The message nobody had written

An original fictional scene about an invented word game.

The rule was simple: we were to make a message using the words cut from an old magazine. We could not cut any more. My sister shook the envelope, and a bright little shower of promises landed on the table. Better. New. Enjoy. Under them lay a single grey although.

I reached for the largest words first. They belonged together by size, if by nothing else. My sister took although and placed it beside a picture of a kettle. “That one will be useful,” she said. I told her it would be useful if we had anything to put after it.

For a while, our messages sounded like advertisements that had forgotten what they were selling. We ordered each other to enjoy a Wednesday. We offered a new underneath. Then my sister found the word missing, folded beneath a photograph of a shoe. She set it in the middle of the table and began moving the other pieces around it.

We made the missing Wednesday first. That was almost sensible. Perhaps a calendar printer had skipped it. Then we put enjoy before missing. I disliked the result. Missing was a word for lost keys and people who ought to have come home. My sister suggested it could also mean not attending something. I thought of the long prize ceremony we had both escaped by having chickenpox. I laughed, which annoyed me because I had been explaining why she was wrong.

We did not keep that message. Nor did we put the large bright promises back at the centre. By the end, the smallest words had become difficult to spare. We needed if, and still, and the patient grey although. Our final sentence was crooked because no two pieces had the same lettering. I cannot remember it exactly. I remember that neither of us could have made it alone, and that although had stopped looking grey.

How does the writer show the narrator responding to the word game and to the sister's ideas? Support your answer with references to the passage.