4/26/12

Saskadelphia
By James Bambury


There was no good television on Saskadelphia. All the signals faded and dispersed on their way out of the earth's upper atmosphere and all the corporate Intellectual Property enforcement satellites snatched enough packets of data to break up any good streams. Even still, we could only afford the chance of getting signals from when Saskadelphia's orbit was on the same side of the earth as the sun.

So we had to make our own fun.

We all took up acting. We did all of Shakespeare's work and then Shaw's, which was all we had. Then we translated them into Esperanto and performed them all again. After we exhausted every permutation of euchre we moved onto contract bridge until that game was considered solved. We turned to creating our games from the standard deck of playing cards but they never provided the same enchantment. For a while, we looked into chess as a means of amusing ourselves through Saskadelphia's long solar year. Eventually that drew tiresome even after introducing Fischer's random set-up system or fairy pieces.

Now, we wait under the domes and bide our time, always looking upwards. It is a quiet place now, but it's not home.


- - -
James Bambury writes from Brampton, Ontario. He blogs and tweets about it at http://jamesbambury.blogspot.com and @JamesBambury.