Double Four

The dominos are falling, one with two, three with four, or five with six, depending on the dots.  She sits on the edge, the cold, the distant, the floating cloud.  She is the double four, and she stands strong, doesn’t waver, her slim frame, streamlined, silent.  An ebony piece, warmly cool, touched by no one, no one touching her.  She stands aside from the rest and watches as the dark shapes fall, the chips are down, the one and one, the two and three, the much sought after double six, but there the double four is up, a strange one.  ‘I’m left wi the whore frae Leith.  I’m out,’ shouts the man in cap, through beer coated throat, hears she in her reminiscence.  She is party to a group of twenty-eight, has four dots either side of her face if you look at her horizontally, or four topside, four bottom looking er, what’s the word, er…standing up.  She’s still standing.  Perpendicular.  Some might say she’s not got a great grip on life, that she walks the thin line between sanity and insanity, but she’s not the one toppling in the rolling snake of tumblers.  There goes another.  Clickety click and they’re down.  Wait, that’s that other game.  That’s em, what do you call it…the one with two fat ladies, a man alive, legs eleven.  Legs eleven.  The whore frae Leith needs but two.  She’d give the game up for but one.  On saying that, her bottom is solidly stacked, and she’s still standing.  Another, another and another topples.  Knockety, knock, knock. knock, the three two hits the back of five four, her group, then the five four hits the back of double two, and they’re down, dots licking the ground, Bakelite backsides shiny and smooth peeping up at her, she the last man standing.  Double five is down, her fellow player the four and three is away, in a sad trail of fallen tablets, in interwoven defeat.  Sanctus dominus, she bows for his favour.  The circle of standing stones is no more, a bevy of tiles flat and scattered.  The double four shuffles on, in search of another game.