The Gamble

‘Oh-yah-pay-yah-sohm’, lit. ‘black-and-white-and-count’: a system for drawing lots, where all players display their palms at the same time, either facing up or down; a children’s game.

Believe me when I say it meant everything not to be caught with your palm open, pearl-white and marking you out among sunned knuckles, wrists wrapped in veins, nails rich and streaked with too much earth. One wrong move could cost an afternoon, seeing as there was no deliverance from being chosen by your own hand as fire , hunter, damned to the far-fetched chance that your quarry, set free at a touch might run out of steam, or in a moment’s distraction deliver an unlucky ally. And so all our longer hours were spent in fruitless pursuit, until finally what began to dawn as a kind of truth – even then – became inescapable. The empty hand, the curse of the chase, fear driving through the field of broken hurdles, a parched track, grass beaten under… Too close, the cut of childhood’s metaphors

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