In Short – Issue 4 (Winter 2026)

January 31, 2026

Image credit: Jaina Cipriano

The Game Played in Silence

By Tim Walker

I have a pencil nub, less than an inch long, in a plastic bag pinned to a bulletin board above my desk. When my father died some years ago, I snagged it as a memento. He came of age during the Great Depression and hated to waste anything. Dad would subject himself to the discomfort of writing with such a tiny pencil, but in his dealings with others, he was a generous man. His personal, everyday frugality made him an inveterate soap-presser: when a bar got so small it wouldn’t dry between uses, he would press it into the side of a larger one. I once had a sliver of soap I wanted to keep separate, and I should have known that he would press it into another, different, bar he kept by the same sink. When he did this, I separated them. Then he pressed them together again. We went back and forth, pressing and separating the sliver until I used it up. We never discussed this. It was like a game played in silence: everything we needed to say, we spoke by the moves we made. 

As for soap-pressing, I never acquired the habit. I use liquid hand soap, which I buy in pump dispenser bottles. I’ve tried to teach my son, by example, to use up the last bit by diluting it with a little water, but he’s not catching on. It’s not important enough to speak of, so I continue to set my example, and he continues to ignore it. When the soap gets too low for the pump to suck it up, he leaves the old dispenser next to the new one, and I commandeer it to use up the last bit. 

To worry about how this will be accomplished when I’m no longer here to do it would be as silly as fretting over the fact there’s no one around now to press slivers of soap into larger bars. Our trivial differences sustain this pantomime of male stubbornness and reticence—a performance that somehow feels deeply satisfying. My only regret is that my son, being on the autism spectrum, is unlikely to have a son of his own. The game played in silence, which I don’t doubt my father played with his father, will come to an end at last.

Tim Walker read, for pleasure, the complete novels of Charles Dickens while earning a BA in Environmental Studies, and the complete novels of Anthony Trollope while earning a PhD in Geological Sciences, and has worked as a computer programmer, healthcare data analyst, used book seller, and pet sitter. He lives largely in his own head, while he corporeally resides in Santa Barbara with his son Dana and their cat Cassiopeia. His essays and poems recently appeared in Harpy Hybrid Review, 3:AM, Fatal Flaw, Rock Salt Journal, TYPO, and Sneaker Wave.