Now

We took turns being Firefly: the pink, winged unicorn with a blue mane and lightning bolts on her haunches. Firefly was the prettiest, and all the other ponies were terrified of her. They had to act out the stories she told, exactly the way she told them, or else be banished to the Volcano of Gloom.

We took turns being the witch. The witch stirred the potion while everyone else filled their cupped hands with dirt, leaves, and dead cicadas to throw in the cauldron. The witch thought up a spell for us all to chant as we danced around a bucket of water teeming with nature’s debris. The witch decided who we were hexing; it could be one of us.

We took turns being the father. The rest of us were the daughters, locked in the basement and forced to obey the father’s commands. We had to jump across the couches because the floor was lava, each leap a challenge as we were weak with starvation. The father wouldn’t feed us until we finished our chores, endless tasks that blistered our fingers. Every so often he turned off the light at the top of the stairs, and that’s when it was nighttime. We’d whisper in the dark and plan our escape, until the father pointed out that he had us chained to the wall.

We took turns being the wife. The wife would get into the canopy bed and pretend to sleep while the husband worked the graveyard shift. The husband would go into the hallway and count to twenty before coming back and crawling under the covers. The wife would kiss the husband with her eyes still closed and scream her throat raw when she opened them to find he wasn’t her husband at all. Whoever had been the husband was now the man. The man’s ears began to melt like wax dripping from a candle. His pupils dilated until his irises disappeared, and the whites of his eyes blackened like bruises. Inky fluid dripped onto the pillowcase—and somebody’s mom would be mad—but the wife kept on screaming as the man’s face fell away piece by piece. Sometimes the man would try to scream, too, but the wife would shush him and say no, that’s my part. Because it was the best part. And that’s just how the game ended.

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Andrea Benvenuto is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer based in Pennsylvania. Her short fiction has appeared in Chouette, Lumina Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at andreabenvenuto.com and on social media @dreabenvenuto.