We used to fight about who got to be Miss Scarlet.
She was the most beautiful character on the box,
her slender waist, her long black hair, her scarlet lips.
Her slender waist. It was as if we thought that by moving
a red plastic piece around the board, we, too,
would be more beautiful. With a roll of the dice,
she would glide across the square tiles from the library
to the billiard room, would take the underground tunnel
between the conservatory and the lounge.
As I filled in the squares on my brown detective pad,
I imagined long red acrylics on my stubby broken nails.
Oh she was everything we were not. She was mysterious,
she hung out in a mansion with a ballroom and study.
She was elegant, thin and rich. And when things went wrong,
and they always did, she and her friends, Miss Peacock, Mrs. White,
they always figured it out by the end of the game
just who had been the killer, and what weapon they used—
the silver candlestick, the knife.
Did we really believe that beauty would help us
to figure things out? We decided at some point
to try that route. The game gathered dust
as we turned to stealing our mother’s make up
and styling each other’s hair, then watching
our weight, then not eating at all.
We were our own killers then. Our own weapons, too.
We didn’t need a revolver or a rope. It was Miss Scarlet
in the kitchen, but it took years for us to figure it out.
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