New Flash Fiction: Pawns by Jamie Killen

Jamie Killen describes herself as a "Lady who writes stuff. Mostly creepy stuff" – and this story Pawns, of a never-ending chess tournament certainly fits the description of creepy... like a bad dream from which you never wake. As for Jamie, she's a Tuscon-based writer of sci-fi, dark fantasy and horror – and her work has been published in Mythic Delirium, Drabblecast, and Heiresses of Russ among other places. Oh yes, and she has two dogs who are named after characters Fullmetal Alchemist and Doctor Who. You can find her at  jamieskillen.wordpress.com


​​Pawns
Jamie Killen


The old man and woman play chess today, as they do every day.
           
Please try not to see their game as a metaphor. He plays his queen early, but this does not point to masculine aggression. She avoids pawn sacrifices, but it would be a mistake to read maternal instinct into those choices. If you try to divine from the outcome of the game who has the upper hand in marital conflicts, you will be missing the point entirely.
           
Instead, watch.
           
Watch the way they consult little notebooks as they move the pieces around the board.
           
Watch the odd moves each makes now and then: a rook sacrificed for no discernible purpose, a bishop sitting idly on A8. These moves could be dismissed as amateurish mistakes, except that we know these are no amateurs.
           
Watch, most of all, what they do when the game ends. It is the same every time. The defeated player tips over his or her king. Both turn to look at the brushed steel door set into the far wall. They wait for a moment; there is no hope in those eyes as they stare at the door, only the weary resolve of a very old and very necessary routine.
           
Now widen your scope. Look at the circular shape of the room, with no sharp edges or corners. Note the two plates, two spoons, two cups. The shapeless grey clothing each wears, garments that might indicate indifferent design, or perhaps a theoretical and abstract notion of the human form.
           
And if you have noticed that the one slot where their food appears and the one that takes their waste away are much too small for even a slender human to crawl through, gold star for you.
           
The question of how many possible chess games there are is a matter of some controversy. Mathematician Claude Shannon estimated the number as 10^120. Subsequent calculations arrived at something closer to 10^40. It is sometimes said that the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.
           
The important thing is this: With the first two moves, there are 400 possible games. After the two players move again, there are nearly 200,000. With the third round, there are 121,000,000. By the time each player takes their fourth move, fuck it, why bother?
           
But what other choice do they have?
           
Certainly, they will not be able to play all the possible games. Not even close. They have always known this, since her hair was chestnut and his grew thick and both of them awoke here in the room.
           
They won’t be able to play all of the games, but they might play the right one. That one correct combination of moves spoken of by their unseen captors. That promise that they have chosen to believe.
           
And that is why, even though her hair is grey and his is thin and neither remember the color of the sky, they set up the board again.