Up-Up-Down-Left-Right
by R. Mac Jones
We choose a side-scroller because we see our lives together as linear, and we believe we both look better in profile. Thoughts download in lumps, jumbled, like a dream, and algorithms blend us and make a smooth narrative, and there we are, 8-bit, and they got your hair so wrong, but that is not you, that is you in our game.
Some of it is familiar. I can see the framework, the metaphor, in bears wearing boardshorts, running through the jungle of lime green vines, then a glitch, pixel-flurry, the screen blanks, back again, and finding the key leads to fighting robots with lamprey faces and picking the green door means a mini-boss battle against a giant baby with a chartreuse scarf in a shopping cart, and just before collecting the golden pencil, the glitch again, the blank screen, but only for a moment, then we are back fighting lizards the size of cattle, slipping down rain barrels, and we are underwater, and there it is again--just the briefest fizzle and blank--and we're back bobbing along, pressing B incessantly for some semblance of weightlessness.
Then the glitch, the screen blanks, and we are back almost at the same place, still running right, still reaching save points, still jumping hedges shaped like hands. You try to head off what is coming. You touch my hand as it hits up-up-down-right-left, and I understand, and I blast creatures like ants with human hands and the rest ant parts, and I swing across ravines and grab hold of pixels that are your hands.
You pull me up.
It ends.
