Report Death by Scrabble

Fabio de Moor

General information

Title: Death by Scrabble
Number of pages: 4
Author: Charlie Fish
Year: 2005

Summary

On a hot Sunday afternoon, the main character is playing Scrabble with his wife. He hates his wife and he wants to live without her so he can do something he likes instead of playing Scrabble. He decides that he will kill his wife if he’s able to play the word DEATH or something similar. He also sees some insects flying around and he tells the reader that he had a cousin who died by swallowing a bee.

After playing for a while, the main character starts to notice that the words that are being played make things happen around him. For example, when he plays EXPLODES, he hears a loud noise and the air conditioning breaks down.  He then wants to use the power of the letters to get rid of his wife. While chewing on a B, which is a habit of his, he tries to think of a ‘powerful’ word he can play. That word is QUAKE. However, his wife then plays DEATH. Suddenly, the quake begins, causing the main character to swallow the B he’s chewing on and die while his wife is watching.

Characters

There’s two characters in this story: the main character and his wife. The main character is a 42-year-old man. The reader does not get to know him very well, but one thing he does tell the reader is that he hates his wife. Throughout the story, he is very angry and that is clearly visible. For instance, he says his face is twitching at one point. He is set on killing his wife, but in the end, his hate for his wife turns against him and he is the one who dies.

His wife is also a character we don’t know much about. What is clear is that she’s much more confident and relaxed than her husband. This is visible in her smug expression when rearranging her letters. Also, while her husband is suffering a lot from the heat, it doesn’t seem to bother her at all. Still, she does hate the main character in the same way he hates her. Though, she is probably much smarter than her husband and, since the first word she plays is JINXED, it is likely that she knew about the influence that the game has on the real world much longer than the main character, possibly before they even started playing. She seems to want to give her husband a fair chance to win the game, as she plays SIGNAL when it still isn’t clear to him what’s going on with the game and she plays CAUTION before she deals the final blow to him with the word DEATH.

Themes and motives

The most important theme of this story is that you shouldn’t try to do something bad to another person, because your plans will eventually turn against you. The main character wants to kill his wife, but in the end, he dies himself.

Hate and anger are important motives. As the story progresses, the main character becomes angrier and more frustrated. The hot temperature relates to this. It is already hot when the story begins, and it gets even hotter in the same way the main character’s anger grows.

Setting

The entire story is set in the living room of the two characters. This is a reason for the main character’s frustration: he feels like he’s stuck with his wife and his life.