Spark & Anvil Privacy

Ball 83 · 1983

bingo de quermesse: a June festival in a town in Brazil

The device here: nickname. Your caller: Kelly.

Ball 83. Paper flags in every colour criss-crossed over a school yard, a bonfire, and the smell of popcorn and sweet corn cake. It was the June festival, and under a tent people were playing bingo with grains of corn.

Kelly was there too, in a straw hat. The caller made every number into a little picture or a little rhyme, and the children shouted it back before he finished. “Same game, new names,” Kelly laughed. “Every place makes the numbers its own.”

“You try,” said the caller, and gave Tam the basket of balls. Tam pulled out 8 and thought hard. “A pair of glasses!” he said, and the tent cheered.

Where this comes from: The year is just the ball’s number. Bingo at church festas juninas is a living game in Brazil; no single written source, and the nicknames are our own.

Kelly’s nicknames

  • 2 — “a duck going for a swim”
  • 8 — “a pair of glasses”
  • 10 — “a stick and a hoop”
  • 15 — “half a month of June”
  • 20 — “all your fingers and all your toes”
  • 22 — “two ducks on the pond”
  • 30 — “the days the festival lasts”
  • 50 — “half of a hundred”
  • 66 — “two snails racing”
  • 88 — “two pairs of glasses”

✍️ Write your own nickname calls Next stop: loto →