Beginnings have never been my strong suit, but endings are a wholly different matter. Conclusions. Clinchers. Final words.
So, I will start here, facing the end of one story while telling the beginning of another, hoping that beginning with an ending will make this entire story easier to tell.
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The scribblings on the page consisted of one word repeated over and over and over again. Endgame. It looked like the mad ravings of a lunatic. At the very least, they were the words of a man that was utterly absorbed in his work, like a genius artist who works fervently for days without sleep or food to finish a masterpiece.
After all, this was his masterpiece.
And it would have been nice to know if he’d lost sleep or appetite over his precious Players. Actually… I’m sure he did, but for all the wrong reasons.
I considered flipping through the rest, wondering what it contained, and it was almost like she'd read my mind. Like father, like daughter. He recorded everything since the first moment he was aware of the idea, she told me. Everything was in those notebooks.
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He loved chess. Oh, as clarification, of course he didn’t love love it. I highly doubt that he’d ever felt anything along those lines. Then again, I’m biased, but you should be too. It’s human to be biased.
He liked chess. He enjoyed the game, and he enjoyed the companionship of the one and only opponent whom he considered a challenge later on in life- I’m sure you can guess who. Himself, who else?
He’d always been dependent on experience and logic, past mistakes and rationale. So, I suppose that when it came time for him to create his own game, he simply drew in parts of what he knew. He only planned for experimentation when it came to us- because our existence as the wild cards were the whole point of things, wasn’t it? We were the pawns in a game of checkers, the checkers in a game of cards, the jokers in the game of chess.
A game of chess opens with the opening, closes with the endgame.
Everything in between is the middlegame. Only problem: that all can be only roughly defined, and there is controversy, as always, on the topic between the fanatics who care where an end begins or where a beginning ends.
