Black mothers cried for their sons lost to war. Their white counterparts laughed over them while sipping away at their wine glasses in their ivory towers. The marble tiles of once royal halls were stained in the red of black soldiers and holymen. A lone skypilot said his final rites before a white man on horseback leapt over the barricade of pews, profaning the sacred temple, to cleave the clergymen’s hitherto cleft head. The war was already lost. The black battalion became erratic, their movements more and more thoughtless. There was no hope for them and they were only running out the clock, but their time was nearly up.
I’d been carrying the Bomb over my shoulders since we left our hotel and my arms were getting tired. It was a hot day and the skyscrapers' glass windows were perfectly angled to reflect the sunrays into my bare forehead. I made the mistake of wearing a sweater that I couldn’t take off due to the Bomb still clinging to my back. I knew she would protest and cry if I attempted to put her down. I tried to speak but only a rasp could escape. I licked my dry lips, catching some sweat on my upper lip, and reintroduced wetness into my system as an attempt to moisten what I could of my throat.
“Fred, hanky me.”
The middle child let go of my hand and rummaged through his cargo shorts. He withdrew a handkerchief from his back pocket and walked to stand in front of me.
“You’re too tall.”
“Gimme a sec, your sister is heavy.”
I readjusted my grip on the Bomb’s legs, she tightened her grip near my neck in response. My knees made their slow descent, a bone-cracking sound here and there. I tried my best to breathe though the small hands at my esophagus let only wheezes pass in and out. After a final readjustment to keep the Bomb up, I was low enough to face Frederick. He patted my shining forehead with the hanky. His pats went higher and higher, making me realize how much my hair had receded.
“Thank you, son.”
“Do you need me to take Bonnie?” said a concerned voice from behind me.
“I’ve got her.”
The concerned voice came from Simone, my eldest. She always offered to ease any actions that could be bad on my aging body. Last night at the hotel while they thought I was asleep, I overheard her talking with the others about how gray my hair had gotten and how veiny my hands were.
“Why do I have to walk but she gets to have piggyback rides everywhere?” asked Fred, withholding more pats until he got a suitable answer.
“You know how she is. She’s afraid of the ground.”
My blackmailer did not find that answer convincing, though it was the honest truth.
Bomibel had been afraid of the ground and didn’t talk since her mom died. It's painful to say as her father, but she’s truly had a depressingly unfortunate life—more so than her older siblings. I feel somewhat to blame; I am the one that cursed her with a unique name. My penmanship has always been bad and so my sloppy writing condemned a possibly normal Bonnibel into a lifelong pariah Bomibel. Her mother liked the mix-up so she never had us change it. Simone never called her by her name.
There was an outdoor market in session adjacent to the park we were walking through. Three stalls each carried a horde of the same stuffed animal alpaca. Two others sold artisanal bread, each with a whole truck parked on the sidewalk to carry their load of loaves. The market was a library containing all the cheap things in existence: flimsy sunglasses, kitsch souvenirs of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, knockoff handbags and belts laid on the pavement, books in the worst condition that had never been read.
Simone dragged the collective tangled mass of our interlaced arms to a man selling paintings near the threshold steps of the park. The canvasses were each about as tall as ten year old Frederick. Of the half dozen displayed, most were on the ground loosely leaning on the park’s gated fencing—with only one painting set upon an easel next to the presumed painter.
The centerpiece depicted an abstract urban landscape colored in gray, orange and gold. It had a circular movement to the piece, the rectangles that I presumed represented buildings bowed towards an invisible black hole at its center. It was the kind of painting where close up it's nothing but colors but far away it became a clearer fractured, curving cityscape. Stepping back to see the piece, however, revealed that written over the entire painting was an intelligible signature in cheap reflective gold paint. Simone had been taking her time, studying the painting from inches away—I impede her admiration of the painting by pulling her back and revealing the ruinous watermark.
“You want to buy?” said the possible painter, directed towards Simone. His shaky English had a heavy accent, his skin color already revealing that he was some kind of Latino or Hispanic. Simone responded in some short Spanish phrases in which I could only pick up “no” and “gracias.” Fred began to pull on our collective limbs, acting out the will of the rest of us, impatient with Simone's art examination. With another tug, Fred broke her out of her spell and we continued on our way, exiting the market.
“Chess grandmaster! Chess grandmaster!” an older black man at a brown-stained plastic folding table said near the subway entrance, breaking through the white noise of pedestrian chatter. We walked on, merging with the crowd, a horde feigning deafness, immune to the checkered call of homeless or downtrodden chess players. Fred grabbed my hand again and pressed against my leg. Simone grabbed Fred’s other hand.
“Come on! Man wit the cool hair. Play a game.”
Fred revealed to me that I was balding when he patted my head. Atop was nothing but wisps of gray weeds encroaching the no longer lustering black forest of hair follicles, so the man couldn't have been referring to me. Also I had a six year old hugging my head so it'd be hard to get a good look at any angle.
“Wit the cool glasses. Just one game, man. You're a man, right?”
I was wearing my transition lenses which would darken to orange with aviator-like frames. And I was a man.
“Where are you going, dad?” Simone asked as I let go of Fred’s hand and turned back towards the station.
“I’m going over to that chess player.”
“What are you doing? We don’t have time for that!”
“We’ve got plenty of time. The show’s not for another hour and a half and we can eat after if it takes too long. The subway is right next to the guy.”
“But Fred won’t want to be close to people like that,” she said, her voice getting quieter as she reached the end of her statement.
“There’s nothing to fear. It’ll be good for him and Bombom.”
I reached the table and sat down on the rusty green-brown folding chair opposite to the chess player. There were other similar setups strewn about, run by quieter men, perhaps having given up on enticing people to play that day. The man was very dark. He had crow's feet and dark spots under his brown eyes, cream cheese mingled with ashy bits falling from a cigarette, balanced on the center of his bottom lip, into his jutting, kinky gray beard. He wore an army green cap with a green, red, and yellow colored stripe surrounded by some yellow handsewn filigree and the words “Vietnam Veteran” on it. He wore a camo jacket that had holes along the sleeves; stringy bits of tattered cloth made accidental tassels at his elbows. His hands were bones with mud and dirt between the skeleton and skin instead of flesh. Black and yellow fingernails matched his checkered smile. Checkered like the pockmarked canvas playmat that served as the chessboard, whose edges reached over the table like an ill fitting tablecloth—the all too important squares having just enough solid surface to hold the enlarged plastic pieces. Next to the board was a two foot tall chess trophy with a blank plaque at its base and a cheap-looking blue chess timer with grime that looked like earwax around the edges of the buttons. On the other side of the board was a golden nameplate that read “Grandmaster Bobby.”
“I’m not that Grandmaster Bobby, but I’m just as good,” he said, and let out a coughing laugh that went “hek hek hek.” I transferred Bomibel from my back onto Simone’s sighing shoulders, her frown soon covered by the Bomb's little fingers, her furrowed brow still visible below her bangs. Fred continued to grasp her hand and stood behind her with half his face dug into her lower back. I sat in the chair, it and my joints letting out a harmonized creak.
“How many games? Five bucks for one, twenty for three.”
“Uh, let’s do one for now.” I fished a ten out of one of Fred’s pockets, not having expected to pay.
“We can do no timer for this first one, as a warm up,” Grandmaster Bobby said. “Black or white?”
“White.”
He grabbed the yellowing edges of the mat and spun it around, some pieces falling but no casualties dropping onto the New York pavement. He reset his pieces and then set mine. He went back and forth of the placement of the king and queen before lifting his hands and nodding to himself. He leaned back and rested, his arms crossed, gesturing with a hand for me to go.
My father taught me the basics of chess when I was Fred’s age. He studied a book called How To Beat Your Dad at Chess, which he never allowed me to read. Most of our games played similarly where as we whittled down our pieces, he’d either refer to the book or, rarely, he’d remember and recognise a checkmate. He’d call out the name: “This, my boy, is what they call Anastaisa’s Mate,” “this is The See-Saw,” “Korchnoi’s Maneuver.” He’d call most things Anastasia's Mate even if they were entirely something else; I think because it was the first mate described in the book. He’d always win, the book instructing him to bait me and sacrifice pieces for another impending unoriginal checkmate. I never had cared enough about our games to search up counter plays to my father, but as time went on I’d become less aggressive, as so many of his checkmates involved sacrifices that hinged on offensive plays by me. As my playstyles changed in contradiction to his textbook, we played less and less. He would still win or sometimes we’d stalemate, but the spark ran out. But from our games I knew that a knight—sometimes called a horse—can jump over pieces, and that a pawn could move out two spaces from the starting line. The basics. I moved the pawn—before my queen— out two spaces.
“You sure you wanna do that, Hair n’ Glasses?”
I noticed my mistake and moved the piece back. I advanced the king’s pawn two spaces.
“Sorry, I’m rusty.”
“Oh no worries , boy.”
The war began. While I mustered my pawns, creeping forwards in a zigzag formation, Bobby released his horses—his knights—onto the field. He was quick to respond, a smile on his face, always returning to a laid-back position after placing a piece down, letting his arms cross again or slapping a knee with an open palm. My turns were slower, my hand glued to my chin. I’d try to think ahead, how he’d finally move a bishop or rook, but I was always wrong; his horse-faced soldiers jumped back and forth from the edges of the board to the center. My frontal defense of pawns was picked off one by one. When one of my bishops finally felled a horse, the other ambushed to take revenge. Every sacrifice and trade was in his favor.
Partway through the game he started to chuckle each time he took a piece. It was a high pitched laugh that rose up like a southerner’s wee-hoop cheer then echoed into smaller, raspier chortles. I tensed my forehead before each move, hoping that contracting my skull could squeeze my brain into firing off some neurons. After a worse trade—his knight for a rook—the irksome pair of horses was vanquished, but I was still on the back foot. I made do with the leftover bishop and rook that made up my assault team, my neglected knights preoccupied as barriers and blockades against Bobby’s bishops and queen. I was only now chipping away at his plentiful company of pawns. Each attack was interspersed with entirely defense turns, maneuvering my side of the board and getting out of check. We danced back and forth, him leading, me following, him confident, me stumbling and tripping over myself.
“Checkmate,” he said, without needing to check for any possible moves out of my situation.
“There a name for that mate?” I asked, failing to move attention away from my loss.
“None that I know, Hair n’ Glasses. Just Bobby’s mate.”
“Can we go now? Bonnibel is getting fussy.” Simone asked.
“Sure, gimme a second.” I held the table, ready to lift myself out of the chair. I faced Bobby. “Thanks for the game.”
“No problem. Play again anytime.”
“Daddy lost,” addressing Bomibel while pointing at my losing board state. I sat back down.
“Actually, I can play one more game. Time chess is faster, right?”
“It better be,” Simone said, under her breath.
“I can set it so we each get a maximum of five minutes," said Bobby. "Can’t go longer than ten minutes. And that’s if both of us are slow."
“But Bonn—”
“Bomibel can sit on my lap,” I said, cutting off Simone.
Simone begrudgingly lifted the Bomb off her back and placed her on my lap, her legs perpendicular to mine so as not to have any part of her touch the creaking folding chair. I steadied her, grasping her at her hip so that she wouldn't slide off, watching her run her hands along the white pieces. I intercepted her wrist as she tried to bring her thumb to her mouth.
“Don’t put your fingers in your mouth after touching the piece. We don’t know how many people have touched them.” She pouted and crossed her arms like Bobby, though her grimace was the opposite of Bobby’s piano key smile.
Bobby dragged his mucky blue chess timer towards the board, barely changing its position, more as a gesture to get my attention and signaling that we were going to start the game.
“Lemme help you before you make your move," Bobby said. "An Indian I played wit once gave me advice about time chess. If you ain’t good enough to win, then don’t try to win. Just survive. Run out the timer." He pressed the red button on his side of the timer. As the button disappeared into the timer’s cavity and clicked, my button raised up and my time began ticking down.
I shifted Bomibel to the left, allowing my left forearm to be her backrest while I reached over my pieces with my right. I made sure to advance my king’s pawn and pressed down the timer’s button. Click. Click. In less than a second it was my turn again. Bobby’s hands moved faster than my eyes could register. I kissed Bomibel’s forehead to hide my flustered face, my fingers dancing over my back row before submitting to move a knight without much forethought. Click. Click. My turn again already. I didn’t think, I just moved. Click. Click. My hasty knight was gone. Click. Click. Click. Click.
“Just cuz we’re going fast don’t mean you don’t gotta think. Make moves that mean I gotta slow down.”
Bobby had already given me more tips than my father ever did while playing, but perhaps it was a part of his strategy. Other than his chiding laugh, he wasn’t too talkative in our first brawl. In this game, where time was precious, he spoke when I should’ve been making moves. He was in my head and the time was in my head and I felt something grasp at my face, pulling me down like gravity on an alien planet.
“Simone, can you take her back? I can’t focus while she's putting her hands on my face. Fred, could you give her a snack or something to tide her over?”
The two sighed as loud before exacting my commands. Simone held Bomibel at her front instead of in a piggyback position, and Fred spelunked into his many cargo short pockets to uncover his horde of Clif Bars. Once half a crumbling melted chocolate mint blocked little Bomb’s mouth, my focus returned.
The whole ordeal lost me a minute, a fifth of my allotted time, so I was at a disadvantage in both pieces and seconds. The middle ground was a mess, easy openings for kills on both sides, from my being careless and perhaps Bobby’s confidence that I’d overlook moves or that he was so far ahead that clumsy sacrifices meant nothing. I couldn’t help but take his bait, gobbling up any pieces he set in the sights of my bishops and rooks, if only to quickly respond and end my turns to catch up. When I saw no obvious move, I resorted to advancing my pawns with no goal other than to make it Bobby’s turn again. My pawns were met with a mirror opposite at the end of the board, killing my meek frontmen and setting off a chain reaction for his infantry to diagonally capture more and more pawns; his turns were starting to look like a game of checkers.
“Checkmate.”
“What? Where?”
My attention was focused towards the far end of the board. I craned my chin into my neck, looking at my side. It took me a second to notice the assassination plot, a clever set up of a bishop attacking through my large gaps in pawns, and the only escape route for my king was blocked by a knight's L-shaped lance. A glance at our times showed we each had more than 3 minutes we could’ve ran down.
“It was good playing wit you. That’ll be another ten bucks.”
I fished out another ten from Fred.
“I can do one more, right? Three for twenty. We’ll be quick. Let me be black.”
“First I ever heard that. Hek hek hek.”
I spun the board mat back and arranged both sets of pieces, making sure to place the king and queen in the right positions. Then I sat back. Bobby got to go first and he advanced the pawn before his right knight and clicked the timer. I was tempted to copy his move—I had always been black in the games with my father and once thought I could learn or be on an equal standing if all our moves were mirrored—but each game ended as the two games had today. My hand retreated from my right horse's onyx mane and returned to the home of my chin. My king’s pawn proceeded with the tradition of my previous first moves, two spaces ahead.
“You got some cute kids,” Bobby said as we began to play.
“Yup. Made them myself,” I deflected—was he trying to get in my head again?
“I ain’t got kids. Wanted some. Never found a woman to get wit.”
I took a pawn.
“A shame.”
He took a pawn.
“Where’s your woman at?”
I captured a knight.
“She’s not around anymore.”
“Oh sorry, man. I didn’t mean to big up nothing bad.”
He took a pawn.
“Divorce?"
We traded queens.
“Cancer.”
“Sorry, man.”
He took a knight.
“But it’s good you're not alone. Wit those kids wit you.”
I took a rook.
“Is that why you play? To not be alone?”
He took a bishop.
“Maybe. It’s good to play, man. Helps wit the brain. And I know my brain needs help. Hek hek hek.”
I took another rook.
“Oop. You done messed up.”
“What? No. Neither of us are in check.”
“That’s the problem. I can’t make a move.”
“Then what does that mean?”
“A stalemate. And you were doing alright, too. Can mess up anytime. I can’t tell you how many tourneys I lost from stalemates last second. Can’t tell cuz I never played in tourneys. Hek hek hek.”
“Wait a second, kids, just one more game. I’m close. We’ll eat after the show I promise.”
I said this into the ether. Puzzled, I tore my eyes away from the board and reacclimated to my surroundings. The busy crowds had thinned and my children were no longer behind me. I stood from the rusting chair, letting it clang to the ground as I twisted and turned in search of them. Almost tripping over the chair I just knocked over, I stumbled away from the table and back to the market. The stalls were packing up and the sky was turning from cloudy gray to a light-polluted pseudo-black.
“Simone?”
No response.
“Fred?”
Nothing.
My little girl—I wasn’t there to protect her from the ground, cold and dirty and wet. I called for my little girl. I screamed her name, over and over.
The strangers left in the square scattered in all directions—what was left of the shoddy stuffed animals fell into black puddles, knock-off handbags thudded on cement, paintings with golden signatures were abandoned.
Everyone ran from the microcosm of destruction surrounding me. My little girl went off and I was left in the wake. Alone.
—dedicated to O for beating me at chess for $30 bucks at Union Square, good game
Eli Kurland (BFA Animation, Class of 2025) is an animator, writer, and artist from Los Angeles. He has a passion for storytelling and narrative structure that he puts to work in his animations and short stories. Despite the entire premise of the story, he's not into chess—but he can still probably beat his own dad.