A game in which we're given thousands and thousands of some little things like arrows, something really primitive, and perhaps a kind of amazing futuristic microwave-powered weapon which doesn't work at all. We all go and mill on opposing sides of a valley, are told to have fun, and throw and shoot these pathetic things at each other. It's like a party, almost, and it's exciting and night, although we can see everything. We keep together just out of reach of the other side, and laugh at each other and enjoy ourselves because we're safe. Sometimes they move down the hill on the other side and we have to move back to stay out of the range of the things they fire at us, rows of arrows plopping into the ground always just below us on the hill because we're far enough up to be safe, we're always safe. Every time there has to be someone there, perhaps a girl modelled on someone you knew once, perhaps someone you loved for a while at a real party somewhere, someone who's only here because of your need to give yourself examples that will explain the whole thing to yourself so painfully you'll have no choice except to understand it, whatever it is. She's lost in all this and doesn't realise that she has to move back up the hill to stay safe. She looks up, where it's night and the sky is filled with stars, and the brightest star she can see is immediately overhead, and she shouts in a voice which is silly and young because she's happy, she's there in this unlikely rain of useless weaponry and she's filled with joy: Look, I have the best star in the sky! And of course we all see and she doesn't see that below the best star in the sky there's a descending spear or arrow or something, anything, which falls just as she proclaims her jubilation and it sticks twisted with a sour squelch into her head. She looks almost crestfallen for an instant, and kind of half shrugs, as if to say, not any longer, I suppose, before she collapses. It's like someone young has dropped a lamp and broken its bulb, and there are two pieces of serrated glass which together once almost made up the whole thing; they're sitting crying over this lightbulb which they're trying forever to stick back together, make the bulb again, which they used to have, this great shiny bulb instead of these two useless fragments, and they keep thinking they've almost managed it but of course the bulb will never work. Children are given balloons because they always burst them, and then everything is worse than it was before. 1994