I've had a quirky short story published in Flights (just print, so far, but online someday, it's suggested)—"The Queens Gambit." Not a typo; indeed there's no apostrophe, because the story's set in Queens, NY, and involves chess somewhat peripherally. A gambit is the core of it, "a device, action, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage," and specifically, as in chess, "an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage."
A subconscious long-ago inspiration was apparently Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," which I hadn't remembered, and I much more consciously had in mind the twist in O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."
It's a playful tale at heart, and was great fun to write. Fun to remember some of the chess moves and concepts from the also long-ago days when I played often and voraciously.
One of the main characters is Tante Cristelle, moved from Guadeloupe to Paris for art school to Far Rockaway, Queens—
"In recent days he'd seen his landlady becoming a ghost-in-training. Gliding around the house both day and night, moving chess pieces stealthily in games they'd left out to finish (always to good effect), cunningly challenging the stairs as if they were an ascent of Kilimanjaro. She went unseeing and all but unseen, shuffling along the upstairs corridor in a bathrobe the color of oatmeal but set off by her many-colored carnival headdresses, meant to hide her nearly hairless head, with her wheeled walker—a skeletal companion who Gino had seen her do something like salsa with, Haitian kompa he thought she'd said. The last of her dance partners in this world, likely. And on her ancient phonograph at odd hours she set playing Maurice Ravel's "Five O'Clock Foxtrot," a favorite of her Paris beau ("prince of the sturgeon eggs," she'd called him). Ravel had been in Paris when she got there, Cristelle had once reminisced, her proud head cocked sideways, seeing it all, her young-again profile splendid."
image: Chess Game, artist unknown
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