As a special online supplement to the Fall 2025 issue, the editors present the prizewinning story from the 2025 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Jamel Brinkley.
The three of us had a few hours before the event began, so the man to my right pulled a deck of cards from his back pocket and held up the deck and raised his eyebrows. Sure, said the woman to my left. OK, I said, sure.
We had arrived very early because they did not allow latecomers access to the event, and we did not want to miss it. We did not know each other. I had come on the train, he by bus, she on foot. Now we were together, conspiring to pass the time—as if time were a test, or a car doing thirty on a freeway, or a baton.
The man asked the woman if she wanted to shuffle. Sure, she said. OK, said the man, and handed her the deck. The woman was young, her face smooth and shiny like a playing card. The man was young, too, his teeth so square and so white that briefly I wondered whether they had ever been used at all. I felt young, felt that my life was still new and small and clumsy, but in fact I was very old. Just weeks before, it seemed, I had been admiring the smoothness of my face, the squareness of my teeth. Now I was tired, walking was a chore, my elbows clicked when I went to hug somebody. The center of my vision had gone dark and blurry, so I had trained myself to examine people peripherally, to stand at an angle to their faces. This was very hard: learning to see a thing by not looking at it.
The woman was a perfect shuffler. The cards found their places. Nothing about it struck me as random. Her hands moved spiderlike around the deck, each finger a leg, spindly and searching. OK, she said eventually, and handed the deck back to the man. Now, he said, once it was in his palm, we are ready to play.
The idea of the game, he told us, was that, played right, it did not end. This was odd to me: one of the basic laws of the world of games, I thought, was that there was always some consistently definable point at which a game was over. Checkmate, filled-in grid, timer at ninety minutes. Games were meant to be detours from reality; you played them and you stopped playing them. What was a game that did not end?
Each of us was dealt a third of the deck. The deck, of course, did not divide evenly into three piles: I ended up with one more card than the others. The man assured me that this did not matter.
OK, said the man, it goes like this. When your turn comes, you can give one card to an opponent of your choice. Alternatively, you can take one card from an opponent of your choice. You cannot do both; you cannot do neither. It is up to you to decide which opponent will receive or lose a card. You win either by getting rid of all the cards in your hand or by collecting the entire deck. Except, of course, that if everybody is playing rationally, nobody wins.
OK, said the woman, I think I understand. What you are saying is that everybody is going to be trying either to have all of the cards or to have none of the cards, but everybody is also going to be trying to make sure that nobody else ends up with all of the cards or none of the cards, and so we are going to reach a sort of unhappy equilibrium.
Yes, said the man, isn’t it gorgeous? In twenty-four years of life, I have not found anything else that so efficiently wastes time. I expect that this will be more than enough for now, he continued, lowering his voice, but the truth is that the game can be extended even further.
How? asked the woman, leaning forward, apparently fascinated by the prospect of a soup of boredom thicker and deeper than the one in which we found ourselves submerged already.
Well, said the man to the woman, all but ignoring me, you shuffled the cards as cards are typically shuffled. But there are ways of shuffling that take up wonderful expanses of time. For instance, you take the cards from the box, and then you take the card on the top and place it on the bottom, and then you take the card on the bottom and place it on the top, and you proceed in this way until the cards in the middle of the deck are not arranged as they were at the beginning.
Which never happens, said the woman.
Yes, said the man. In this way, even the eternal game is deferred eternally.
The woman laughed and clapped her hands. I did not laugh. I was not especially interested in playing the man’s game—mostly, at this stage of my life, I was concerned with preserving my hours, not with dithering them away—but the event for which we were all waiting seemed so terribly distant, and I had not brought a book or a sudoku or a friend: I had absolutely nothing to do.
Well, I said, shall we play?
The woman gave a card to the man, and the man took a card from me, and I took a card from the man, and the woman gave a card to me, and the man gave a card to the woman, and on it went. And a very funny thing happened as we played, which was that the game’s logic began to replace my own. The rules of the game were no longer foreign to me. They no longer took the form of a list to be committed to memory: they became my mind, my memory. I had rarely experienced this with other games. It was a total quieting of my own rational impulses, an acceptance of a set of fundamental principles that I had not formulated myself. It was frightening and alluring. I wanted to resist it, or, at least, to remain conscious of it, though already I was growing unsure of what I meant by it; I could not quite define the state of mind, or the sequence of states of mind, for which that word was standing in. What I knew was that I did not want to give myself fully to the passing of the cards.
The game, in any case, was perfect for my poor eyesight: the numbers and symbols on the cards were of no consequence. I almost asked why we had bothered to shuffle at all, but the man and the woman were so lost in the mindless fog of taking and giving, the balancing of the hands, that I did not want to disturb them. Their flat, young faces gave no indication of any sort of awareness: of where they were, of what they were doing, of their mortality, of how their mortality would come, in time, to haunt and soothe them. The man’s face was particularly flat and young and blank. I was struck by the strange and precise certainty that, if there were words passing through his young mind, if there were any words at all, not one of them was death. Surely it was only the cards, the cards—and, maybe, in some remote spot behind the sinuses, the event, the event. That was all there was. The whole thing was very puzzling and very long. Nobody spoke. Around us, people began to arrive for the event, but they—their faraway voices, their vague bodies—were peripheral. We were not interested in them. They were not cards. We could not stack them and hold them and pass them: they were too heavy, too round.
Eventually, the space we were in—it was a lobby of sorts—filled and began to overflow, like a glass. People started sitting between us, inserting themselves into the game, and it was not possible to ignore them any longer.
Should we stop? said the man, sounding sad. We could keep going, said the woman. We could, said the man, but we should stop. OK, said the woman, sounding sad. Sure, I said. We stopped. The man took the cards and slid them into the box and put the box back in his pocket, and my hands felt very empty, and it was as if there had never been any cards at all.
A few minutes remained before the event began, so I went to the bathroom. It was a cavernous bathroom, with urinals in long lines and stalls that could have slept two, but the ceilings were low, far lower than they had been in the lobby. The motion-activated sinks appeared to be malfunctioning: the water turned on and off at random intervals, even though nobody was there. In the middle of the bathroom, slung between one of the lights and one of the mirrors, hung a big, thick spiderweb, in the center of which sat a very small spider with eight very thin legs. I bowed my head to pass beneath the web and approached a urinal.
I always had a very hard time urinating in public places: you had to kind of unclench everything for the urine to come, but I had an unfortunate tendency to remain clenched whenever I left the house, totally, existentially clenched, and I did not perceive this latent clenchedness until I entered bathrooms in public places and tried to urinate and thought, Oh. Other people seemed not to have this problem. They came into public bathrooms and opened themselves to the world, unzipped and exhaled and went, then rezipped and inhaled and washed and went, as if it were the easiest thing to cast out fluids in view of the many-buttoned lawyer lingering by the mirror between meetings, the sniveling moviegoer using paper towels as tissues, the tall tenor saxophonist humming low, lullaby-like sounds to himself as the stream came in fits.
Then there were some people, especially people my age, who struggled with the whole clenching affair, who let out their urine in grocery store fruit aisles, on the windy decks of ferries, at comedy shows, through long tubes and into slim bags affixed to their legs. And in a way, I envied them, their unwitting rebellion against the bizarre exceptionalism of bathrooms, which were, apparently, the only public places in which it was acceptable to release anything from one’s body. Anyway, I was standing at the urinal, unable to unclench even in the one space that allowed—demanded—unclenching, and I was looking down at my unshapely, catheterless body, and I was remembering a game my mother had taught my brother and me.
It went like this: My mother chose a word (it was always my mother who chose the word) and told my brother and me the first letter. Then it fell on my brother and me to think of a word that began with that letter. Suppose the word my mother chose was until. Then the first letter was u, and I could think, for instance, of the word up, and ask my mother a question. Is it a direction? I could ask, or: Is it not down? If my mother sorted out what I was asking, she could say, No, my word is not up, and protect herself. But if my mother did not know, and my brother did, we could count down and say the word together—Up! we could say, Up! Up!—and my mother would congratulate us and give us the next letter of her word. And so on, until one of us stumbled upon until, at which point the game, like any good game, would end, and my mother would tell us we had done very well and send us to bed.
But there had been one word my mother selected that my brother and I never figured out. The first letter, she told us, was c. We began with all the obvious guesses. Is it a pet that is not a dog? Is it a farm animal that gives milk? Is it what you do with a ball? It was not; it was not; it was not. After a while, we earned the second letter (perhaps an l? or an a, or an h, or even an e?), then the third (no memory), the fourth (s), the fifth (e), after which my mother, sensing our confusion, gifted us the sixth (was it an l? an n?), seventh (e), and eighth (s) letters. Here we could go no further. Our vocabularies were still small. Big words—parallelogram, discombobulate, unwieldy—scared us.
My mother would never tell us the word; she said we would sort it out when we were older, and would be glad that we had found it ourselves. But we had never sorted it out, and my brother did not talk to me much anymore, and my mother had died, and as my vocabulary had expanded my memory of the letters had faded, and now I was not sure that I would ever know.
Throughout my adult life, every few years, I had returned to those letters—c__se_es—and grown more confused. I had compiled a list of guesses and presented it to my mother in the hospital. The list comprised three words: closeness, causeless, causelessly. And my mother had just shaken her head. No, she had said, no, no.
She told me, almost word for word, what she had told me when I was a child: that I would sort it out when I was older, that I would be glad to have found it myself. This made me angry. I was older, and I had done all I could by myself. I felt like crying. I felt like a child. My guesses grew more absurd, more desperate. Cassetes, I offered: cassettes missing a t. Or closeless. Or causeness. OK, she had said, I can see that you are frustrated. I will tell you one thing. It ends in a y. Three weeks later, she was dead.
The only possibility I had come up with since then was chaselessly. It was not a possibility, not really, yet it lodged itself inside me, such that I often found myself whispering it, wondering whether it just might be what my mother had had in mind. But no: surely she would have known that this was not a word. Or had she been trying to teach us a lesson—about futility, about mistrust? She would not have been so cynical. Standing at the urinal, looking down, struggling to let go of my fundamental clenchedness, I did not know. I still did not know.
As I headed toward the sinks—which were still switching on and off, on and off—to wash my hands, the door opened, and the man came in, the man with the cards. But he was not the same man. His face was no longer flat and young and blank. The skin was cracked and wrinkled now, covered in little lines like roads on a map. Everything drooped and had a haziness to it, as if seen through a dirty window. He was old; he was like me. I gasped.
What? said the man.
You, I said, but before I could say anything else, the man ducked under the big spiderweb, and the smoothness was restored to his face. I examined him in my peripheral vision. It had been the web; seeing the man behind it, I had mistaken the silken fibers for marks of age, decay.
It had been my creeping blindness, too: my eyes had long since ceased registering depth. Seeing rain falling in front of a girl’s face, I was liable to think that she was crying.
How easily one thing could replace another, in moments of misapprehension like these. How easily old age could replace, or seem briefly to replace, youth. Even my perceptions of the tiny spider at the center of the web were unsettled: Was the spider very little because she was a baby, or was she in fact an old spider who happened to be little? Was there a way to determine the age of a spider? Wetting my hands at one of the failing sinks, I looked at myself in the mirror. Was there any chance that I was, in fact, young? Had I misinterpreted the lines on my own face? I had not. There was no web before me now.
And was there a web at all? Could I be certain? Fluorescent light was swimming between all the mirrors, sending ever-multiplying yellow threads through the air, threads so palpable I was tempted to pluck one, to see if a note might ring out. Could I be certain that the web was not made of this light? Yes: I had squinted and turned my head and seen the spider, and the spider was not light; the spider was a spider. There was a web, a big, thick web, hanging between one of the lights and one of the mirrors. Here my tired eyes had not deceived me. These were the sorts of questions I had to ask myself now. I had developed increasingly complex algorithms to bridge the inscrutable gap between what was and what I saw there to be. Everything needed to be interrogated: the existence of wrinkles, the existence of webs, existence.
The man stood at a urinal—the same urinal at which I had chosen to stand minutes before—and let out, without hesitation, a great big stream of urine whose virile whoosh I heard even as I passed beneath the little spider and opened the door to the high-ceilinged lobby, where, in anticipation of the event, people had begun to arrange themselves in long, nervous, drifting lines, like bits of silk buffeted by the draft from a flushing toilet.
I joined one of the lines. I had a ticket, though always when you were waiting to show your ticket, you ended up convincing yourself that you were an impostor, that your ticket was a forgery, that you were going to be found out. You passed the time by worrying that you had broken rules of which you were not even aware. I kept taking my ticket out of my bag and checking it, making sure it had not disappeared or morphed, somehow, into a different ticket, a ticket for another event. The people in front of me were talking about the event, about how great it was supposed to be. The people behind me were talking about the event, about a very negative review that had appeared the day before in the city paper. There seemed to be many versions of the event. I wondered which version the organizers had selected tonight: the great version or the very bad version.
The people in front of me were young, and the people behind me were young. This got me thinking about a recurring dream that had been plaguing me, in which young people convicted of heinous crimes were subjected to an accelerated aging process that left them forgetful, unable to walk. I was, in this dream, young. I had murdered my father. I was given an injection that contained decades, after which I found myself blind, confused, nostalgic. I was thinking now in the line that there was a certain logic to this system. Killing the murderer would render you a hypocrite. Instead, you sapped the murderer of energy, so that he dulled into something quiet and bland and unresentful, so that his murderous thoughts shriveled into inconsequential little shapes, like balled-up gum wrappers, or wizened blueberries reminiscent of balled-up gum wrappers, or pruney fingertips reminiscent of wizened blueberries.
Sometimes I worried that I had received such an injection. It would explain the dizzying speed with which I felt youth had turned a corner into age. But, even through the low eyelids of my tired memory, I was fairly confident that I had never murdered my father. Besides, I remembered things about being fifty, being sixty. There was no discontinuity. I could connect it all in a line.
At any rate, I always woke from the dream breathing fast, heavy with an exhaustion that went beyond sleep, my mouth filled with a very subtle bitterness, my arm sore, and I always had the sense, as I sat up in bed and blinked effortfully, that I had glimpsed something ugly about myself.
Finally, I reached the front of the line and showed my ticket and took my seat. I was in a row marked with a letter of the alphabet, and my chair had a number on its left arm. In this way, anybody could find me with ease, which seemed unnecessary: People did not come to events like this one to be made locatable, to be fixed by a set of coordinates. People came to disappear into a dark space, surrounded by other strangers eager to disappear—some of these disappearing strangers, no doubt, hiding decks of cards in their pockets.
The lights dimmed. A voice explained what to do in case of emergency, but the instructions were unhelpful. I was advised to locate an exit; this was apparently my responsibility. I turned and found a red sign behind me. Then the event began. It was slated to last an hour.
It was difficult for me to see what was going on. My eyes had begun to deteriorate almost a decade before, and at the time I had mourned the loss of the center of my vision as one might mourn the loss of life itself. I had managed to convince myself that my life was, in fact, over, that seeing only part of what was happening around me was tantamount to seeing nothing at all, that I was better off locking myself in a room and closing my eyes and pretending that there was nothing to see, nothing at all. But this was not how I felt anymore. Through some combination of reflection and habituation, I had come to appreciate the separation from the world that my eyes afforded me. I could observe when I wanted to observe, but I could also ignore any face, any landscape, that did not interest me; I could retreat into the craggy topography of my thoughts with the knowledge that, if a friend suggested I was not paying attention, I could simply blame my eyes—which would make my friend feel very guilty, so that, somehow, she would be the one apologizing, and not me.
It was frustrating, though, that I could hardly watch the event. I tried turning my head, squinting my eyes. None of it worked particularly well. In the stubborn darkness of the space, everything ahead of me was a blur. I missed the confusing brightness of the bathroom, its banjo strings of light.
At some point, maybe twenty minutes in, I gave up on following along and began instead to think about a conversation I had had with my brother on the day of my fortieth birthday. I had felt, that day, terrified of death. It was something about the number forty, how it fell limply from the mouth, as if dropped by accident. I told my brother that I was aware of my finiteness in a way I had hardly ever been as a younger man. And my brother said to me, You know, I think it is possible to stretch a moment to such an extent that our experience of time becomes effectively infinite. I said, I would really like that to be true. It is true, said my brother. We are always talking, and moving, and interacting, and being interacted with. But if you sit, and allow yourself to forget that you have a body, and do your best to take in everything—everything—that is unfolding around you, to take it in idly, dispassionately, you will find that minutes pass slowly, and that hours feel like weeks, and that you can change how you understand the world before the world has changed at all. And I think, said my brother, that this can be something very close to eternal life.
At the time, I had scoffed and called my brother’s strategy useless, misguided. An impossible game—those were the words I had used.
Even now, I was skeptical. What my brother had proposed was all about looking directly, looking closely, looking at—precisely the kinds of looking that were no longer available to me. But as I sat in the great big dark space, feeling gloriously alone, I was suddenly suffocated by the flat, heavy knowledge of my own oldness. I had the sense that to move forward, to leave, would be to find my death waiting for me beneath the red sign, leaning against the door and offering me a card. So I decided to try my hand at my brother’s game. I resolved to remain in my chair for as long as possible. I resolved to look. Well, I thought to myself, shall we play?
The trick, of course, was that there was little to observe in my immediate environs. Other than the event, which was going on so far ahead of me that I could not see it, there was mostly darkness. So I slowed my breathing and challenged myself to appreciate the particularities of the darkness. I traced the shape of my blindness. I greeted the floaters in my vision, tried to follow them, watched them skitter away like bugs from light—even though there was no light, none anywhere. I noticed, too, the hordes of dots I had perceived in the dark since I was a child, dots swooping, rushing, unreal dots, dots like schooling sardines. I tried to count the dots; I reached a number so large that to say it out loud, in English, would surely have required more than an hour; still, I counted. I heard each cough, each whisper. I imagined the instant as a physical substance. I saw myself stretching it out, crawling into it, closing it behind me, never emerging.
It was really working. I did not feel young, but my age felt at least as if it were arrested, unable to advance any further—as in those dreams in which you must reach a door to escape something terrible, but your legs turn to cattails or road signs, and you find yourself frozen in place, the difference being that my present frozenness was welcome, wanted; what I was escaping was motion itself, motion in time. I unclenched my mind to the idea that this escape was possible. I imagined time as a deck of cards waiting to be shuffled: I took the card on the top and placed it on the bottom, and then I took the card on the bottom and placed it on the top, again and again. Then I imagined time as a puzzle that could not be solved, like my mother’s word: c__se_es, c__se_es. I imagined the remainder of my hour in the space as a game that did not, could not, end. I tallied the creaks of the chairs—c__se_es—and I recorded the bursts of applause—c__se_es—and I cataloged the footsteps of those leaving early.
Except that they were not leaving early: they were leaving, and everybody else was leaving, and the lights were coming on. I sat there as they all left. The event had ended. It was over. I sat there, sat there. I did not want to move. I told myself I was all wrapped up in a spiderweb, and nobody could free me, and I would just stay in that web, still, timeless. I was sitting. I would be sitting. The chair was where I was and would be. I was so still. I could not mold time, could not so much as touch it, but I could remain very still in my chair, in the great big bright empty space.
Oh, I thought after a small eternity. Ceaselessly. Ceaselessly.