Minesweeper

By Steve Gergley

My wife and I find a heavy oak door hidden behind a skyscraper of cardboard boxes in the unexplored southwest territory of the Hot Topic stockroom. Inside, we discover a large, square, empty room. A beige Dell desktop from 1994 sits in the center of the spotless floor. A stack of teal floppy disks stand beside the computer’s grimy tower. A sky the color of a strawberry smoothie shines through the fifteen-foot, floor-to ceiling picture window on our right.
After searching for an exit from the mall for so many decades, my wife and I jog over to the window and look outside. But all we see is the shimmering cherry sun, the thin shreds of flat white cirrus clouds, and the fiery grapefruit sky burning behind the glass. Neither the parking lot nor the ground are anywhere in sight.
Moments later the oak door creaks closed behind us with a two-tone thump and a hard metallic click. Too late we see that there is no doorknob on this side of the door. For the next four hours and eleven minutes, we kick and punch and throw ourselves against the heavy slab of oak. But the door doesn’t budge. The lock doesn’t break. The room doesn’t relent. So we sit down in the center of the floor and begin playing Minesweeper on the old computer.
The game is as boring and tedious as I remember. To make things interesting, my wife sets the game to the highest difficulty: the largest grid allowed, the greatest number of mines.
With a grin she removes her hand from the mouse and invites me to take over. For the next two minutes, I right click on thirty or forty random squares, placing flags all over the grid. My wife shakes her head. She scoffs and raises her eyebrows. She crosses her arms and gives me a look of disappointment.
Fine, whatever, I say, with a laugh. Have it your way.
I click on a random square in the middle of the field. A red 3 appears. My wife nods in approval. I click on another square three columns to the left and four rows down. A navy-blue 4 pops up.
Nice, my wife says, with an impressed nod.
I swirl the mouse over the game board a few times and click on a random square. The square turns red. Spiky black mines light up approximately 98.66% of the game board. The happy face at the top of the grid turns into a frown. Pixelated black X’s appear over its eyes.
Things continue in this manner for many years. My wife and I play an additional 29,762 games of Minesweeper. It never gets any more exciting. Following game #6113, we stop keeping track of our wins and losses. We don’t care. None of this matters. When not playing Minesweeper, we lurch across the hard floor like Komodo Dragons and fuck within the cube of scarlet light beneath the window.
Decades later, our district manager Lance opens the door and steps inside. We ignore him. We huddle naked and half-feral in the far corner of the room. We scratch the crisscrossing grid of the Minesweeper game board into the soft canvas of my pink and reeking flesh.

Steve Gergley is the author of four books. His most recent novel, Episode 3328: Ian Sharp, was published in January of 2025 by Translucent Eyes Press. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Passages North, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.