Shuffleboard with Mr. Zeller

Chapter 32 of Snowbirds, a novella-in-flash by Margo Rife

Thank you for reading Snowbirds, a serialized novella-in-flash by Margo Rife. Go here to start at the beginning. You’ll find the linked table of contents here.

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Here we are, a most unlikely pair, on the concrete court overlooking the intracoastal waterway. It was my idea to teach him shuffleboard because old people love this game. All you need to do is take the wooden stick and push a disc onto one of the squares in the triangle. Somehow, Mr. Zeller has managed to make this difficult.

Instead of the normal two step approach to the baseline, he takes seven steps—really putting the shuffle in shuffleboard. With such a slow approach, his disc never makes it into the triangle area. And because he doesn’t let us alternate turns and insists on me going first, I score heavily, and his four black round discs sit below the scoring area. Even though he ends up with no points, Mr. Zeller seems pleased with his outcome.

“I don’t want to push you away,” he explains in his heavy German accent.

“But that’s the game. Planting your disc on a square, or blocking it or pushing away your competitor’s disc. Without following these basic rules, it’s not shuffleboard.”