Game

I look around at all the other people on the poolside, and I notice they are all, without exception, beautiful women. Very suspicious, I think, that they should all be beautiful. They surround me on the poolside in a way at once exhilarating and sinister. I look back across the pool to the chair where my crumpled pile of belongings sits while I swim. I enter and exit the surface of the water. It occurs to me that any one of these beautiful women could, at any moment, steal my keys.

So I am not really surprised later when I am walking to a restaurant with a beautiful woman late at night, down a gravel drive in an alley, and two men yell from behind us.

"Get down! This is not a game, motherfuckers!"

I turn around and see their guns. The beautiful woman is already face down in the gravel, smoothing her skirt down around her thighs.

One of the men stands over us with his gun. I can feel the other's hands in my pockets. I think about the sheer skirt of the beautiful woman next to me in the gravel. I breathe in some dust. Then I say something stupid.

"Look, just don't take my keys," I say.

"What was that?" the man says. He leans in close. I can smell the chlorine on his breath. I know he really did hear, because he reaches back into my pocket and takes my keys. He throws them over a fence into the dark.

"This isn't a game, motherfucker," he repeats.

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