Chess Clock: Touch Move

Owen made it through the city tournament. Now it is States, five rounds over two days, and in round four he is sitting across from an eight-year-old whose hand is shaking exactly the way his used to.

The wooden clock has moved.

For as long as Owen Bex can remember, it lived on the kitchen table at his grandmother's house — the one with two faces side by side like a pair of eyes, and two flat buttons on top, and a strip of yellowed tape underneath with his grandfather's handwriting on it: S. BEX, PROPERTY OF, DO NOT WANDER OFF.

Since November it has lived on the shelf above Owen's desk, between a lamp and a stack of school books, and every night when he turns the lamp off, the last thing he sees is two round faces looking back at him in the dark.

'You are a clock,' he tells it, some nights. 'You are a piece of wood with springs in it. This is a completely normal thing to have a relationship with.'

He is twelve now. He goes to a club on Tuesdays in the basement of the community centre, where a man named Grigor makes him play five-minute games until his hands stop being clever, and where his rating went up two hundred and ten points over the winter. He has a folder of scoresheets. He has a tournament bag with a roll-up board in it.

What he has, mostly, is a piece of paper on the refrigerator that arrived in February, and that his mother has straightened approximately once a day since.

STATE SCHOLASTIC CHAMPIONSHIP. FIVE ROUNDS. MARCH 14–15. QUALIFIED: BEX, O.