Asimov’s, September/October 2026
Cindy, a matter-of-fact biodiversity newsletter editor living alone in the West Village, receives a cryptic text from an unknown number the night before her life changes: an invitation to Board Game Night in Bryant Park. A cascade of fours follows her all day—a wrong alarm time, a subway line running, an overheard word count—until she arrives at the park and finds three strikingly beautiful women, Ruby, Madison, and Ava, calling out for a fourth player to complete their game of Sorry! Though Cindy is plain and unglamorous next to their polish, the women fold her in warmly, marveling that her name is Cindy, just like the character in Sex and the City they call Carrie. Over the classic wooden-token version of the game, Cindy has a wonderful time, and by the end the women are inviting her to weekly Thursday dinners at an expensive Japanese restaurant, always their treat, always insisting a fourth never pays.
At first the dinners are dazzling, full of gossip and generosity, but soon come the four a.m. phone calls—one from each woman in turn, unloading anxieties about work sabotage, sibling resentment, and a boyfriend’s difficult teenage daughter. Cindy listens for hours each time, always left hollowed out and exhausted afterward, though she can’t quite explain why she keeps answering. A persistent, spider-like sensation creeps up her spine whenever something doesn’t add up: the women’s inability to say how long they’ve known each other, a slip of a name—Andrea—who turns out to have been their previous fourth, now vanished under vague explanations. Cindy begins piecing together that Ruby, Madison, and Ava are somehow interchangeable in their neediness, each insisting she alone understands Cindy while badmouthing the other two behind their backs.
The truth arrives through Ava, the most talkative and insecure of the three, who admits during a late-night call that the women are hosts to an Entity requiring three bodies to sustain itself and a fourth, uninvolved human to absorb its excess psychic energy. The Entity grants money, beauty, and glimpses of desire in exchange for servitude, and Sorry!, invented by the Parker Brothers—rumored to be an Entity themselves—serves as its recruiting portal. All Hallow’s Eve, which happens to be Cindy’s birthday and falls that year on both Board Game Night and a full moon, is described as the moment the barrier between worlds grows thin enough for the Entity’s wishes to finally manifest.
Cindy researches quietly, finds fragmented confirmation online, and arrives at the reunion early with a hidden thermos of salt and a brass handbell. Before the game can begin, she rings the bell, invokes the Parker Brothers’ own motto back at them, and declares the connection severed. The three women’s phones buzz with bad news all at once—Ruby’s partnership collapses, Madison loses the co-op, Ava’s boyfriend leaves her—and their unearthly glow fades to ordinariness. As they demand an explanation, Cindy is already texting her real best friend, Lucy, who arrives moments later in a Dorothy costume, radiant in a way Cindy has never quite noticed before, revealing that she, too, understands far more than she’s ever said.
Lois Metzger is the author of five novels for young adults, including A Trick of the Light, named an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year. She has also written two nonfiction books about the Holocaust for middle-school readers and edited five books of original stories, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies all over the world. You can find her online at loismetzger.com