rapture's coming, pt 2

The third omen appears unobtrusively in the third week of August. Late Tuesday afternoon, a designer browses through some shelves in an antique shop and notices an old paddleboard preserved in resin. He notes the roughly hewn grid-lines and the delicate inlay of carnelian and lapiz lazuli; the juxtaposition pleases him.

On Thursday night, he hosts a small dinner party and several of his guests express interest in his purchase. One is a graduate student who recently completed her thesis on Mesopotamian civilization, and she has seen a similar design etched into the burial stone of a Sumerian king. Later that night, her curiosity piqued, she looks through some old notes and discovers that the design is the playing-board for a favored game of Ur's court.

On Friday, her advisor calls to cancel their weekly meeting. He believes he has caught a cold; in reality, he will die on the following Monday. She takes the opportunity to return to her friend's apartment, where she had left her umbrella the previous night. She makes an offhand remark about the game she has discovered, and her friend mischievously suggests that they play a round.

The rules are simple. The squares inlaid with carnelian are points of refuge, the narrow neck represents paths which only one piece may cross. The game possesses a curious property: though each player possesses three pieces and three carnelian points, it is impossible to occupy all three points of refuge at once.

She does not leave until very late in the night on Friday. When she closes her eyes, she sees the six copper pennies they used as markers, marching across the back of her eyelids. She dreams of long, narrow bridges across unspeakably deep chasms. She wakes early in the afternoon to report to her shift at a local coffeehouse. She is stunned to find several customers playing the game she recently discovered, the board scrawled on the back of napkins. She stops one customer who is carving six points of refuge into a table, finds herself oddly reluctant to do so.

On the following Monday, she receives notice of her advisor's death. She notices children drawing in the street with chalk, and does not dare to look too carefully at their designs. On the side of her apartment complex, someone has spray-painted a grid with two long, narrow paths. There are splotches in the grid squares; she notes dully that only two of the points of refuge are marked. She is unsurprised to receive a call from her friend later in the day, who had returned to find his apartment door ajar and the lock broken. It seemed that one of the robbers had carelessly dropped the inlaid paddleboard; one of the two bridges is cracked.