A Professional Lola by E.P. Tuazon

Author:E.P. Tuazon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636281193
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Frog

“Did you say Chrono Trigger?” Lina asks, her lips slightly agape, exposing a dark green tongue. I stare a little too long at her mouth, discolored by the dye the bar used for her “Marlboro Breath” cocktail, still trying to place her voice.

She was one of Luke’s friends, the one he was telling me would be here if I would only come with him (Please? Just once?) to the “super-rad” video game bar down the street from our office.

“They got good booze, and she’s a voice actress. Didn’t you want to be one of those in high school?” he commented, and before I could deny it, we were here.

Lina’s voice was familiar in the way that I recognized it only when it was addressing other people. In other conversations, she transformed from one familiar character to another, from a creature who could communicate only by repeating her own name to a young boy who piloted a giant robot.

Somehow, her talking directly to me, shoulder to shoulder, made her sound like no one.

The game we had been playing at our table was simple. We each took turns asking the group for one video game that had the kind of character we described. The person whose turn it was would say, “Name a game where a character uses a big sword,” and someone would reply Final Fantasy 7, another, Soulcalibur V. There wasn’t a penalty for not replying, there wasn’t one for getting it wrong or saying the same thing as someone else, other than a less sober person than you spurring you on to pick another. There was no winning or losing the game, either. It was a game just to stir the pot, just to get conversation going. It ended when someone had to go, when someone started the domino of leaving, one “I have to get up early” after another “I got a long drive.”

Luke puffed the last request, “Name a game where a frog’s a hero.”

“Frogger,” someone spat.

“Battle Toads. Does that count?” another replied.

“Chrono Trigger,” I said.

“Did you say Chrono Trigger?” Lina asked, more like a whisper after my thinking about it, after my staring at her emerald lips for an embarrassingly long time.

I can’t tell if it is my words or her repeating them that give them the final nudge, but it dislodges the memories of my grandmother, my lola, I hadn’t thought about in years. I turn from Lina and see flashes of them reflected in the bitter amber of my “Cosmo Canyon”—an old-fashioned absolutely nothing like the one Tifa shook for Cloud. The clap of her tsinelas on her plastic floor runners, the whiff of her garlic rice and fried fish breakfast wafting from each blow to the game cartridge when it didn’t work, then the padded smack of her pushing it into the slot of the console and sliding up the power switch, a purple button that flicked up instead of sank in.

“Sa-Star Fox!” someone stutters.

“PaRappatherapper!” another says overeagerly.

“Does that count?” the one who said Battle Toads asks.

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