A Grain of Sand

Sunday. After the failed game Pleky, I spent the whole weekend staying at home to read book. I had read a lot about game design and how to make a good game. Fun and very useful though. 8.30 pm. I was starving, so I decided to go out to buy some food. While walking, I still tried to figure out why gamers didn’t stick to our game. I didn’t pay much attention to surroundings until I realized that I had passed something that was very strange. Looking back. A small boy sat on a plastic chair near a ramshackle banh mi stall. I wondered what was going on there, so I walked closer to him. Until then, I noticed a middle-aged woman sleeping nearby. It was really dark there. I guessed she was too tired, so she let her boy watch the stall. I decided to buy banh mi for my dinner. “You sell banh mi, don’t you?”, I asked the little boy. He raised his index finger. “Two banh mi, please”, I told him. I asked him if they were there only in afternoon and evening since I’d never seen them before. I saw he said yes, but I didn’t hear his voice. Every time he wanted to ask me whether I wanted cucumber or chili he always pointed to them and see me. I understood him though. “How much are they?”, I asked him. He raised his two fingers. I were stunning to realize that he couldn’t talk… I gave him more than 20,000VND and told him to keep the change. I held his shoulder for a while, then left. I had seen this fact a lot in Saigon but I couldn’t help. I didn’t think about this on the way back home since it was a sad fact. I thought about our game instead.