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  • Minecraft
  • Angela Belcaster (bio)

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Santiago Echeverry. La Vie en Rose (detail). 2013. Videoart, animation produced with Kinect and Processing. 4 minutes, 45 seconds.

Why are you still here?” my brother Caleb asks.

I have been sitting next to him on the couch for exactly four minutes—long enough to try three times to log him into his online high school courses and get shut out by the program. I will have to email his online mentor to get the password reset.

“I’m just checking my email,” I say. Our mother is working and I have him today.

“Yes, but why are you still here?”

“Because I am comfortable,” I say. “This will only take a few minutes, then I’ll go.”

“Yes,” he repeats, pushing his glasses up on his face, already immersed in a video game that’s loading. “It’s just that,” he says, “you know, I like to be by myself when I play. You’re kind of in my bubble.”

“I know,” I say. I move over a few inches and look up at the television. “What’s this called?”

My brother is seventeen and he has a repertoire of four or five video games that are his favorites. I know their names, but have actually only watched him play one or two. Runescape, Gears of War. Modern Warfare.

“This is Minecraft,” he says.

Oh. I had always thought Minecraft must be another shooter game, given what I’d seen of his other favorites. Mines, blowing things up, blasting other people to pieces. Actually, the zombie shooter game that he plays looks fun, but I have no talent for these things, and my singular attempt at playing with him was met by him simply removing the controller from my hands just as I was trying to double-tap a crawler zombie and saying, “You suck. I’m sorry but you can’t play.” But that’s the way he is. He means no offense.

It’s a beautiful, sparse, cube-shaped world on the screen in front of us.

“This is my house,” he says. “I built it myself.”

It has three stories and is made out of wood. I’m impressed. It is stunning. Three-storied, spare, expansive windows, Taliesin-esqe except that he has no idea who Frank Lloyd Wright was. Probably. Or maybe he does. He surprises sometimes. The house is all form and function, except for a single tapestry on the wall. Which is also surprising. He refuses to let anyone decorate his room in any way. Art doesn’t interest me, was what he said.

“I made that,” he says now.

“Of what?”

“Wool and sticks. I dyed the wool with those flowers in the field.”

Before I can ask how, he swings away from the wall hanging and his avatar looks out the window.

“Uh-oh”, he says, “the sun is setting.” A perfect cube of sun is slowly sinking in the sky.

“There are light cycles, here”, he says, “just like in our world, but they are faster. Stay here a minute,” he says, eyes glued on the screen, “and the moon will rise.

I wait. I’m impatient today. I have midterms in a week and Abnormal Psych, which certainly shouldn’t be kicking my ass, is. I really should be working on my own things if I can’t supervise him with his schoolwork today. I have twelve credits left until I graduate at the technical college and it has been maddeningly slow with my responsibilities here but there is nothing else to be done. My mother is half dead from working night shifts and I am his sister. He will always need us, one or the other. It is as simple as that.

A glowing moon cube rises on the screen and pixelated stars twinkle. I find myself looking for familiar constellations. [End Page 141]

“If you watch closely, Caleb says, “you can see them move, because time moves faster here.” A simple piano sonata plays.

“The music is beautiful,” I say. “It’s very calming.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I like it.”

I sit back into the couch...

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