You’re Cheating!

My favourite card game growing up was Cheat because, duh, you were allowed to cheat. My favourite type of cheat in the game was not the bold straightforward move of putting down two “threes” and calling them two “fours,” but the sly manoeuvre of putting down two “fours” and slipping in a stray “three” at the bottom of your pile.

And then, just to make it more fun, we’d play with five incomplete decks of cards—so none of us knew just how many “fours” we were actually playing with. We’d play for hours on rainy afternoons or snowed-in Sundays.

Inspired by Word Games. Photo by pmmart.

Word Games

I’ve been wasting a huge amount of time playing word games online. One, at least, is simple enough: six letters, and your job’s to find as many words as possible, with extra credit for using all six.

     Which reminded me of Truman Capote’s infamous dismissal of Jack Kerouac’s prose—“That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Still, when I’m slogging through a bout of procrastination and can’t find a damned thing to write, sometimes it is nice to just be typing:

CARETS · CATERS · CASTER · CRATES · REACTS · RECAST · TRACES

Who cares how my story is coming along? I just got 175 bonus points!

Inspired by Scrabble Drabble. Image by Google Gemini.

Cursive

In grade four, Cathy Maxwell got caught chewing gum and told to put her name on the blackboard. She wrote in a fast hand, piqued at being culled from a field of ruminants. What a beautifully scripted x. An r really, but with a perditious 45˚ slash to the upper right corner. With my own wad pancaked like Sunday's Eucharist against the roof of my mouth, I meditated on that perfect signature: The mark of a confident, privileged, sign-up-for-curling-lessons white girl. With no x to cross, I Hilroy'd luxurious Ls, taking up space that wasn’t a poor girl’s to take.

Inspired by Scrabble Drabble. Image based on a photo by Selim Aksan.

Scrabble Drabble

Amid the ooze of kegs, and boomèd vox, it was a nifty act. A sage heart, the quiet niece (she weds anon), drew useless vowels and blessèd X and Z to cover triple-counted squares and pad her score. Oh, woe to others! Wives, uncles, intendeds, did howl with feline malice, queer amid the jab and rag of play. One sob was heard. What wretched luck! Yet t’was not luck at all. I needs must write the truth. There was yin to the game—ya, and much shrewd wordery: who’s ever heard of “hirer,” and just what the hell is “voile?”

Photo, by the author, of the family game board—December 27, 2025. By my count there are 27 words on this board, and this hundred-word drabble uses all of them.

Self-medicating

Shopping to my mother was part medicine and part recreational sport. Many Saturdays she’d drag us to the mall. We’d spend the afternoon getting our steps in while she rummaged through every bargain bin for yet another new summer top, or purse or decorative thing-a-ma-jig. We’d sit on all the new sofas upstairs at Sears. We’d try on a bunch of shoes (the sales attendants must have loved us). This wasn’t about need. This was about dopamine hits, dreams and boredom. Shopping was her opium. Fun at the time; a little sad in retrospect. And I’ve hated malls ever since.

Inspired by The Cop Out. Image by ThatHolisticMom888.

The Cop Out

Most happily, the holidays are over. The days are getting brighter and longer, and the brain-numbing cycle of Christmas music is over. The Mr. Hydes have drunk their tonics and morphed back to the Dr. Jekylls. It was my first time in years I did not shop locally. Too expensive, too woke and too tchotchke. Half of the time the stores do not shovel their walkways. I ended up at Yorkdale Mall in its cosy underground free heated parking, where I could browse in my runners with no jacket, cop out, and buy Aritzia for all. It was mindlessly peaceful.

Inspired by the new year. Photo by Aritzia.

Toronto’s Seventh-Oldest Paperboy

In 2017, I started delivering the West End Phoenix . . . because at 56, all I really wanted was the simplicity again of being nothing more than a paperboy. Eight years later, I’m still at it. In fact, just last Saturday, I collected a pile of 2026 calendars from the office; but I’ve been sitting on them, because I think it’ll be a lot more fun to present my forty-six subscribers with brand-new calendars tomorrow, on New Year’s Day.

     Today, however, I’m supposed to be writing about some eccentric I’ve encountered in the neighbourhood, but damned if I can think of one.

Inspired by Subway Encounter and Microneedled. Photo by the author.