Smiling Back at Me

Tucked away in a box of odds and ends, I found a lost photograph of me as a baby.  It was just a picture of me in a blue jumper, half smiling with my head resting on a pillow.  My name and age were scrawled on the back in smudged pencil.  I showed the picture to my wife.  She could hardly believe that it was me, although there was something that she recognized about the eyes.  She was so taken with this photograph, she commissioned a full-sized portrait of it painted.  She hung the portrait over the fireplace.  For the rest of my life, I had to see it hanging there, smiling back at me, every time I walked into the room.  I got so tired of it.

The Book Store

I was waking down the street in an abandoned quarter of the city.  It was late at night.  I huddled against the rain in my brown coat, dodging the puddles scattered along the pavement.  I walked with my head down, emersed in a sense of despondency engendered by the coldness of the rain, the shabbiness of my coat, the murkiness of the puddles, and the forsaken emptiness of the buildings around me.  I came to a spot where one of the streetlamps was burned out, leaving a pool of darkness along the front of one the buildings.  I was curious about what was there.  I had a flashlight in the pocket of my coat, and I pulled it out and tapped it against the palm of my hand a few times to get it to work.

As the beam played off the walls in that dark space, I saw that it was an old book store.  The windows were broken, and the shelves and the displays had all been cleaned out and overturned.  There was no front door, just a cracked doorframe.  So I crept into the store, feeling my way with the flashlight beam.  Glass and splintered wood crunched under my feet.  I could hear soft, lonely drips of rain falling from the weak spots in the roof.  I traced the flashlight beam along the wall, and I found a single shelf, hanging crooked and nearly collapsing, that still held a few paperback books.  The covers were tattered and the spines were broken in white bands from long use.  But I saw a few books that I had been looking for for years.  I pulled one with a brown cover down off the shelf.  I flipped through the pages, illuminating the text with my flashlight.

As I stood there, getting lost in random passages and nearly forgetting where I was, there was a sudden snap and a low, groaning hum, as though someone had just powered up a generator.  Dim lights faded on around me from the corners of the store.  People, in coats even shabbier than my own, began to crawl out from different nooks and recesses in the walls, some of them knocking over shelves that were blocking their way.  I swept the beam of my flashlight across their faces.  They all squinted in the harsh glare, unaccustomed to the brightness.  They were curious about the book in my hand and the other books still on the shelves.  It was as if they hadn't known the books were still there until I had come along and shed some light on them.

I handed out the remaining volumes at random, trying to explain what the books were about, what stories and ideas they contained, offering reviews and recommendations of a few spare sentences.  The people just held the books in their hands like they were life-giving portions of bread, feeling their weight and substance, staring at the illustrations on the covers, not really heeding anything I was telling them.  But they had the books.  That was something.  They clutched them fiercely and they nodded vigorously as they receded back into their holes.  The lights went out as the last of them pulled a bookshelf back over the entrance to their lair, as though tucking themselves under a blanket.  I was left there in the darkness to find my way out with the beam of my flashlight, still holding the two books that I had kept for myself.

Picture Perfect

I woke up in a dark hotel room.  I grumbled my way out of bed, and I pulled back the curtains to let in some light.  Rising before me, I saw two towering buildings randomly lit by various windows.  It was just a pair of high-rise office buildings, straight-edged and squared at the top, but they looked so clean and clear against the deep blue backdrop of the sky.  I wanted to take a picture of it.  I grabbed my camera off the table, and I took a few steps back to get everything into frame.  But then I realized that there would be a glare off the window, and that it would ruin the photo.  I had to go outside and take the picture out in the open air.

The lobby doors of the hotel opened onto a narrow street with walls rising on either side.  Down at the far end of the street, in the distance to the East, I saw a conglomeration of buildings that looked like a city made of white crystal set against stratus clouds and pastel skies.  This was an even more incredible sight than the pair of office buildings.  I needed to get a picture of this too.  I ran down to the end of the street, so that I could get a nice, unobstructed view of it in the open.  But as I came to the corner, I was met by the glaring sun rising over the edge of the land.  I knew this would wash out my picture entirely, completely outshining the soft colors.

So I tried to find my original subject again.  I made my way through the streets, looking over the pedestrians' heads and keeping my camera poised for the right moment.  But I couldn't find those same buildings.  I saw plenty of other buildings.  I saw all the morning bustle of the city, the congested traffic and the crowded sidewalks.  I elbowed my way through, turning corners at random.  But something had changed.  The light had shifted.  The magic had passed.

Queen's Gambit

I was wandering through a dense forest where shafts of morning light occasionally broke through the trees, and as I came to an open clearing I saw a white castle high up on the hill.  There was a procession of knights and horses and banners coming down the hill from the castle, and there was a princess with blonde hair and a long purple gown at the head of the procession.  From the other direction, a crowd of common men were approaching, an unruly mass of burlap and black leather.  They met in the middle of the field, as though for a duel, and they stood waiting as an old white-haired man, the personal attendant to the princess, scuttled out from the procession and set up a table and a chessboard in the space between them.  As the attendant laid out the board and the pieces, the princess stared with a cold and haughty expression, as though holding eye contact with every man in the crowd.

The princess was an extremely skilled chess player, and it had been ordained that a man would have to beat her in a game of chess before he could ask for her hand in marriage.  No one had decided on this stipulation; it was simply the way that it had to be.  Certainly neither her mother nor her father had wanted it this way.  They wouldn't have wanted any unnecessary obstacles in the way of their daughter's happiness or their kingdom's stability.  And the princess herself hadn't asked for this stipulation either.  In fact, it was quite clear from the way that she took her seat at her side of the chessboard, pouting and petulantly shooing away the attendant that kept fussing over her, that she resented the whole arrangement.

 However, despite her resentment, she could not throw a match out of disinterest or from an inclination to let one of her suitors win.  They had to beat her fairly and honestly.  This was either part of the stipulation or it was simply due to the fact that the princess was such a naturally skilled player that she was incapable of not seeing through the game to unravel the most brilliant strategies and calculate the most complex moves with the meer flick of a piece.  In either event, it was clear, as the day wore on and one opponent after another was dismissed from the table in defeat, that she was growing impatient with the whole ordeal.  She lounged sideways in her chair, not even facing the board and barely bothering to look at it, making her moves with the thought of a moment and rolling her eyes.  And yet, she won match after match.  If she could have thrown a game, she would have, just to be done with it.

A variety of men came to take their place on the opposite side of the board.  They came with a variety of attitudes and demeanors. Some scratched their heads, bewildered by the game, and they stared at the board with their mouths open, shocked and crestfallen when the princess eliminated them with four or five easy moves.  Others came smirking, sly and cocky.  They would make their moves and then sit back with arms folded, holding their gaze steady on the princess.  They tried to sneak their pieces around her.  They would lay subtle traps.  She flicked aside their pawns and rooks and bishops like they were clothes pins.  They blinked at the board in disbelief before the attendant ushered them away.  Then there were the older men in the crowd, the ones who had studied with the greatest grand masters in the realm.  They pushed their way to the front, eager to display their skills before their peers.  The princess laughed out loud at every one of them and she sighed impatiently as she countered all of their obvious textbook maneuvers.

The crowd thinned as more and more men left in defeat until, finally, there was just one man left.  He had blonde hair, much the same shade as the princess herself.  He took his place at the board with with a simple, openhearted expression on his face.  He gave the princess a bright, warm smile and then he bent to scrutinize the pieces laid out before him.  The princess cast a knowing look at her attendant and shook her head.  But after the man survived the opening exchanges and matched her ploys move for move, she began to sit up straighter.  She turned to face the board.  She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing in on her pieces, plotting her moves.  And from time to time, she looked up at the man across from her, studying him as well.

With the crowd gone and only the players and the procession remaining, it was quiet on the field.  Bees buzzed among the scattered wildflowers that had sprouted up here and there in the grass.  The knights in their armor had dismounted and they stretched lazily on the ground, while their horses occasionally knickered and swung their heads.  The banners stirred in the breeze.  The attendant tapped the princess on the shoulder and hesitantly broached the subject of taking a break for tea.  The princess just glared at him until he finally nodded and slunk away.

The game went on with long pauses between moves, as pieces both white and black fell from the board one by one.  It was the princess plying her strategies now, probing for weaknesses, trying to get an angle on her opponent.  The blonde-haired man matched each of her moves easily, as though he had anticipated them, as though he knew her heart and her mind.  Something like hope, maybe even love, stirred in her eyes as she gazed across the table at him.  She placed her knight and he slid his rook out of harm.  She maneuvered her bishop and he blocked her play with a pawn.  She made a fatal mistake with her queen and she gasped as he plucked it from the board.  She looked at her remaining pieces, struggling to formulate a defense.  Her pulse quickened.  He had the advantage.  There was an actual chance that he might win.

But then he made the wrong move at the wrong moment and he left his king vulnerable.  She saw it immediately.  She didn't want to see it, but she couldn't help but see it.  Tears formed in her eyes as she moved her piece into position and whispered under her breath, "Checkmate."  He shook his head in denial.  His fingers flexed over the board.  There had to be a move!  There had to be something!  It couldn't be over just like that!  But it was.  She was right.  The tear rolled down her cheek as the attendant came and took her from the table.  I saw her look back one last time as the procession started away, and then the horses and banners streamed back up the hill to the castle and out of sight.  And the blonde-haired man was left alone on the field, sitting before the chessboard, wondering how he'd lost it all.