She Always Won Battleship
He became convinced she was cheating, then felt embarrassed by his paranoia despite continuing to hold his arms around his board like a shield.
He asked her how she always won, and she told him he was too rigid, such that his placement of ships – even if subconsciously – followed the same immutable pattern.
We’ll see about that, he bitterly thought, and the next time he shut his eyes and arranged them at random. Scattered his ships across the board in a way which defied her logic, her so-called pattern.
When she wins again, he once again insists that she had somehow slipped through his defenses to cheat and see his arrangement. She, unsympathetically, points out that placing the ships with his eyes closed inevitably led to unstrategic placements, so that it was easy for her to win even without knowing the (nonexistent) pattern of his ships.
Then, taking pity on him, she let him in on the secret principle which invariably guided her own placements: an automatic impulse to create a sort of spiral. Try as hard as she might, she could never deny her base nature, and the spiral always recurred with terrifying rigidity.
Well, he appreciates knowing that, but sometimes wishes he had figured it out himself; whenever he wins, she smiles as if it’s as much her victory as his. Yes, he wins the battle, but she wins the war.
Alyosha Vak lives, and has always lived, in New York City. She likes writing and drawing.