug of coffee onto a coaster and presented the circle with a peaceful smile that I remembered Mild having a real giggle at the last time we were here.

"Before that–" Leo bent forward until the top of his head was visible, a grey part splitting his hair like a chalk line. There were faded sprinkles in the black strands behind his ears, as if the chalk had been shaken clean there. He straightened up to present a white box. On the front, in four coloured squares of purple, blue, green and yellow was the word 'LIFE'. I laughed immediately.

Ayre moved some air in her throat that I thought was supposed to dislodge something that obviously wasn't there. "Leo, we might skip the board game today," she half-whispered. Her hair had grown quite long in the nearly eight months it had been, and swung pin-straight by her elbows as she nudged her glasses up her nose.

"Nonsense," he replied. "It's important for our motor functions."

Beside Leo, Joy was already taking the lid off the box and flipping it to the underneath. She had curled her silver hair and was wearing a purple-sequined dress that took hold of the reflections of the bright pink and yellow roses in the window boxes outside. The recent spring rain had sent the retreat's gardens into an exuberant bloom, and this second-floor, east-facing sitting room was gently dimmed even in the mid-morning by the thick ivy creepers that were dropping from the roof.

"This is our favourite activity of the week, you know that, ma'am," Joy said, not so much with a plea as with an expectation. She hadn't even looked at Ayre, instead knocking on New's chair next to her. He followed her finger to a small table turned up against the wall behind him. He glanced at Ayre, who shrugged and got to her feet. We all followed her lead, and after stacking our chairs into the corners of the room, we were soon crouched on the burgundy rug on the floor, clustered around the table, and Leo was dolling out coloured playing pieces that I belatedly realised were cars. He didn't ask me if I wanted the orange one before he popped it in my palm.

"Once you get to my vintage," he said to me while handing out four other cars, one each to Joy, Ayre, Zom and New, and keeping a cool red one for himself, "you'll find these old board games have a certain clever irony to them that those video games of yours don't."

"Video games can be clever," New said. He thumbed a yellow car into the air and I decided that exposing his addiction to a simple line-up mobile game would result in way too much side-tracking... That and probably everyone would end up downloading it, because New talking excitedly about something was a rare and beautiful event that more than once had inspired me to do something pretty stupid.

"I don't think anyone's young enough here to miss the 'clever irony' of a group of ghosts and ghost-adjacents playing The Game of Life," Ayre said. Her little wink was surprising.

"It could be quite prophetic, you never know," Joy hummed cheerily.

"Or help you make a decision about something you're stuck on...?"

I caught Zom's eyebrow. New was nominated banker and we all wedged a shapeless plastic figure into the driver's seat of our cars.

"I'm not stuck on a decision, exactly," I replied. New gave everyone $200,000 in Life money. "I'm stuck not knowing how to make it. And what will happen after it."

"Love, I genuinely don't remember how old I am," Joy sighed as she set the six cars on the COLLEGE PATH square of the twisting yellow road on the board before us. "State it clearly for me. Are you passing on, untethering and moving in with us, or doing something else? Something ambitious?"