The First Gift

I open Pocket God expecting the woman to have gone back to work.

She has. She stands beside the well, one hand on the rope, while the rest of the village moves in small pixel loops around her. The fields beyond them are still the color of old straw. A few green shoots remain, but most of the rows have collapsed into brown squares.

Then she looks up.

I stop with my thumb hovering over the screen. She lets go of the rope and raises one hand, palm outward. It's the same gesture she made yesterday before bowing. This time, she holds it there.

“Okay,” I say. “You did see me.”

She lowers her hand. Her head follows my thumb as I move it slowly to the left.

I know what an animation loop looks like. I have spent enough time with games to know when one is trying to look clever. This feels like a different category of clever, the sort that makes me reluctant to test it too hard.

I move my thumb toward the fields. She turns, looks at the dry rows, then points at them. A second villager follows her gaze. He says something I can't hear and gestures toward the well.

The woman nods. She points to the well, then to the nearest field, then makes a hauling motion with both hands.

The game has no subtitles. It also has no reason to give me a person who can explain her irrigation problem with gestures. I stare at the screen anyway, trying to decide whether that last motion was random. She repeats it, more emphatically, and the villager beside her picks up a clay jar.

The well has water. The fields need water. I can manage that much.

I tap the little well.

A ring ripples across its blue surface. The villager with the jar steps toward it, then stops. He looks up, apparently waiting. The woman looks up too.

“Go on,” I tell them.

They don't move.

I tap the well again, harder, as though the distinction between a soft tap and an impatient one has ever mattered to a phone game. The water ripples. The villagers remain where they are.

On the edge of the screen, the rain icon is a pale gray cloud. It looks spent. The tiny sun icon beside it is bright, but I don't know whether it's a button or decoration. I press it. The cloud doesn't change, and the sun simply rolls higher into the corner.

The woman looks toward the field again. She has stopped making the hauling gesture. A few villagers gather behind her, watching. I have apparently called a meeting and contributed nothing useful.