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A yellow-orange plastic tray, twenty-five shapes, and a spring-loaded promise to detonate on schedule. Milton Bradley sold you a bomb and you set it off yourself, every time.

Twelve of them arranged around your head, sparkle pink and iridescent teal, holding back a wisp of hair that had already been fine. A hair accessory pretending to be a hair accessory.

Four colored quadrants, four ascending tones, and a small black disc that would happily play a sequence at you until you were an old man. Nobody ever finished Simon. Simon finished you.

Every week a new one arrived, in a cardboard sleeve with a picture of a smiling family, promising a thousand free hours of a service you were already paying for. You did not install it. You put it on the pile.

You had thirty minutes on the Apple IIe. You did not spend them learning multiplication. You spent them running from a purple troggle across a five-by-five grid of numbers, and if you got eaten it was because seven was not a multiple of four, and the whole class saw.

Six minutes past the hour, six minutes past the next hour, forever. A wall of beige text, a tri-city temperature list, and a saxophone that had never been to your area but wanted you to know your dew point anyway.