Work Text:
White moves first.
Pawn to F3.
Belly is standing in line at the bakery with the second best muffins in the world. She’s staring at her ticket number, 271.
She wonders if when the roll of tickets gets replaced, whether the numbers keep climbing up, getting larger and larger up into the millions, the hundred millions, or if they reset.
Wonders if ten years from now a girl standing in this very shop will be holding ticket number seven million three hundred thousand and something. Wonders if the girl will have someone she loves standing next to her and wonders if that person will love her for an amount of time greater than her ticket number.
She comes back the next day. Her ticket number is 5.
Queen to H4.
Check.
***
White attempts to block.
Pawn to G3.
Sometimes Belly looks in the mirror and sees a stranger staring back at her. Then she blinks and she recognizes herself again.
Sometimes she thinks about pressing her fingertips against the cool surface until it ripples under her touch and she can cross to the other side like Alice did. Belly through the looking glass. She’d be Isabel on the other side.
Everything would be opposite. Right is left and left is right and right is wrong and wrong is right and she could finally make all the right decisions.
She never wants to go to Wonderland though. She’s afraid that the second she sets foot into the Queen of Hearts court and the Queen hears her story, it’ll be off with her head.
If she’s being honest though, what she’s truly afraid of, in the dark secret recesses of herself, is that after hearing her story, the Queen of Hearts will abdicate the throne to her.
Queen to G3.
Check.
***
White attempts to escape check.
King to E2.
Belly has solved the paradox of Theseus’s ship.
She’s not saying that she’s more intelligent than the collective efforts of the greatest minds in philosophy, but unless there’s a glaring fallacy in her logic she somehow missed, she’s fairly certain she solved it. She doesn’t want a Nobel Prize for her discovery, just a properly functioning ship, but a Nobel Prize would be much more forthcoming than the latter option.
It goes like this. She’s pulled up and discarded and replaced every single last plank of wood on her ship over and over and over and over. But it’s still the same ship, still broken.
She knows this because the gentle depths of the ocean always seep in through the cracks in the wood, steering her off course. She wonders if Aristotle would’ve known how to fix her broken ship because she sure as hell hasn’t been able to figure out how to.
Every time she tries to set sail for home, her ship unwaveringly points to the west, to the one place she knows she’ll never be welcome again.
Knight to D4.
Check.
***
White steps forward.
King to E3.
The many worlds interpretation postulates subatomic particles existing in every possible state at once, causing the universe to split into a separate branch for each and every one of these possible states. This branching therefore leads to an endless number of parallel universes that never come into contact with one another.
There’s no way for a subatomic particle to make the wrong decision because every time there’s a split in the road it gets to walk down both paths, every possible path in fact.
Even though it’s entirely theoretical, Belly still feels a visceral disdain for anyone who opposes this theory of quantum physics.
Who fucking cares if there’s no proof of parallel universes and that you can never see them? What kind of immense hubris does someone have to be in possession of to deem that just because they can’t feel something is real, it simply doesn’t exist.
Who made them grand fucking arbiters of the universe. You can’t feel the earth spinning on the axis, but it undeniably does. Not everything is about you, god.
Do people not crave the belief in those parallel universes that are perpetually out of reach the way that she does? She doesn’t even care if there’s never any proof of these worlds’ existence, just the thought that they’re out there somewhere, tucked safely in a hidden pocket of the universe is enough to bring her a fleeting wave of solace.Things have always been safer tucked away in the hills of her imagination.
Hundreds and thousands and millions of universes where things shine a little differently. Schrödinger’s cat dead in one universe but alive in a parallel one. Except she doesn’t care about a theoretical fucking cat she has real shit to worry about. A particle goes right instead of left, a coin lands on heads instead of tails, she said no instead of yes.
An endless parade of parallel what ifs marching along to the tired beat of her heart.
What if?
What if?
What if?
Just because you can’t see something, feel something, know something concretely and without a doubt, doesn’t mean it’s not real. She should know that better than anyone.
Queen to F4.
Check.
***
White continues on.
King to D3.
In an ideal world, in a vacuum, a football would spiral in a perfect parabolic arc when thrown. But there’s outside factors affecting the path of the ball in the real world, and that subsequently affect the shape of the path the ball takes.
In Belly’s ideal world, the ball would arc in a perfect parabola and stay at the apex of its trajectory forever, just hanging there on top of the world, suspended in the air while gravity took a break for a couple decades to go sip lemonade on the beach.
If she could bend the laws of physics through the sheer force of will she would, but as it stands she has to get her head out of the clouds and plant her feet back on the ground.
It’s the real world, and the inescapable force gravity drags everything down eventually.
Pawn to B6.
Check.
***
White moves further inward.
King to C4.
Every time Belly passes by an airport she feels a sharp wave of melancholy for the motionless suffering of the grounded planes sitting there in the lot. Every other vehicle of transportation gets to be parked in their natural domain.
Cars settled on the street, trains resting on the tracks, boats moored in the ocean. But planes are confined to the unfamiliar stretch of asphalt, their steel and iron gradually deteriorating as they long for the sharp kiss of the wind to soothe their wings.
Belly thinks that if she were allowed to rearrange the universe, she would hang all the planes at rest in the sky on rainbow strings. Then everything could be where it belonged.
Well, almost everything.
Knight to F6.
Check.
***
White attempts to escape.
King to D5.
In chess there’s a maneuver called castling, wherein a player can switch the positions of their king and rook. It’s a peculiar move in the sense that castling is the sole move in chess where you can move two pieces simultaneously during one turn.
Of course there’s a string of rules surrounding this, specific circumstances of when you could do it and the slightly differing ways of how you can do it. Neither the rook nor the king has been previously moved, kingside castling compared to queenside castling, it’s all semantics.
The most crucial thing to keep in mind though, is that you can only castle once. You can only switch the pieces once, and then you have to live with your choice for the rest of the game. Choose once, choose well.
Belly never castles on the rare occasions she plays chess.
Queenside castle. King to C8 and Rook to D8.
Check.
***
White returns to its path.
King to C4.
She’s playing Scrabble with Steven and laughter is bubbling in her throat as her brother passionately monologues on the elucidation of unacceptable laziness juxtaposed with careful brilliance.
She had placed an “s” at the end of his “till” which had apparently been enough to set him off. He’s been on his tirade for long enough that her side is starting to ache from how hard she’s laughing, but Steven still shows no sign of running out of steam anytime soon.
She thinks if he had his own late night talk show he wouldn’t even reach a cool ten viewers but that it’d be okay and he wouldn’t really mind because he gets off on the sound of his own voice. She would still tune in every evening though, unfortunately. Her mom would as well, that’s two listeners.
Three listeners.
The laughter abruptly sours almost imperceptibly in her throat when she is reminded of the fact that she could have placed her letter in the front instead, to get double points with the word “still.”
Pawn to D5.
Check.
***
White captures.
Pawn to D5.
There are no polar bears in the South Pole.
If you wanted to see polar bears, you would have to visit the North Pole. Yeah sure, you could also see them in the zoo, but to really truly see them, it’s the North Pole or nothing.
Belly sometimes thinks about how if you used a compass and started walking North you wouldn’t reach the polar bears.
See, magnetic North is different than true North, and the compass would direct you towards the earths magnetic North Pole which is located near the geographic South Pole. You would end up in the Arctic, clutching your compass as you look out at the sea of penguins with not a polar bears in sight.
Belly thinks it’s unsettling how something that can seem so unquestionably right on the surface could be so deceptive, so fundamentally flawed.
Rook to D5.
Check.
***
White captures.
King to D5.
There was a mathematician, Erasthotenes, who calculated the circumference of the earth to a remarkable degree of accuracy through a geometrical analysis of the shadows of sticks cast by the sun in two different cities.
Belly understands measuring things in terms of the sun. She used to do that instinctively for years, comparing everything to the shadows cast by the brightest spot in her solar system.
Only her sun didn’t have a radius of 696,000 kilometers but was rather 185.42 centimeters tall.
Bishop to E6.
Check.
***
White escapes.
King to C6.
Belly thinks people don’t have enough empathy for Icarus.
That’s okay though, she feels sorry that they’ve never loved something as beautifully dangerous and untouchable as the sun in that all consuming and irretrievable way. They don’t know how fireworks blossom across every fiber, every atom of your being, how everything is blindingly dazzlingly radiant and how anything and everything feels possible in the wake of its incandescent blaze.
It’s a beautiful burning tragedy. Icarus realized his limits too late. Belly realized that the sun loved her back too late.
Bishop to D7.
Check.
***
White moves toward the edge.
King to B7.
There’s this phenomenon called quantum entanglement that Belly read about in a dog eared book left on a table in a summer house by the ocean. It’s when two particles interact and become inextricably linked, bound together forever, entangled. When one particle assumes a certain state, the other does as well, instantaneously, across galaxies, across millions of kilometers, across the east coast to the west coast.
Sometimes she’ll be walking down the street or drying the dishes and she’ll feel a tug in her chest and wonder if this same feeling is being mirrored right at this very moment. A skip of her heartbeat, a shiver down her spine, an ache beneath her ribs, a catch in her breath, impossible, inexplicable, unless you believed in the invisible perpetual force tethering her to the opposite coast.
It’s the only piece she really has left of him.
There’s one brilliantly clear afternoon near the middle of June when she feels a warm spark in her chest. It burns like it’s trying to eclipse the sun. She pulls out her phone and quickly checks, she thought it might be when she felt the strength of that tug, today is the day that he graduates from Stanford.
She musters all the pride, all the affection, all the bright beautiful feelings that are brimming out of her, and hopes it makes the spark in his chest burn bright enough to light a two hundred and seventy one hour long firework show. She thinks that if she took all the atoms from every molecule of water from every wave from the Pacific to the Atlantic, it still wouldn’t be enough to spell out everything she never said.
She knows she could just call him and spend minute and minute stumbling over her words, send him a text full of exclamation points and strings of emojis, even write an email that’ll quietly and slot itself into his inbox.
But she also knows that entangled particles always feel what the other feels, inexplicably, instantaneously. She still feels the warm glow lingering in her chest, flowing gently like waves saying hello to the sand before returning back to the sea where they came from.
She thinks maybe they’ll always be entangled and that’s the most she’ll ever get. She wonders if the heartache she’s been dragging around for the past few years of her life has been entirely hers, or whether she’s sharing his as well.
Is it cruel of her to hope that he gets all the air crushed out of his lungs on a Tuesday waiting for the crosswalk signal because the jogger next to him is wearing the same perfume she always did?
This is the only thing she’ll ever share with him from now until their atoms flutter back into the pulse of the universe.
Bishop to C8.
Check.
***
White retreats into a corner.
King to A8.
It’s a sunny April morning and the sky is cerulean blue and littered with cumulus clouds with a sprinkle of cirrus. Belly walks into the bakery with the world’s second best muffins.
Her ticket number is 53.
Bishop to B7.
Check.
***
The white king is trapped between A8 and B7 whilst the black bishop cycles between C8 and B7. There is no checkmate.