Ekaterina Sedia - Running with the Pack

Gelreesh mania died out in the year of the great comet, for here was something even more spectacular for people to turn their attention to. With the promise of the end of the world, mankind had learned to pity itself. Fortunately or unfortunately, however one might see it, this spinning ball of shit, this paradisiacal Valshavar of planets, was spared for another millennium in which more startling forms of anomalous humanity might spring up and lend perspective to the mundane herd.

And now, ages hence, recent news from Nethit concerning the Gelreesh. Two years ago, an enterprising graduate student from Nethit University, having been told the legends of the beautiful one when he was a child, went in search through the basement of the museum to try to uncover the box containing the creature’s remains. The catacombs that lay beneath the imposing structure are vast and the records kept as to what had been stored where have been eaten by an unusual mite that was believed to have been introduced into the environs of the museum by a mummy brought back from a glacier at the top of the world. Apparently, this termitic flea species awoke in the underground warmth and discovered its taste for paper, so that now the ledgers are filled with sheets of lace, more hole than text.

Still, the conscientious young man continued to search for over a year. His desire was to study the physiological form of this legend. Eventually, after months of exhaustive searching, he came upon a crate marked with grease pencil, GELREESH. Upon prying open the box, he found inside a collection of bones wrapped in a tattered garment of maroon silk. There was also a handkerchief bearing the stitched symbol of a broken heart. When he uncovered the bones, he was shocked to find the skeleton of a very large bird instead of that of a mutant human. A professor of his from the university determined upon inspection that these were indeed the remains of a great horned owl.

“Hex!” Miranda waved purple fingertips over the white-bone tumble of the dice, which came up one, three, six.

Lydia, her run of fours broken, cursed her eloquently. Miranda, indifferent to charges of being a loose woman, scooped up the dice and promptly buncoed.

“Bitch!” cried Lydia, jubilant. “Give up the Bunco Bear, whore!”

From the head table a child’s toy, seized hastily from Cass’s daughter’s room before the game began, flew through the air in a fuzzy, bright green arc. Miranda caught it, one-handed and laughing, and tucked it into her cleavage.

Sandy applauded with the rest as Miranda threw one more four and then came up twos and fives.

“Time to bunco,” said Lydia as Sandy grabbed the dice for her turn, and she threw. A four, a two, and one die rolled off the table and landed near her foot: a five. She snatched it up: she could claim it was a four, take the five, or re-roll.

“It was a five,” she said—the single four allowed her to continue and she wanted to seem honest at this point. She’d subbed twice for this bunco group—Cass worked at the cubicle kitty-corner to her, and started asking to come the month before last—and they needed to replace a regular who’d moved out of state. No pack of bunco bitches likes being stuck at eleven members, having a ghost at table—one player rolling for an invisible teammate.

She liked this group: you got dinner instead of just coffee and dessert and the stakes of $20 apiece made it worth her while to get creative. She felt like she had skin in this game. She expected that after tonight’s game she’d be invited to join, and it was always easy to fix up things so the game got cancelled the month it was your turn to host. Volunteer for June, when the task of juggling kids fresh out of school and planning summer vacation usually resulted in a scrub, or change the date late enough that only nine or fewer could come, two ghosts being the limit of anyone’s tolerance. She’d volunteer to help another hostess, bringing the main dish and gaining a reputation for helpfulness while avoiding the expense of the booze.

A single four, and another, and the dice passed to Miranda’s partner. She rolled one, three, three, and before Lydia could seize the dice there was an exasperated shriek and the clang of a bell from the head table and the round was over.

Miranda’s bunco was worth twenty-one points, so Sandy and Lydia stayed in the pit, while Miranda and her ex-partner, a short plump pink creature whose name Sandy couldn’t recall—G-something, who sold Avon and left a few catalogs in an unobtrusive way on the kitchen table—moved on to the center table and split, finding new partners, the losers from the head table. Lydia grabbed an M&M from the bowl on the pit and waved a cocktail-ringed hand at Sandy when she made to move.

“Stay where you are, Sandy-Candy,” said Lydia, plumping her rather wide butt on the seat next to her. “That chair’s bad luck for me.”

“Shall I keep score?” Sandy asked innocuously, reaching for the pad Miranda’s partner—Gretta? No, more Brit—had left behind. Lydia nodded vaguely. No one really liked to keep score, it meant you had to concentrate on top of your dinner and a wine cooler, and the uninhibited caterwauling of yourself and your fellows.

But if you were willing to keep score, and were subtle about it, and good at misdirection, keeping score was a good way of making sure you won a few more times, at least on paper, than you really had.

Bunco is a supremely simple game requiring only the skill to toss the dice. Six rounds, sometimes twelve: roll ones, then twos, threes, and so forth. Three of a kind—ones in round one, twos in round two—is a bunco. The only possible strategy is to throw as fast as possible, because the more you roll the more the chance of getting a bunco.

There are modifications, embellishments. Mini-buncos and triple-buncos and one-two-three sequences and extra points at the head table. The buy-in can be five bucks, ten, twenty, sometimes you get dinner, sometimes you get cake. These are flash and fancy icing, the true spine and soul of the game is only this: roll the dice, bitch. All the menfolk and children had fled the premises, here are your girlfriends, and you can do no wrong here—eat and drink as you will, and talk as you will about your brother’s ex and your high school friend’s divorce and your jewelry business. Talk and roll the dice.

It’s a game of chance, not skill, so there’s not many ways you can cheat. If the game is going fast and the other three women are chatting and not paying attention you can say you got one or two more points than you did—you passed on the dice and the scorekeeper would ask what you got and you said four instead of three. No one would know. And if you were keeping score yourself it was even easier.

Sandy liked winning other people’s cash, liked free food, liked even better the idea that she controlled the outcome behind the façade of a pleasant face and manner, without anyone else suspecting. She felt a friendly kind of contempt for Cass and her friends, their overpriced game, their shrieking and stretch marks. They’d do very well for her, she thought.

Sandy won the round, fair and square, and moved ahead to partner small pink Gretta—no, Gwynne! That was it. It took the head table a long time to score twenty-one; the game was long and Gwynne buncoed, but before she could seize the green bear, Tessa buncoed too, and then Gwynne got three fives, not a bunco but good for five points, and in the hilarity that resulted from that and from everyone overhearing Maggie tell Harriet-called-Harry and Mia about losing her virginity, lo these many years ago, at Disneyland, Sandy claimed six fives when she only rightly had four, winning the round for Gwynne and herself when the bell rang. Dionne tallied her points without demur but Sandy didn’t see Gwynne and Lydia glance at the table and then at each other.