Checkmate

It started as a chess game: cerebral and deliberate. He would get my knight with a pawn; a long moment later I would slide my bishop in position to take his queen.

    Now it is War.

    We slap our cards down together, fast and hard, swipe our wins away in a blink and then throw down again, again, again, again, pausing only to reshuffle the deck.

    This morning he barreled into the kitchen ahead of his coffee, bent on tearing me from my notebook. At the end of Scene One he seized the top of a chair I was not sitting in and his red face erupted to the breast-like dome-light above the breakfast table: “Do you hear me?”

    “Oh, yes,” I said, my scribbles coming ever faster. “Do you know how to spell ‘obstreperous’?”