“You want to play a game?”

I looked up from my phone at her and shrugged. “Sure.”

We’d been watching TV for the past hour and nothing was really catching our attention, so any change was welcome. I stretched and yawned, reaching for my cup of coffee. Damn. It had cooled off.

“Great. I’ve got something special from the school that I want to try out.” She was definitely holding back a grin. This wasn’t good news. At the very least, I’d need a fresh cup of coffee.

“I’m not so sure I want to mess with anything magical right now, dude.” I say as I move slowly off the couch and head into the kitchen and start working on my coffee. “Last time we did that it took me three weeks to grow back my toes.” I heard her messing around with something in her bag and then a clattering as stuff fell on the table. Ugh, hope she didn’t scratch it again.

“You cannot still be blaming me for that. You didn’t even try to hold still. Besides, this isn’t a spell I’m trying to practice. This game is enchanted. It does just one thing. Not even I could mess it up.”

I sigh. Anything magical typically meant fun for her and shit for me. Not that that was a particularly unique experience for men. After all, I can’t even touch the Flow.

“Besides,” I could hear her tease, “you’d actually get to practice magic yourself.”

That caught my attention. “How do you mean?” I turned around with my cup and leaned on the counter, studying the two decks of cards she’d laid out on a board on the table. One was black, and the other white, with teardrops of the opposite color decorating them. The game board itself seemed pretty plain. It was a warm brown color with twenty or so spaces of various colors moving around the perimeter, and it looked truly ancient. I couldn’t tell what it was made of, either, but it seemed heavy. How did she carry this in her bag? I looked up and found her sitting cross-legged on the couch, legs mostly bared save for the denim shorts she wore. I quickly averted my gaze as she motioned toward the white deck.

“You pick a card, some type of trivia, and ask me a question. If I get it right, I move forward on the board. If I land on a blank space nothing happens, but if I land on a colored space I get to draw a card from the black deck and use it on either on of us. Whatever color I land on will be the color of card I draw from the deck, and the effect will begin taking place immediately. You following along?”

I nod and take my seat in the recliner perpendicular from where she’s sitting. “And if you get the trivia wrong?”

She smiled, brushing her long, curly hair out of her face. “You get to draw a black card. It’ll have different changes you can choose from and then you get to apply it to me. Apparently you’ll even feel the Flow.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but she had me hooked. Once, as a child, my parents had taken me near a Spring and I could feel the Flow. I couldn’t access it, obviously, as a male, but as a child I could feel it. It had felt like power and purpose and had given me a heady feeling of intent that my eight-year-old mind couldn’t make sense of. I struggled with the memory of those feelings for years. Anyways, it’s been fifteen years since then and I’d murder for the chance to feel that again.

“So what’s the goal of the game then? Just to make it around the board?”

She nodded again. I’d always found it funny how excited she could get over the stuff she loved. Especially when she had the chance to share it.

“And what types of changes are these? Shrinking? Cat ears? Bark-like-a-dog sorts of changes like girls prank each other with in elementary?”

I raised an eyebrow when she blushed. “Actually, they’re kind of the kinky kind. It’s a game for adults. Not just for couples, though!” she waved her hands at my expression. “It’s like Cards Against Humanity. It’s mature, but you can play it with others.”

“So there’s nothing sexual in there?”

She looked down. “I mean, there probably is.”

“But what about—”

“He wouldn’t mind. Besides, it’s not like we haven’t all done shit together before. Remember my twentieth birthday when I was legally allowed to practice magic?”

I grinned. How could I forget that? She’d gotten drunk and decided everybody at the party was going to be naked because her crush was there, and suddenly everyone’s clothes were gone. It was really an exceptional piece of magic, considering she was only barely of age and drunk out of her skull. And if that’s what it was gonna take for me to feel more of the Flow, then so be it.

“Fine. I’m down. Is there anything else I should know before we start?”

“Nope.” She smiled at me briefly before looking away again, tapping her bare foot on the couch. It was a nervous habit of hers and I suspected something was up, but it was too late. She’d tempted me with the Flow.

I leaned forward to pick my piece out from the half-dozen identical gray tokens. The second it touched my skin it changed into a perfect likeness of me, including the Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt I was wearing and the gray pajama pants I was wearing. My red hair moved naturally on its head as I placed it down on the START space, and then the avatar actually brushed the hair out of his eyes! “Whoa!”

“Seriously,” she said, “they look just like us.” She placed her avatar down next to mine on the START square. It had her Latin complexion, her dark, wavy hair that came down to her bare shoulder blades. It wore the same orange tank top and denim shorts that she was wearing, and her feet were bare. Her face was the same, with her cute, wide nose and dark lips. The avatar’s sizes looked to be correct, too, as she was only 5’5” or so and I’m around 5’11”. I’ve always wanted to get to 6” just so I could say I’m six-feet tall, but my genes never gave me the chance.

I sipped on my coffee and tried to glean more information from the board, but I couldn’t get anything out of it. The colored squares weren’t labeled, and the colors on them seemed to shift every few seconds. Curious, I asked, “Is there a manual? Or…?” but she was already shaking her head. She tapped her temple with her finger.

“All transferred mentally. Sorry. I saved it from a book.”

“Oh! So you conjured this? I was wondering how you carried this—” I went to pass my hand through the board, but I hit a solid, metallic material. “Oh. It’s not conjured?”

She looked a little sheepish, but also very excited. I hate that her grin is so cute. “No. This is the only one of its kind in the world. When you play, you have to actually summon the board here.”

“Summon?” I whispered, eyeing the board with a new respect. Summoning spells were not easy, and they typically brought things along that you didn’t want to deal with. Someone tried summoning a lesser goat last summer on a friend’s campus and it took a full construction crew a week just to clear the mess up. Maybe I should be having second thoughts about this… But she was already waving her hands again.

“Nothing bad, dude! All I did was bring the game board here. That’s it. It’s not bad Juju.”

I thought about it for another moment but eventually nodded. I trusted her. We’d been friends for years. “Okay. Who goes first?”

“Gentlemen first.” She grinned.

“But does that mean that I get asked a question first or that I draw first?”

She rolled her eyes at my intentional annoyance and pointed for me to draw a white card. I took the top one off the deck. Magically, when I touched the top of the deck a white card appeared in my hand. I read it.

“This should be an easy one. Which is the rarest M&M color? Red, yellow, green, or brown?” I looked back up to find a puzzled look on her face.

“I don’t eat M&Ms.” She said. “Those are all real M&M colors?”

I nodded.

“Huh. Brown seems like the obvious answer, right? Why would they cover brown chocolate with a brown candy shell?”

“You’re—”

“But this game is tricky! I’m going to say ‘red’. Final answer.”

I grinned. She was always outsmarting herself. “I was about to say that you were right. ‘Brown’ is the correct choice. Obviously.” I sipped my coffee as she facepalmed.

“Fine! Let’s get going with this.” She pointed at the pile of black cards. “Hit me.”

Maybe now I’ll get to touch the Flow… Not to mention I’ll get to play with some fun changes, I thought to myself as I touched the black deck. A card appeared in front of my hand with four colors on it: red, blue, green, and yellow. With a raised eyebrow I selected the red color and a card appeared in my hand. I gulped.

LIP ENLARGEMENT
OR
LIP SENSITIVITY BONUS

“What is it?” she asked as I read over the options.

“Uh… am I allowed to tell you?”

She looked off for a second, then shrugged. “I don’t see anything in the rules about not sharing. There shouldn’t be any penalties.”

“Okay.” I showed her the card.

“Ooh! That’s so cool!” she ran her tongue behind her bottom lip before giving it a little squeeze between her teeth. “Would you mind choosing ‘lip enlargement’? I think I want to see what that’s like.”

“Sure. So long as you let me have a choice in the future.”

“Deal.”

My finger hovered over the selection for a moment. Will I really feel the Flow? Only one way to find out. I tapped the card.

It was like dipping my arm into ice cold water. The chill ran across my skin and through every nerve ending in my hand before abruptly disappearing. But it was more than that! There was something in my head. It was only there for a brief flash, but I’d felt it. Like waking up to a bright light— my mind’s eye hadn’t had time to adjust to the brightness, but in my memory I could tie it together. I’d just seen the Flow.

I--an adult male--had just touched the Flow through this game.

“Holy shit.”