A quiet room, a spinning wheel

We were all sitting there, the conversation having run its course. The quiet was starting to feel heavy, the kind where everyone is just looking at their hands. I remembered the wheel app on my phone, the one we’d used once before for something else entirely.

The spin that changed the air

I pulled it up and said we should just spin for a game. No big plan, just a tap. The wheel whirred with a soft digital sound, the options a blur of color. Everyone leaned in a little, just to see.It landed on ‘Charades with a Twist’. No one was quite sure what the twist was, but that was the point. My uncle shrugged and said, ‘Well, I guess I’m a twisty giraffe now,’ and stood up with an exaggerated stretch.

When the laughter finally came

He was trying to act out ‘skyscraper’ but looked more like a tree in a hurricane. We were throwing out wild guesses, none of them right, but it didn’t matter. The trying was the whole thing.Then my niece, who’s usually so quiet, shouted ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa!’ and mimicked the tilt perfectly. It was so unexpected and spot-on that the room just erupted. It wasn’t a polite chuckle; it was that deep, shared belly laugh that leaves you wiping your eyes.The silence after that was different. It was comfortable, filled with the echoes of that moment. We just kept playing, the wheel deciding our fate every few minutes.

What the wheel held

It was never about the game itself, really. It was the permission to be a little ridiculous, handed to us by a random spin.