The game was given to me. I would like to make that clear before you think otherwise.

It arrived after I went on a first date with a guy from one of those dating websites. We hit it off, so much so that he kissed me on my doorstep. On his leaving, I walked through my door and tripped over a small box. I couldn’t remember ordering anything, and I picked it up, bewildered at the rattle that was emitted. When I opened the box, I found a puzzle.

“What an odd, intricately contrived thing,” I said out loud to myself.

The puzzle looked back at me, quite curiously. Or perhaps we looked at each other curiously, as both of us were confused by what we saw. I, a large, oddly shaped amalgamation of flesh, and the puzzle, a game that I wasn’t expecting.

I thought about it all evening as I watched TV. Who had sent me this puzzle and why? The TV behaved bizarrely, flicking through channels on its own accord, and I felt so tired, I imagined a second television sprouting from its side, a mirror to my reflection, tired, haggard.

By the time I got up the next morning, all thoughts of the puzzle had ceased, and I left to go to work for the day. The day passed like every other, and I fell asleep to the sounds of reality television in the bathroom. I woke up once or twice to my eyes in the mirror watching me.

The days after this were the same; the puzzle sat on my wooden cabinet, and I went to work and came back every day. When the guy I met for the first date messaged me, I responded quickly and fell asleep, squirming as something warm and slippery tied itself to my ankles. The television played in the background.

We decided to meet again.

This time the date was longer, we talked more, and he wanted to lean on my shoulder. I let him. A closeness began to flourish. We kissed at the end and vowed to meet up again soon. A few days passed. I messaged. We met up. We agreed to go on another date. We went back to work. As you can see, we began to form a relationship.

I didn’t notice it at first. The wooden puzzle.

After my second date, I got back home and threw my keys into the pot by the door. I ran into the kitchen to make myself a glass of water because it was so hot outside, and ended up falling asleep on the kitchen countertop to the sounds of someone sleeping. They were talking in their sleep like Josh, the guy I was seeing, spoke, with his intonation and accent, and I found it rather soothing.

But after the fourth or fifth date, I can’t quite remember, I noticed the puzzle had moved. When I came through the door, all windswept with the excitement of feeling connected, I looked at the wooden box and saw that the puzzle pieces were all in different places. Some of them were falling out of the box, some were inside the four corners, and some were piled on top of one another.

I leant over for further inspection. One medium and one small triangle remained in the wooden shape, but all the rest of the items lay scattered around the rim. Shivering slightly, I found the thick, black tentacles pressed to my feet knotted themselves across my chest and my stomach, wrapping their arms across my back too. Eyes watched me watch the puzzle.

I found the ordeal strange and wondered at this point if someone had broken into my apartment but looked around the more expensive items and decided something was coming from the puzzle. It was the eyes, the breath and the reflections. The eyeballs blinked and the television crackled with static.

After my next workday, I came home and checked the box. Nothing. Then I went on my phone and had dinner, and went to bed. Another TV screen sprouted from my wall, the tentacles from my body connecting to the device, thin, black wires where I could see a transcription of Josh’s thoughts, and he was thinking about me. The words were capitalised and red, juddering across the pixels.

I’ll keep this up until she’s back home, and then I’ll tear out the roots.

Sleep evaded me that night. I thought that he might be playing tricks on me.

I went on another date with him. I checked the puzzle. Pieces had moved once more. This time, the same two pieces were side by side, sitting in the centre of the box. I found my way to bed and messaged Josh goodnight. He messaged back. I went to sleep happy.

On a few occasions, I tried moving the pieces in the wooden box or throwing it into the chute, but the box would always land right back on my doorstep, and the pieces moved exactly back to where they were before.

So, it continued. Some time passed, perhaps a month, perhaps two. The two triangles remained, and I kept seeing Josh. On one night, I went over to his place, and we kissed in front of his silent television. As he moved in to close the space between us, he told me he loved me. I felt the pangs of warmth across my chest and said I did too. We fell asleep in the presence of one another. His eyeballs glistened.

I woke up early the next morning and looked over at him coyly. I said, “You snore, just like you did on the TV.”

He hadn’t been properly awake and suddenly sat up and looked at me uncomfortably. He replied, “What TV are you talking about?”

He didn’t seem to know that he was being broadcast across the world. I thought it best not to mention this again, for he seemed discomforted.

When I left for work, I leaned over to grab my keys from the stand and looked over the puzzle, only to find the large triangle and the square all piled into the wooden space, slotted beside each other neatly. Instead of being baffled, I looked at the puzzle and nodded. I thought I was understanding its meaning. The wires thickened and tied themselves to my shoulder blades neatly.

At this point, I thought that for every bit Josh and I liked one another, a piece would fit into the puzzle, and it would signal an eternal happiness once all the pieces were complete. I was convinced its very presence meant he was the one.

But as our relationship continued, I found the puzzle very much the same, day after day. I fell in love with Josh as I fell in love with my job, relentlessly, vividly, quickly. I had never been in a relationship before him, and I found myself falling in love with everything he did. He was everything to me.

We never fought in the beginning; only once did we disagree. It was one day, when he was talking about how he thought some people were too soft these days, and I was in a bad mood, cooking dinner and taking issue with him. I tried to throw down my knife, but it was tangled in my wrist, and I turned around, angrily.

“What do you even mean by that?” I said, tugging the knife. It slipped over my finger and sliced an orange that popped with veins and pupils.
The room went black and white and jagged.

He just shrugged. “I don’t know, I don’t mean anything by it. I just mean people could be a bit more resilient.”

Anger had grown quickly in my body, but it left it the same way, and soon we were back to our evening activities.

The next day, I looked over the puzzle curiously and saw that the other small triangle had joined the picture.

Time passed. I found an active dating app on his phone and hit the roof. The television glowed. He told me that it was before we were dating, and he promised to stop scrolling on there. I didn’t say anything, but the last two shapes fell into the puzzle, and I noticed the square had been misplaced, alongside the first small triangle.

When he told me his friends didn’t want to meet me, other pieces of the puzzle fell out and the parallelogram centred itself in between the two large triangles. I hated the idea of being un-birthed. I watched squiggly black lines erase my body in the mirror.

The next time I saw him, I told him I’d never felt so secure before.
In the puzzle, the square rotated back in, and I found the slippery wire tightened.

I said I loved him so very much when we ate dinner.

Large triangle to the centre.

When he told me he was confused and he couldn’t see me anymore, pieces fell out.

A few of the screens in my house imploded from within.

He began to say that I was crazy.

I said nothing and stormed home. I threw off my shoes and I grabbed that wretched puzzle and threw it out of my window, pieces flying, flinging themselves across the road below. I watched as they tumbled into the windscreens of cars and caused people to swerve out of their way. I wanted to see the rubber tyre roll over them and crunch them down, but the wooden shapes just lay on the ground.

The eyeballs in my dresser fell off like unscrewed handles. The tentacles loosened.

He said he was going to break up with me.

I went to bed and cried.

I messaged him to plead for us to get back together.

He didn’t respond.

The puzzle landed on my doorstep the next morning. I observed the package, neatly wrapped and tied together with a small, satin green ribbon. The pieces were a little bashed and dented, but I placed the item back on my wooden dresser and leaned against the cool floor tiles.

All the pieces had fallen out of the wooden square.

The tentacles that had wrapped themselves to me released, and I watched as they, black and wet, slithered from me, back into the box. The screens that had drawn themselves into my hallway and glued to my walls burnt into the bricks and disappeared.

I wept blood and swept up the rest.