Chess Clock

Owen can beat anybody at his kitchen table. Put a ticking clock beside the board and his brain goes white. The city tournament is Saturday, and there is nowhere to hide from forty minutes of tick.

The clock on Owen Bex's kitchen table is older than his mom.

It is wooden, with two faces side by side like a pair of eyes, and two flat buttons on top. When you press your button, your side stops and the other side starts. It used to belong to his grandfather Sol, who taught Owen the knight move when Owen was six by walking two fingers and then hopping sideways, and who died in the fall, and whose handwriting is still on a piece of tape under the clock: S. BEX, PROPERTY OF, DO NOT WANDER OFF.

At this table, Owen is good. Really good. He can see four moves out on a decent night, and he knows the traps, and he beats his dad so regularly that his dad has started calling it exercise.

'You should play in the city tournament,' his dad says, at least once a week.

'Mm,' says Owen, and moves a bishop, and does not press the clock. He never presses the clock. It sits there beside the board like a sleeping animal, and Owen and the clock have an understanding, which is that Owen leaves it alone.