It began one rainy Monday when the Zookeeper and the Ice Cream Girl made their home on a lush green plain. They built a strange dwelling called a House-Pouse, hewn from red polymer, square in structure, with a flat roof and four chimneys. Architecturally, aesthetically, it was a hot mess. But the Zookeeper and the Ice Cream Girl stood proudly beside it, he wielding an oversized brush, she proffering her vanilla ice cream, and both grinning with glee.

And so the Peameny people were born. What they lacked in taste, they gained in resourcefulness, quickly erecting House-Pouses for some twenty-five families haphazardly around the glade. Then, the Simpson-skinned Peameny people emerged from their House-Pouses in a veritable cosplay of uniforms: there were train drivers, jungle explorers, office workers, pet parlour assistants; many stood with arms aloft as if praying for sun, while others lay face down on the grass, as if… well, who knows. And every Peaman sported a cheery smile, though none were as joyful as the Zookeeper and the Ice Cream Girl.

They were busy erecting further settlements, real marvels at two and three stories tall, when suddenly a great tragedy befell them. A large mass descended, scattering House-Pouses and scaring the living daylights out of the Peamen—as the boy tripped while reaching for the plastic tub and landed bottom-first on the mat, erupting into peals of tears.

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ I tutted, pulling him onto my lap and rubbing his bottom. ‘It’s okay, Pumpkin.’

After Baa-Baa Black Sheep and a bop on the nose, he was calm.

‘Right,’ I said, clambering up from the floor.

‘Where going mummy?’ he asked.

‘Making my little Pumpkin a snack, then it’s time for the Daddy Tidy.’

‘Carry!’ he cried.

‘No, baby, you—’

‘Carry!’

‘No, you don’t need…’ I said, scooping him up onto my hip. ‘How about you keep playing and I’ll make the snack?’

He buried into my neck, crying, ‘Mummy!’

I glanced back at the Peameny people, the Zookeeper and the Ice Cream Girl who beamed like astonished parents, then hobbled to the kitchen.

***

We ate when Adam got home.

‘He made a little world today,’ I said, ‘didn’t you, Pumpkin?’

‘Oh?’ Adam said.

‘He’s so imaginative. Tell daddy what the people are called.’ But he was inspecting some red pepper, so I filled in. ‘The people are Peamen and their houses are called…’

I trailed off.

‘Wow, that’s great,’ he said, looking up from his phone. ‘Sorry, it’s all kicking off about the restructure.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, as I did understand the concept of work, though now only nostalgically, vicariously.

The boy pushed away his bowl.

‘No like.’

‘It’s your favourite,’ I said.

‘No like it.’

‘Do you want something else? Cheesy pasta?’

‘Deezy basta!’ he squealed.

Adam followed me into the kitchen.

‘You’re not going to make a whole new dinner for him,’ he said.

‘It only takes five minutes.’

‘But you already made dinner: he should eat it.’                     

‘It’s fine.’

‘Seriously?’ he said. ‘You already made dinner, and you’re tired.’

The kitchen rippled.

‘I just want him to feel loved,’ I wept. ‘I want him full up on love!’

Adam didn’t answer.

I added, ‘And I need you to pick up more blocks from this woman on Facebook Marketplace. She’s selling two massive tubs for fifteen pounds.’

***

The delivery was made by stealth that night while the boy and I slept. Downstairs the next morning, after breakfast and Daddy Bye-Byes, I sat astounded among the haul. It was an unfathomable bounty: wheels, windscreens, towers, wings, propellers, levers, tracks, roads, people upon people, and blocks upon blocks. It was King Solomon’s Mine, El Dorado, the Grail.

The Zookeeper wasted no time leading the Peameny people south-east down the hallway to the kitchen-diner, then, after toasted teacakes, north-west to the lounge and up the stairs. Now, in densely populated areas, the House-Pouses grew to seven stories tall, and the Peamen congregated around them in fervent awe. Despite the bloody mess, it was impossible not to be charmed by their industriousness.

But as they paused for a tippy cup of milk, I reconsidered Peameny civilisation. As impressive as their reduplication was, they had an exceptionally narrow view of life and no imagination at all. In Peameny culture, the males explored and built, while the females stayed home and made tea. No one typified this more than the overbearing Zookeeper (who, it should be noted, had an entirely delusional occupation, as no animals yet existed) and the deferential Ice Cream Girl who smiled beside her House-Pouse, still enquiring, ‘Vanilla? Vanilla?’

Out of curiosity, I performed a cheeky little deus ex machina and popped the Ice Cream Girl into the aircraft construction site. Within minutes she was back, forcing a grin. So, this wasn’t a game; it was a prison.

***

By Wednesday, the Peamen colonised the known world. The central business district grew to forty stories high, obscuring the TV; a flotilla of boats jammed the hallway; factories lined every stair; cars parked in the cat bowl and the Drawer of Random Stuff. I found an astronaut grinning in my knicker drawer.

The Peamen weren’t only hierarchical, but cruel. When animals descended on the land in great numbers and eclectic varieties—giraffes, squirrels, polar bears, monkeys—instead of marvelling at these wonders, the Zookeeper put them in a zoo. He did so with complete surety, as if he’d known all along that such creatures would one day exist, and that it was only necessary to create the means for their imprisonment, then to wait.

But he didn’t foresee it all. With their empire so expansive, the Peamen turned on themselves. The south-east peoples, who specialised in aircraft and trains, travelled north to plunder the agricultural region and murder its farmers. The north-easterners fought back with spades and carrots, but in vain. There was one particularly brutal killing, in which a baker was executed by a kamikaze fighter plane, which nearly shocked the Peamen into ceasefire, but only nearly.

Why did the baker die?

‘Cause he stinked of pee-pee and he House-Pouse stinked of pee-pee too,’ said the boy.

‘Pee-pee? I thought they were Pea-men, like peas that you eat?’

‘Peeman dead.’

‘No, that’s not nice.’

He frowned and turned away. In that dismissal, I felt something profound, like: how should it be done then? And if you’re so smart, why haven’t you done it?

***

Disaster struck on Thursday evening.

‘Did you tidy up his world?’ I asked Adam after the boy had gone to bed.

‘His what?’

‘The world he made.’

‘I put the blocks away,’ he said.

‘He’ll be devastated. How am I going to explain that to him?’

‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Right, I’m with him all day and night, but you know he’ll be fine.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

I assessed the damage. It was total obliteration. Everyone and everything that had ever been, piled in the post-apocalyptic tub. They were calling, ‘Help us! We need change!’

I just knew, beneath the wreckage was the Ice Cream Girl, softly crying: ‘Vanilla… vanilla…’

Adam followed me into the playroom. ‘It’ll be fine. You even said it was a bloody mess!’

I pointed a finger at him.

‘You’re a—Peeman,’ I said.

His eyes narrowed.

‘I don’t know what that is.’

I jabbed him in the chest.

‘You’re the Zookeeper!’

‘Well, good.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m a zookeeper.’

‘I’m not your Ice Cream Girl.’

‘What’s up with you these days?’ he said, placing his large palms on my arms and kissing my forehead.

I brushed him off.

‘Hey, what’s the problem?’

‘The problem! The problem!’

This wasn’t how I wanted to do it.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I said. Though the line was delivered like: I’m leaving you. I want a divorce. You’re fired.

***

On Friday morning, the Peemen had a strop, then got on with a major rebuilding programme. They expanded aggressively, regaining old territories and claiming new ones with spiteful bravado, building deserts and shopping centres and freight trains across the world with manic zeal. Their wildly experimental structures were like hypnagogic hallucinations, defying logic and sense. Trains pulled icefloes; Peemen brandished cranes; camels had windscreens. A House-Pouse wasn’t a House-Pouse anymore.

What did I really make of these people? I hated them. Narcissists, fanatics, conformists. Their civilisation reeked of decadence, their culture of machismo. It was post-empire, late-capitalist; the Zookeeper’s fever dream.

The boy, his hands full, fizzed with frustrated energy.

Suddenly, you could see him through time. He was large in stature like his dad, stubbled, sporting a shirt and gilet, emerging from his car; a property surveyor or regional sales manager; an amateur rugby and squash player; a husband, father, son; and he was still going about it all as if the world were a game. And I’d be so proud of him—but for what? For chipping his own nib of diamond from the rockface? Then, over Sunday roast, I’d ask if he remembered playing Peemen that rainy spring when I was pregnant with his little brother, and he’d look at me, as I’d aged and become irrelevant, as if to say: Crazy old mum! He’d be unaware that I hadn’t always been irrelevant; no, it had begun right then, and he’d been its catalyst. He’d taken everything from me and given me everything I needed.

And here were the Peemen, consumed by hubris and hamartia, in an inescapable state of decline. They grinned vastly yet felt devastated and morose. How long could it last?

Meanwhile, I’d begun making my own little House-Pouse, a cottage with a flowerbed out front, for the Ice Cream Girl.

The boy came over.

‘Pumpkin, I’m allowed a block.’

He grabbed it, his fist inside mine.

‘It’s a greenhouse for her plants.’

‘Mine.’

‘No.’

‘Mine!’ he shouted.

‘Fine!’ I shouted back.

I let go of the block and stood up.

‘Right,’ I said.

At that moment, I felt the first swell of what they call morning sickness (in which morning lasts all day and night). My cheeks turned sour, but I held still and didn’t run to kneel at the basin.

Instead, retching a little, I grasped a tower.

I wrenched it from the earth and hurled it to the floor.

The boy made an imploded gasp.

The next tower burst up from its foundations, then plummeted in a shower of bricks and people.

Next, the library was razed. The Costa shattered to smithereens.

Animals fled.

People scattered to hide under IKEA storage solutions.

The aircraft fell from the sky, the trains exploded.

The fields were upended and crops destroyed.

The Zookeeper was crushed in a hail of boats.

I was King Kong. I was Godzilla. I was the extinction event.

And the Peemeny people smiled their awful smiles, as if they’d known this was how it must end and cherished their destruction. Their arms were raised in exaltation—Take us, Great Mama, take us now!

I was the rapture.

I stopped.

Coming back to myself, panting, I looked up. The boy stood mannequin-like, his arms slack and face frozen. Reflected in his eyes, I saw myself. My power to create, to hurt, to destroy. I was terrified and revitalised.

I cleared my throat and hoicked up my elasticated leggings.

‘Look at the time,’ I tutted. ‘Must make my little Pumpkin’s snack and then we’ve got a big Daddy Tidy.’

Before I went, I searched the debris. I picked up a little girl, transporting her from the world, giving her transcendence from the unceasing serving of vanilla ice cream, while the doomed men below grinned up at this levitating miracle. Only she and I would know her eternal resting place, on my highest wardrobe shelf, where only the most precious secrets may exist—among my grandma’s gold necklace, the tiny vial of Mum’s ashes, and my wedding shoes.

And that was the end of that game.

---

Jonny Aldridge is a writer based in northeast England. He was shortlisted for the RSL V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize 2026, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2026, and won the Europeana Creative Climate Action Award 2026. He is editor-in-chief of the Teesside literary magazine Transporter and writes the free bimonthly print newsletter ‘Writing Stories’.