The Cube Game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cube_(game)

I must admit, I was a little prepared, not having participated in this exact game per se, but having participated in others like it, and did so with a decided agenda of creating an interesting picture, but which nonetheless led to an interesting introspective interpretation given the games parameters.


Here's the picture:

It's a desert. It's a dry, barren landscape, cracked from years without sufficient moisture, just the occasional deluge of the too-short rainy season, leaving naught but the hardest lives left to endure.

In the middle of this desert is a giant block of ice. It's shaped like a cube, but is melting in the midday sun. Leaning against the southern face of the directionally aligned cube of ice is a ladder, leading to its summit, a mere 12 feet (cubed).

There is a horse, a Palomino, drinking from the melting rivulets pouring down the eastern face.

When the storm comes, a savage sandstorm tearing in from the west, the horse is already mostly sheltered, only needing to take a few cautionary steps back, towards the north, for the cube of ice suffers the brunt of the stinging sands, marring its surface with pits and scars from the windblown erosion.

However, the storm must have blown in a seed from afar, for shortly thereafter, in the filthy hollowed pool formed by the wind and sun in the top of the cube, a seed sprouts a rose. The rose grows by sending it's roots down through the ice, causing great cracks and fissures throughout the matter that sustains it.

In the end the cube doesn't quite resemble the majesty and awe of a pure block of steaming ice in the middle of a desert as it did with the initial image; it is cracked, breaking, shrinking, and falling away, but the rose grows, and the horse drinks.

- Foster