This story is a response to the Muse on Monday prompt for May 18, 2026: Write a story about a game

Grid Games

The chalked grid on the wall outside my door was two lines crossed with two more. A piece of chalk was wedged into a crack nearby.

It was a pretty obvious tic-tac-toe setup, even without the X in the upper left space. I looked around. This wasn’t the type of apartment building to have quirky graffiti like this. I’d only lived there a month, but so far on my floor I had met:

The Crone: an elderly French woman who smoked constantly and muttered under her breath in some dialect of French I had never heard before. Probably not the tic-tac-toe type.

The Lovebirds: a newlywed couple who were always hanging onto each other. They didn’t seem aware enough of the outside world to do this.

The Workaholic: I’d only seen this guy twice, but both times he was rushing out while talking on the phone. No way he did this.

Then there was the last apartment in the hall: 3E. The landlord insisted that it was occupied although he didn’t tell me who lived there. I’d never seen any signs of life from it. Still, this could have been put on the wall by anyone. My apartment was right next to the elevator, so everyone had to go past it to go in and out.

I did the only thing I could: I picked up the chalk and drew a circle in the center square. Then I went to work.

When I got back, there was an X in the lower left corner. Come on. I drew a circle in the middle left square to block and went into my apartment.

It took two days to reach the inevitable tie. The next day, however, the last square wasn’t filled in; instead, the grid was erased and replaced with a blank grid.

Sure, I’ll go first. To mix things up, I put an O in the upper middle space and went to work.

This time it took me two days to lose. I didn’t even know you could lose in tic tac toe. By the time I noticed, it was too late to stop it. When I got back after work and saw the 3 Xs with a line through them, there was also a chalk line high up on the wall on the left. 1-0.

So that’s how it is, is it? I erased the game, redrew the grid and let my friend go first.

It was weird, I actually thought of them as my friend even though I didn’t know who it was. It was the only person I’d interacted with at all in the building except the super, and he wasn’t exactly chatty. I had concluded that it must be the mystery person in 3E because I could not think who else it could be. Sure, it could be someone from another floor or even from outside, but why? It didn’t make sense.

The games went on for a week, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again and so we tied from then on. My friend’s one win went unmatched.

It felt like cheating, but I confess that I spent a not insignificant amount of time looking out my peephole to see if I could catch my friend adding his (her?) play to the latest game. I thought of setting up a camera somewhere, but that really felt underhanded.

My newest fantasy was writing Who are you? on the wall to see what they would answer. I couldn’t get up the nerve to, though. Still, my favorite parts of the day were when I left or came home. For two moments each day, I felt like I was connected to some other human being.

The next, I came out of my apartment to find that the tic-tac-toe grid was gone. In its place was a larger grid of 15 x 15 squares. There were squares that read DL, DW, TL, TW, but even without them it was clear it was a Scrabble board. In the center of the board, spelled out neatly in five squares was the word: