Joan churned up the vampire teeth and tossed them. Careful. She didn't want to get bitten. Again.
The fangs scraped away from the beaten pink plastic cup and sank into the board, points down, easy, like it was rancid flesh.
The crickets around them changed tones, becoming something that shrieked. In pain.
Joe quirked his head at the move, mouth twisting as he sifted through his folders. Frowning, he pinched up a few strands of hair, long, too sparse to be of any colour, and fluttered it down between them. They looped out and wrapped around the teeth. "Virginal," he said. "So hard to find."
With a grinding hiss and the choking smell of carbon, the hair crumpled and bit oblivion.
"She lied," Joan tarted. "Lose a turn."
Ducking her lips, she pulled out a hero's hope and clicked it down on the board. As it tried to knock out the teeth, the sky flared pink and rain began to thump down.
Rain that also hopped.
And cried ko-KEE.
Joe pinched up one of the frogs and filed it.
Rolling her eyes, Joan tossed true love.
The coquies became peanuts.
Sighing, Joe shuffled back into his folders and refiled.
Reaching up, he pinched the sun and plunked it into the board.
"Smooth move," Joan said, as a cricket trotted by, waltzing with a bleeding peanut.
Tilting her head up to the stars, she considered.
Picking out a likely in the black and blue mottle, she smiled and whipped away Orion's belt, who glared and yelped a curse as his toga tunic thing fell around his ankles.
The hunter was yanking back on his bow when Joe snatched his arrow.
They made a double play, the board slurping both offerings like hot soup.
The vamp teeth made a pair of notches in the belt, and the bones of the earth rose up.
The hill they were sitting on was now a very leeched vertebra, crumbling and pitted.
Joe went back for his folders and clanged down a spoon. The arrow pierced its heart, and a panting hank of knotted fur lunged from the dark, snarling and biting down.
It ripped away the corner of the board, trying to savage it from its post, fur and snot flying with the kill shake.
"Stop that," Joan snapped, flicking her hand out to crack its nose. Blue light snapped from her fingers, and the board was spit back with a whimper.
"Wasn't it my turn?" she said, looking for her glass.
"Sorry." Joe looked down at his spoon. The fangs had swallowed its handle, and were nibbling their way up. "But I don't think it's coming back."
Joan took a sip of pop. "You always cheat." She flipped up a Gorgon's egg and cracked it into the board.
Its yolk tarnished the silver and blackened the fangs, before taking a chunk out of Orion's belt.
"Predictable," Joe smirked, and rolled out two Hydra eyes. They winked against the fangs, flirting. Then one met the wrong end of the arrow.
"Ew. That had to hurt." She looked up, and a cricket bigger than the hill was waltzing off with a bleeding Joe.
"And I win again," Joan muttered, and took another sip of pop.
Marlo Dianne lives on the ocean. A writer and artist, Marlo has published more than fifty works, with recent oddities in Cinema Spec, Tales of Moreauvia, Necrography, and Goblin Fruit.
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