Kick on Girl
Art by Clara Medanić
There’s a game called Wall Kickers. You’re a little pixel monkey and you have to jump from wall to wall to move upwards — hence the name. Along the way up, you encounter holes in the walls which you fall through — leading to your death, spikes on the walls, impaling you — leading to your death, electrifying panels, electrocuting you — leading to your death; and so on and so forth.
Sometimes while jumping, you land on a surface moving incredibly fast, like a treadmill — you don’t have enough time to react, you’re falling. The fall leads to your death. It’s quite tragic. Sometimes the realisation that the ground is moving comes as such a shock that you flip the other way out of sheer terror. You realise once you’re falling, that you did it to yourself. If you were only calm and rational, it would have been okay. Your heart drops and your muscles seize and you go on kicking your way from wall to wall without inhaling a single breath — you are tense.
Before leaving the ground, the grass is neon and two millimetres deep. The earth underfoot stays solid and stern while above ground, blue birds hover on the timber staircase, overgrown with thick summer grass. Nature doesn’t demand anything of you, it tickles your back with a silk scarf.
There is always the debilitating awareness however, of an impending reality that you’re destined to meet, unable to prevent, and so burdened by the approaching of. You will die in this safe haven. You are standing on the earth on which you will die. Here is your killer. Some would call you a silly monkey, knowing only of your end yet jumping forever. But you can enjoy the garden and know that you will fall. Other than this small grievance, the grassy woodlands of Jungle Jumps are bliss. Anyway, you have a job. You — Jumpy Monkey — are Chief banana dispenser tester for NASA and you cannot stay on the ground forever. Before commencing The Great Jump, you relish in the warmth of the orange sky, and watch the pale blue clouds passing through one another like moving cars.
As soon as you leave the ground, you cannot return to that ideal. You begin to question if you’d even truly been there — if it ever truly existed. You never think about it again. From then on, you jump.
The higher you jump, the stranger things become. Your world is morphing and deforming, but you hardly notice. You don’t stop once to wonder how you look. You never try to catch your reflection. There are no mirrors here. It is quiet and empty, and you only have one motive; one purpose; one goal; one joy. Jumping.
And so you jump. But where are you jumping? You got so caught up on locating a clear space on which you could land; with kicking and kicking from wall to wall, calculating your jump’s brevity and depth, noting your airtime, controlling the length at which you drop before flipping and jumping the opposite direction with the pure force of gravity and your sheer physiological excellence, you got so caught up in all this; you never stopped to wonder why you jump: what is up there? What are you so desperately trying to reach? No one told the silly monkey that a rainbow has no end.
It does not matter how high you jump, for you must always jump further. There is no finish line. You’ll never stop and feel accomplished. It never stops. The difficulty of one stage becomes suddenly laughable when compared to the next. As you jump, your expectations that you have of yourself, they jump alongside you. Silly monkey does not know that there is a mean trick being played on him; the rope he’s trying to catch is being pulled by the human hand.
Sometimes you intentionally jump into open air until a split second before it’s too late. You like feeling the veins in your neck pop, the sudden absence of a heartbeat. For that split second, you are not yourself at all, you are nothing more than fear. You’re an animal, and you’re playing with fire.
Sometimes you do too well for too long. You get cocky. You kick back. You deserve a break. You jump willy-nilly. You’re barely kicking, it’s more like swimming. Your silhouette radiates all the colours of the rainbow. You’re invincible, barely landing anymore. Blindly tapping walls with gentle caresses you shoot upwards and upwards until you’re impaled.
The play symbol bulges stupidly before the sub-saharan beauty of your jungle. Is heaven nothing but a blank slate? THE END. Play again? What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Here is a gift, do not dwell. Here, a new environment. Let me lead you to a new life. You can always begin again.
You’ve moved on to the mystical world of Celestial Skip. With this new life, you are a new person. You are a cat in space. The mobile game would excel by having the option to acquire a space helmet for the cat skin but one cannot have everything I suppose.
It’s quiet in space, similar to the Garden of Eden that was Jungle Jumps only with a deafening hum. Endless grey noise dotted by sporadic beeps. Gravity works differently in space. Your heart does not race, and neither do you. Your muscles do not tense. You really are swimming now. The beeps echo your heartbeat, as if in a labour induced coma. You’re floating. Perhaps, this is heaven.
As you float, you never truly leave that garden. No matter how fast or high or mindlessly you jump, you are calm. You drift past colossal planets patterned with deep shades of stone and metal. They hover behind you as great statues do. You have time to admire them as you move. They exist beautifully. No one expects them to be, but they are. Isn’t it enough just to be beautiful?
Considering all this, you jump
And jump
And jump
And jump.