fbpx

Middlegame

Her daughter, my daughter, our daughter

Nathaniel Donnett, Untitled. 2018, plastic, duct tape, digital photos. 53 × 63". Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art.

It was a careless, not even reckless but simply unguarded move, not in the least like her. She was never unguarded in her play. I studied my daughter’s face, observed her brown-eyed focus, recognized it, having seen and marveled at her intensity so many times before. Her gaze was bright, aureate, penetrating, yet this unmindful move seemed somehow important. Easily, clearly a mistake of inattention, one that I would have made over and again, but it was sufficiently uncharacteristic for her that I actually asked if she was certain about making the move. It had been a couple of years since I had put to her such a question and she was puzzled by it, or at least mildly indignant. She watched as I captured her knight with a hardly difficult-to-spot bishop.

“I didn’t see that,” she said.

“Clearly.” I held her captured knight in my palm, not wanting to amplify the event by placing it on the table. “Not like you.” She had for a year been a better, much better, chess player than I was. “Anyone can miss something. Take me, for example. I employ such nescience as a tactic.”

She didn’t look up from the board.

“Are you OK?”

“I think so,” she said. She glanced at me, gave the board another steady look, and then resigned, removing her king rather than toppling him, as was her custom. “What the hell is nescience?”

“Tossed it out there just for you.”

“Nice word.”

“Glad you like it.”

More from Issue 37

Issue 37 Transmission
Epilogue for a Way of Life
Issue 37 Transmission

The pandemic had lifted up the rotting log of philosophy, and the philosophers were wriggling about in the sunlight.

Issue 37 Transmission
Living Inside
Issue 37 Transmission

A family member’s loved one inside has written, My greatest fear is that I will die in prison.

Issue 37 Transmission

Bloomberg, after this debate, was neither loved nor feared. That left the third thing.

Issue 37 Transmission

Bush’s decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan were obviously the most consequential of his presidency, but the decision to…

Issue 37 Transmission
Coronavirus and Chronopolitics
Issue 37 Transmission

Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”

Issue 37 Transmission
Ground Zero
Issue 37 Transmission
Misery
Issue 37 Transmission
The Dead Live Longer
Issue 37 Transmission

Fucking society!

Issue 37 Transmission

A whole generation has grown up with restrictions on their lives defined by Israel, yet many have never seen an Israeli.

Issue 37 Transmission
The Bad Feature
Issue 37 Transmission

But solidarity also had the power, dramatic if fleeting, to blur other lines of division.

Issue 37 Transmission