ANOTHER CASTLE by Mike McClelland
Flo, the fashionable penguin who lives on the other side of the pear orchard, is thinking of leaving our island.
“Why?” my older son, who is two-and-a-half, asks, distraught.
My younger son bites my big toe. He’s one.
“We’ll get her to stay,” I tell them. Flo has other adventures in mind, other shores to land upon, other castles to explore. But we ask her to stay. As soon as Flo seems convinced, we head straight to the post office to send Flo a gift.
“What should we send her?” I ask as I type out a generic note to accompany the gift.
“A motorbike,” my older son says. Motorbike is his answer for most things.
We compromise and send Flo a tricycle and then go about harvesting some pears from our freshly imported pear trees, pausing to screech whenever a bug appears.
Our island is a utopia. We spend our days gathering fruit, digging holes, fishing, and rearranging furniture. There are no police here. Our hair is blue and we usually dress in a yellow romper, a monocle, and a tiara that all the neighbors are jealous of. Every time we put the tiara on, I say to my boys, “I just love finding new places to wear diamonds!”
Having a Marilyn Monroe quote for all occasions has served me well, and this is a gift I will pass on to my sons.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, we’re not actually on an island. We’re playing Animal Crossing, which we do for a little bit every day.
Since the beginning, video games have been pushing us forward with the promise of what else is out there. Mario reaches the castle, battles through it, only to find a little toadstool person waiting with a message: “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”
Now, spending most of my time indoors, the thought returns to me over and over. Maybe it – inspiration, security, happiness, health, freedom – wait outside my castle walls. There are riches to be found, just over the next hill, but I’m not allowed to leave.
As a gay couple with two young kids in the south, everything beyond our own backyard is scary right now. There’s the virus. There’s systemic racism. There are guns. There’s economic insecurity.
So we’re stuck in this castle. In our case, the castle is a pleasant rental with a postage stamp of a backyard on the outskirts of a Georgia university town. We’re lucky to have outdoor access and playing in the yard passes the hours, but there is only so much we can do to hold the attention of our boys without worrying about sunburn, bug bites, COVID-19, rifles, and racists. Inside, nightly story time is wonderful, but both of my sons can only handle about four books before we start eating the pages or jumping on beds. YouTube concerts and train sets work wonders, but sometimes I just need some help. So I've turned to one of my first loves, video games, for assistance.
The boys are a bit too young to fully master the process, so they each have an old, unplugged controller in hand while I manage the real controls for the three of us. We talk about the different kinds of insects and fossils that appear on our island, and we even get to purchase stolen art from a fox who has parked his boat on a small beach on the north side of our island.
As a writer, I feel like I should be nurturing my literary life. So we plan dinner parties; on the island, I can be Clarissa Dalloway. We send out letters every day, manipulating townsfolk like Miss Strangeworth. We obsess over catching the biggest fish, Ahab-ing our way through the hours as we throw back trout, bass, clownfish and the occasional boot.
In some of my more selfish moments, I wonder if the pandemic is keeping me from helping my children become prodigies. By the time their girls were my boys’ age, Richard and Oracene Williams already had the whole family out on the tennis court. My older son is only six months away from the age Yo-Yo Ma was when he started cello lessons. Am I holding them back by holding them in? So we play Mario Tennis, we bounce around to Just Dance with tiny plastic violins in hand. It might not be perfect, but it’s something.
Then, when the boys are snuggled in bed, I pull the newest Resident Evil up. For a little while, I get to be enduring franchise heroine Jill Valentine, who also finds herself in the middle of both a deadly pandemic and under attack by an unchecked police force (in Jill’s case, the police are zombies). As Jill, I get to shoot and stab and grenade a variety of villains, but unlike some other games, there aren’t points for killing. Jill’s task is to survive. To keep moving forward, to get knocked down and pick herself back up and inch forward.
I’m right there with her. Right now, I’m trying to survive, trying to minimize the damage while protecting those in my care. These games help, they take our mind off of the news and the neighbors, off of what happened yesterday and what might happen tomorrow. Like Flo, I’m out there searching for another castle, but for the moment, I’ll stick with Jill. I’ll survive.
Mike McClelland lives in complete chaos with his husband, two sons, and three rescue dogs, and is the author of Gay Zoo Day and a recently completed novel about queer witches.