The Game

And how it's played.

Sometimes I will find an old scene or paragraph I wrote when I was trying for PLL — the Pure Literary Lucid. They’re predictable scenarios and the goal was to handle them with calm control and the accumulation of reflection. I liked figuring them out but didn’t necessarily like writing them. But I do like coming back to them now and learning how to deface them a little bit.

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O LUCKY MAN

One Thursday, just before dinner, Julia got a call on the house phone. It came while she was setting the table. Calls on the line were rare enough now that it struck her as important, and she left the silverware in a pile and hurried to answer it. It was her sister, announcing through tears that she was leaving her marriage. Her wife had changed, she said, begun to talk to herself in a menacing tone, drew doodles of monsters, inked little drops of blood on the back of her hand. Annelise confessed that she felt many things but mostly cowardice, in that she knew she needed to do something but could not bring herself to intervene. While Annelise was talking, Julie looked around her own kitchen, considered how cavernous and cold it had become, and decided that she could not tell her sister that she was approaching the same decision for entirely different reasons. Her husband had become small to her and she had already taken up with another man, a neighbor. She loved undressing in front of him and watching him undress in front of her. His body rose up toward her in the basest way and all she felt was freedom. After sex she would look at herself in the bathroom mirror and begin to laugh. “You ghoul,” she told her reflection. “You glorious ghoul.” She helped her sister calm down, hung up the phone, and returned to the table, where she correctly placed the remaining forks and knives and then sat in a chair and waited like a painting for her husband to come home. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]