"Roll With It" by Andrew Shaughnessy — Our March 2024 Silver Medal Winner
“Fresh, fun, intriguing, and engaging, this story places readers into the image setting in a uniquely creative way.”
“I love the D & D vibe!”
“...some lovely images... ”
Meet Andrew
Andrew (Andy) Shaughnessy is a Toronto-based intellectual property litigation lawyer and writer. He is a three-time bronze medalist and four-time short-lister in Blank Spaces Magazine writing competitions. His short stories and poems have appeared with Blank Spaces Magazine, Off Topic Publishing, Syncopation Literary Journal, and Last Stanza Poetry Journal, among others. He is the 2023 Mississauga Library Poetry Prize Winner. He overuses m-dashes (and parentheses) and has (the love of) a dog.
Roll With It
the unedited story by Andrew Shaughnessy
What would you do if you found yourself under the parabolic arch of a massive hollowed-out root of an ancient orb tree, flaming torch in hand, looking up through a portal to two shining celestial objects—weaponless and alone, because you chose to enter instead of staying back with the others, who are using the turn to regenerate the power-ups of their weapons? Even if this had been your first fantasy-role-play game, you would have known the common dogma: Stay with the group.
But I’m not you. I’m not in any group. I am just trying to figure it out for myself. I’m at this gathering of eight college students, huddled around a conference table in drafty Withers Hall, because I had nothing else to do.
I look at the hand-drawn dungeon map. My token—an amethyst worry stone I’ve carried since childhood—sits in an advance position ahead of six tiny metal figurines. The judgment of the other players weighs on me. “Should I retake my move?”
The dungeon master, a third-year biology major named Dwayne—though everyone calls him the Blue Whale, because of his ability to suck up and retain information—is not having it. “That’s not how it works,” he says. He selects three dice from a tray, one icosahedral. “Throw the D20 to determine whether you are finding a cache of weapons, a saboteur, or something else.” He raises his eyebrows. “And, to assess the damage in case you are attacked, use the regular die and this guy, the D12.” He holds up a translucent dodecahedron die before sliding the three pieces over. I feel like a speck of krill in an ocean of knowledge I’m unprepared for, his gaping maw coming toward me. “Roll.”
“All at once?”
Dwayne rolls his eyes. The guy sitting beside the only female, Suzy, shakes his head. On Suzy’s other side, Jenkins, the friend who’s dragged me here, lowers his.
“Roll the twenty-sider.” It was Suzy. She smiles, softly, as if she sees in me something I haven’t yet seen in myself.
I’m a loner and a bit of a follower. This doesn’t bother Jenkins. We shared our childhood and a paper route—three hundred papers delivered midweek in a northern community in a vast neighbourhood called the P-patch, a moniker derived from its street names. We split the weekly work, and the extras—flyers on Tuesdays, catalogues on Thursdays, and the dreaded Wish Book, a massive glossy holiday volume that had me wishing never to see a Palace, Peacock, Pelican, Primrose, Pleasant, or Placid ever again. A novelist from my hometown once wrote that it was A Good Place to Come From. He’d never had my paper route. Like him, I intended to leave.
I followed Jenkins to university, another gormlessly directionless teenager encouraged by a misguided guidance counsellor to study engineering. An earlier aptitude test had suggested musical playwright, but the religious guidance counsellor steered me away—something about the vocation’s sexual ambiguity and loose morality. I don’t know what in me needed protection, but I heeded his advice. Even a coin flip connotes choice—the roll of a die, options. Engineering was the only thing to do.
Life decisions unfold like this. In February of my final year at university, I took a morning train to Toronto for an interview for a sales job with an oil company at an office in Don Mills. I arrived in blizzard conditions. The bus I’d selected couldn’t climb the hill from the subway. So, I walked—three miles, feeling very much like I was back home on my paper route, sans proper clothing. I arrived late for my interview—pant cuffs soaked, rolled up like balloon ends—just as they were shutting down the office. I got the job on grit alone—or maybe they said ‘pluck’—and got dropped off at a bus stop, alone, to find my way to the train station and home. I should have been rejected out of hand. An aptitude test at another company had predicted I would be lousy at sales. More luck than smarts. That’s me.
The game has ended and I am walking Suzy home, Jenkins having rushed off.
“You haven’t played before, have you?” she asks.
“Was it that obvious?”
She raises her eyebrows and buries a smile in her hoodie.
“I’m glad I entered the orb though!”
“Orb tree,” Suzy corrects. “That was cool, right at the time of the planetary alignment. The Blue Whale was ecstatic.”
Dwayne was that. He made me an honourary lifetime member for being the first to unlock that special part of his dungeon. I wanted to say it was luck, but these gamers have abilities to live in worlds far more fantastical than my own. Luck is an accepted part of their process. “It’s all in the wrist,” I say, mimicking a die roll. “Though I wish I could have tried that twelve-sided beauty.”
“You have simple wishes.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” We walk along silently. It’s cold out but I feel comfortable here, under the clear night sky. “Tell me,” I say. “Why do you like it so much?”
“Every game is different. You never know how it’s going to work out.”
“Can you actually visualize it?”
“That’s the best part,” she says. She looks up as the silhouette of a cloud slides across the face of a crescent moon. “You see what you want to see.” She reaches out and traces the moon’s shape with a finger. “You don’t know what comes next.” My gaze shifts from her finger to her eye. There’s a sparkle.
Of course, had it been you in that moment, the one who walked into the root of an orb tree, torch in hand, just as the planets aligned to change the course of history, you would have known, precisely, the perfect thing to say.
But, like I said, I’m not you. I need to figure this out (promptly).
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