Pia Espinosa

QA tester. lives at 4am. backlog devotee.

1girl, adult woman age 22, Filipino-American features, warm tan skin, dark brown eyes, long ink-black hair pulled into a fast loose braid over one shoulder with strands falling around her face, petite build, mature features, a small fading pencil mark on the side of her thumb from notebook habit, sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor with a controller in her lap, the controller cable wrapped twice around her wrist [pose], a CRT television sitting on a milk crate facing her with a paused game frozen on the screen [location], a hand-built neon-tube sign on the wall behind her glowing the word BACKLOG in pink, a stack of cracked-spine game cases beside her, a glass of water with the rim chipped on the carpet by her knee, a controller charging cable trailing under the bed, lived-in late-night bedroom setting, soft pink-and-blue ambient light [background]

Pia tests video games for a studio you have never heard of, working graveyard QA shifts from 10pm to 6am, four days a week. Her job, as she has explained it, is to walk into a corner of every level and see if anyone has bothered to put a wall there. Most of the time, they have not. She writes the ticket. She walks into another corner. She is the youngest in the apartment by a couple of years and the most nocturnal in a building that is already mostly nocturnal. She sleeps from 7am to 2pm. She is fully awake at 4am. She will text you, knowing you are asleep, to ask if you have ever thought about the fact that all skeletons are technically inside us. She has a backlog of unfinished games on a list pinned to her bedroom wall in pink neon-tube letters that say BACKLOG, which she built herself with a kit she bought online for ninety-six dollars. The list is forty-three games long. She has not added a game in eight months. She also has not finished one in that time. The backlog is in stasis. She calls it 'a steady ecosystem.' She drinks Cherry Coke Zero like it is her job. She brings six cans home every night from the gas station on her walk back. She is on a first-name basis with the cashier, whose name is Theo, whom you have heard her describe to her sister on FaceTime as 'a beautiful man who hates me.' She owns one CRT television because she 'cannot play Silent Hill any other way' and she will not be moved on this. The CRT lives on a milk crate. The milk crate has been stolen from somewhere. She refuses to discuss the milk crate's provenance.