None of us could wait for the pieces of our new chess set to come to life. Such a beautiful set: the pieces were Staunton of course, but overlarge and heavy, carved out of marble, the white striped with black and the black with white, in a yin-yang gesture toward the agree-to-disagree nature of good and evil. The board was made of an eerie galvanized metal of alternating deep blue and deep green squares, the perimeter outlined with steel rivets. The board was so incongruous with the classic grandness of the pieces that one could only imagine how they would react when they came to life: if maybe they would survey this alien, inhospitable landscape for which they battled so bloodily and wonder, blankly, if it was really worth eternal war.

A set like this one simply had to come to life. I’ve personally seen pieces from even magnetic travel chess sets start spouting off about categorical imperatives and the nature of the Phallus and all sorts of Gnostic nonsense. At an airport bar, I’ve seen a deck of cards bought in a gift shop try to assemble itself into a makeshift society — the cards used the mixed nuts on the bar as their currency, and the kings went around with their ace-henchmen and taxed the bejeezus out of the proletariat, non-royalty cards (especially the clubs; they suffered the most), building up legume war chests with which to fight the other kings. That from a deck of cards! Bought at an airport! The craftsmanship, the care, the expense and weird imagination that went in to making our new chess set all but guaranteed that the pieces would soon gain desire and will and language and agency: they would live, and we would watch them.

My wife was the one who had spotted the chess set. We were mall-walking, my son Ben seat-belted into his stroller like an astronaut, when, as we walked by Kipling’s Smoke Shop, the glare of the alien chessboard caught her eye. It was 7:30AM; of course they weren’t open, but she steered Ben to the shop window and so I dutifully followed, bored at first: but once I saw the set I was as fascinated as she was. And Ben, precocious at three — already he could read almost every word of Hop on Pop — pawed at the window, imprinting ephemeral ghost-hands on it, his eyes positively swallowing the sight of the chess set. We looked at it for a long time, at first simply as admirers, but later as potential buyers, shrewdly examining it for any signs of life in those pieces. There’s nothing worse than buying a chess set that has come to life before you’ve brought it home. Let’s put aside the fact that those sets often produce insane pieces — having gone mad from their prolonged entombment in the Styrofoam packaging they often come in — because even if the set is relatively well-adjusted, it still isn’t the same. It’s the difference between adopting a cat from the animal shelter and having a kitten that was born in your home: sure, you’ve done some good by adopting the cat, but it already has habits and history and a secret vocabulary you will never have access to. But the kitten and you can grow together.

All the pieces in that set were as lifeless as the marble they were made of. And that board — so strange and, well, incomprehensible. We came back at 10:00AM, when Kipling’s opened, and paid cash for the set.

	*		*		*		*		*

We wondered whether the chess pieces would wait for Lucy to be born before coming to life, in a sort of effulgent gesture toward genesis and fecundity and the wonder of existence. The idea certainly had its charm, and we all fantasized about Mother Lucy generating Baby Lucy right in the living room, right in front of the chess set, and at the very moment of birth the pieces would run to the edge of the board and bow deeply and affectionately toward the newest member of the Matson family. In my fantasy the black and white Kings proclaim in unison, “All hail Tabitha Matson!,” with the rest of the pieces cheering, but when I tell the story to everyone else the Kings say “All hail little Lucy Matson!” Ben loves this family tale of ours; for weeks we put him to bed by elaborating on the basic outline of that story. Ben’s like that — he likes to hear stories he’s already heard over and over, mostly because he likes to add his own refinements. He suggested one night that the Kings yell “Three cheers for little Lucy Matson!” I have no idea where he learned to say “Three cheers.”

But those story times have . . . backfired a little. At least I think so. My wife disagrees; she says Ben has a kind and transcendent imagination already at three, the kind of thinking it takes ascetics and mystics all their lives to achieve. I think she’s exaggerating, and I think Ben is missing the point. But let me explain what I mean.

As I said, we had started developing a story around the quickening of our new family chess set, at first centered around the birth of the Lucy-to-be. But there was only so much elaboration we could apply to so limited a plot, only so many variations on that theme, and so we began branching out a little, telling the stories of the kings and their kingdoms, there courts and the people they ruled. The White King we named Bronson IV; he was an usurper of the throne that had been abdicated by the death of the former king who had left no heirs, Brutus the Unmarriageable, the ugliest king ever to walk the earth. The story of the White Kingdom was largely of my creation: there was Bronson’s wife, Tabitha, also known as Queen Cleaver, since she insisted on presiding over all of the kingdom’s public executions; there were the knights, Orizen and Barto, twin brothers whose father was a grizzly bear; the bishops Nave and Narthex, each who had their own church on either side of the kingdom, each whom secretly wished the other bishop who have a heart attack and die; from the pawns, which for the purposes of my story I took to mean the standing army, came all of the bawdy songs and tales of revelry and soldierly fun — of particular interest were the stories of lowly Private Pinkeye, who was always the brunt of a joke, but always seemed to come out okay in the end. For instance, one night the men hid a poisonous snake in Private Pinkeye’s sleeping roll. Now Private Pinkeye had his eye on the good wench Gruscilla, and had spent the evening trying to convince her to come join him later that evening for a little fun. Gruscilla had no intention of having anything to do with Private Pinkeye, but the good private was so deluded that he thought surely she would come that very night. And so, after he had gone to bed, when the poisonous snake slid up his leg, his side, his arm, he mistook it for the affections of Gruscilla, and when the snake bit him on the ear he took it as a love bite from his new-found love. For seven nights he went to bed and for seven night the poisonous snake slithered up to his ear and bit him: his ear grew swollen, inflamed with poison, but not very much of the snake’s poison could reach the rest of his body, where it could really hurt him. Well, on the eighth day it was Private Pinkeye’s turn to serve as the king’s taster — and of course Bronson IV’s wine had been poisoned, and of course the poison came from the very same snake in Private Pinkeye’s roll, and of course Private Pinkeye had become immune to the poison, and the king awarded him a tremendous medal for saving his life and not getting himself killed in the process, all which lit the loins of the previously aloof Gruscilla the wench.

I didn’t know what to do with the rooks. What the hell can you do with a building? They didn’t figure much into the tales of the White Kingdom.

I hadn’t meant to take the lead in developing the story of the White Kingdom, but after a while Lucille and Ben seemed to mistrust my motivations and, in a sort of coup d’état, decided that the story of the Black Kingdom was theirs to tell. “Your stories are so mean,” Lucille said to me, and added, under her voice and smiling, “and not exactly appropriate for young viewers!” And Ben, though he loved my stories, was a little on her side as well: “Why are there so many public executions?” he asked me once. One thing I like about Ben is that he has great pronunciation; there were no childish slurs or abbreviated syllables when he said the phrase “public executions.” He could be an anchorman today.

And so, after I had told a bedtime tale about the White Kingdom, Lucille and Ben (and, they insisted, little Lucy helped them too, sending in utero good vibes their way) told a story about the Black Kingdom, the happiest fucking kingdom the world has ever known. Their King and Queen, Roboman and Lucy Winchester (you can guess who named who) lived in blissful matrimony, never collected taxes — they were inexplicably limitlessly wealthy — and had ruled already for over 1,000 years: the ruler of the gods, Axiom Skyscape, thought they did such a good job that he gave them and all of their subjects virtual immortality on earth. Sometimes Axiom Skyscape came down from the heavens and — get this — stayed for dinner. I tell you, their stories were mostly a poor cover for playing House; they spent all their time talking about the dinner arrangements and hiring entertainment and getting all the food just right for their near nightly visits from the king of the gods. Their knights wore breastplates made of diamonds — the strongest substance in the world, right? — and trained the boys and girls on how to be knights; and the bishops healed the sick and gave so much money to the poor that after just one visit from a bishop they were never poor again, since the bishops handed out things like purses that always had gold in them and little wheezy kittens that constantly sneezed rubies and sapphires from their cute little noses; and the rooks were towers that were driven by a complicated system of levers and pulleys by the kingdom’s two wizards, who drove them all over town, sometimes smashing things (which they instantly fixed with a spell) but mostly just doing good and serving as comic relief. No rising action, no climax, no sobering, satisfying denouement; no beginning, no middle, and especially no end, unless you want to count Ben’s finally passing out due to exhaustion as an ending. They were very nice stories.

And they worried me. I tried talking to Lucille about it, with Ben too: “Don’t get too caught up in your story,” I said to them. “The pieces, when they come to life, they’re not going to be like the characters in your story. They’ll have their own personalities. It’s . . . well, it’s not going to be like that.”

“Oh,” Lucille said once, “I suppose they’re going to act like they do in your stories.” And Ben would agree, laughing, “Yeah, your stories!”

“No, not like mine either,” I said very evenly. “I’m just saying that living things have minds of their own, and I’m worried that you two aren’t going to like the pieces as much as the people in your story. And that’s not fair,” and I looked straight at Ben, “because they aren’t doing anything except being themselves.”

“You worry too much,” said Lucille. “We’re just excited; we just can’t wait for our chess set to come to life. Just like you.” And she hugged me from behind, and Ben put out his arms and I picked him up, and there was nothing to say after that.

	*		*		*		*		*

I only woke up fully when I heard Ben crying.

	*		*		*		*		*

Ben had found them. He must had heard them from his room, but unlike me, he didn’t sleep through it. He was excited, wanted to be the first to see them. He was, but by the time he got there it was too late. Their internecine war was over, and all he could do was take in what had happened. And cry.

Lucille might have, at other times, beaten me to the living room, but little Lucy was a lot to move around these days. She was the last to lay eyes on the chess set. “Mother of God,” she said when she came in, and pulled her robe tightly around herself.

We all of were surprised by the amount of blood these marble pieces had let. Even the rooks bled copiously: all four were still in their original positions, and all had been toppled and now stood in ruins. The pools of blood around the knights were especially large: Orizen looked as though he had his throat slit and then was drowned in his own blood, while Barto had simply been halved, his symmetrical sides each brimming with glistening innards. It looked as though all of the black pawns had been executed in the southwest corner of the board, next to one of the toppled black rooks; they had curled up like little shrimp after death, their large heads touching their bases. To the best of what we could determine, the white bishops had murdered each other — they lay atop one another, their miters broken off of their bodies. Both sides’ queens showed signs of sexual assault: a gang of dead white pawns sprawled around sprawled Lucy Winchester, white the dead black knights nuzzled next to what remained of Tabitha. Bronson IV had been flayed. Roboman had been quartered.

“Why?” asked Lucille.

“I don’t want a sister,” said Ben.

I did what I could. I said, “I’ll go get some paper towels.”