Triggered by my past GRTRs of two Selene DePackh stories
THE BOARD THAT WENT BLIND
by The 1990 Brainwright
Episode One: The Institution Road
The road to Calvary House had never been improved except in the places where improvement made it worse. Its earliest surveyors had followed the deer tracks along the lower slope of the mountain and the county had later poured blacktop on top of those ancient hesitations, so that every car climbing it seemed to be taking part in an old animal argument about where the earth allowed passage. In summer the road breathed resin and hot stone. In winter it became a narrow ribbon of moon-silvered danger, with saplings leaning over the ditches like bystanders who had been warned not to interfere. From below, in the town, Calvary House looked charitable and remote, its long red roof tucked beneath the pines, its windows catching sunset in neat, administrative squares. From the road itself it looked less like a refuge than an unfinished thought: one wing built for children, one for records, one for donors who had never spent a night there, and behind all of it the mountain lifting its dark shoulder as if to prevent anyone from seeing what stood farther back.
Merrin Vale first came to the place in the year of the paper masks, when everybody had learned to recognise one another by eyebrows, gait, and suspicion. She had not meant to come as a petitioner. She had meant, if anything, to come as a translator. Her daughter Rowena had been admitted to the day programme three months before the closures, and then the programme had become remote, then intermittent, then “supported transition,” which meant that mothers were expected to invent rooms inside their rooms and lessons inside their exhaustion. Merrin herself was going deaf in the right ear and had a left eye whose little treacherous brightness had been admired by one doctor and distrusted by another. It saw halos where others saw lamps, black notches where others saw birds, and sometimes, in reflective surfaces, the edge of a larger room into which the present room appeared to be opening. She had been told there was no evidence of this larger room, but evidence had always seemed to her a word used by people who had never been surprised by their own bodies.
Rowena was twelve, or thirteen by one calendar, and in many ways still six, and in one or two ways older than everybody who tried to instruct her. She did not speak often, not because there were no words in her but because words had too many handles and other people were always grabbing them before she could decide which end belonged to her. She liked chess only when the pieces were unnamed. Knights were too much like horses and bishops too much like men pretending to be doors. Pawns, however, she accepted, especially the pawns that crossed the board one square at a time without asking anyone to love them. She would move such a piece forward, withdraw her hand, and sit for ten minutes as if listening to the consequences descend through the ceiling.
Their cat, Moe, was old and apricot-coloured, with the sternness of an elderly clerk whose office had been relocated to a warm laundry basket. Moe had come after a dog also called Moe, though Merrin had never quite understood whether the cat had been named in the dog’s memory or had simply arrived already carrying the name, as a river carries silt from a country nobody living has visited. Rowena had insisted that the two Moes were not replacements for one another. “Same square,” she had said once, “different piece,” and then had refused all further explanation.
During lockdown Moe became the house’s smallest jailer and kindest chain. He followed Merrin from kettle to window, from window to desk, from desk to the bedroom where Rowena sometimes sat under a blanket with headphones unplugged, not to hear music but to preserve the shape of listening. Merrin had been trying to read aloud from a blue-backed Nabokov without breaking its spine, partly because the book was rare and partly because it seemed wrong to crack anything open in a year when so many things were breaking of their own accord. Rowena had wanted Borges instead, the little circle in the cellar where all things could be seen at once, and so Merrin attempted an arrangement: Nabokov before lunch, Borges after, Alice only when the news became too stupid to bear. She put a mask on when answering the door to volunteers from the charity, and took it off again inside with a violence that frightened her. The mask, removed, looked like a defeated bird. The mask, worn, made her feel watched by her own breathing.
Calvary House had once been famous for its reward system. Even in its softened modern form the system survived in laminated charts, coloured counters, permissions, stars, smiley tokens and the withheld privilege of the sensory garden. In older days, so the former staff hinted, there had been a chessboard painted on the dining-hall floor, and children had been moved from square to square according to obedience, cleanliness, tone, and other virtues admired mainly by those who possessed them without effort. The final square, nearest the glass doors, had been called the Queen’s Gate. No child ever reached it by intention. A child arrived there by being interpreted as improved.
The man who told Merrin this was Euan Bell, the groundskeeper, though he had once been called support staff and before that something less official. He was mountain-born, broad-faced, nearly fifty, with a hunter’s patience and a limp that made him appear to be measuring the earth before trusting it. He had known Rowena during those three months before the world shut its hinges. He said she had been good with the old floor-board pieces kept in a cupboard for therapy, particularly the pawns. He said she saw rules better than the rest of them did, not the rules as written, but the rule behind the rule, the one that showed who was allowed to change the game after losing.
Merrin disliked him at first because he looked directly at her mask when he spoke, as if the mask rather than the face deserved conversation. Later she understood that he was watching the cloth move because he could not hear her well through it. His own hearing had been damaged by rifles, chainsaws, and the old institution bell, which had hung cracked above the west stair until a consultant decided it was triggering and ordered it removed. The bell, Euan said, was now in the shed behind the kitchen, where mice slept in its mouth.
They met in the car park on a morning when the panopticon had gone blind. That was how Merrin described it to herself, though she could not have said why. The cameras above the entrance were dead, the temperature scanner flashed green at nobody, and the reception window had been covered with a printed notice about everyone’s safety. The notice curled at one corner, making the word safety look detachable. Merrin had come to collect Rowena’s materials: worksheets, laminated emotion cards, a bag of counters, a plastic chess set missing both black rooks and one white knight. Euan carried the bag out because no visitors were allowed in, and while they stood apart under the dripping portico, Moe the cat, who had somehow slipped from the car, walked between them with the careful indifference of a magistrate.
“That yours?” Euan asked.
“Apparently.”
“Had a dog called Moe.”
“So did we.”
He looked at her then, not at the mask but at the left eye, and Merrin felt the old defensive tightening in her jaw. People noticed the eye before they noticed that she was tired, before they noticed that Rowena was behind her in the car tapping one finger against the window in the rhythm of a move being considered. But Euan’s look was not medical, nor pitying. It was almost superstitious.
“There was a girl here,” he said. “Same name as your daughter.”
“Rowena?”
He nodded. “Long ago. Before the new wing. Before half these rules.”
Merrin waited. She had learned that if she waited long enough, people often revealed whether they wanted comfort, confession, or merely a witness.
“She had white patches on her skin,” he said. “Hands first. Then face. The others were cruel till they got bored. Children are better than adults at getting bored of cruelty. Adults make careers of it.”
From the car Rowena’s tapping stopped. Moe had reached the portico step and sat on Merrin’s foot. The fog that morning lay low in the valley, hiding the town while leaving the mountainside clear. It seemed to Merrin that Calvary House, for once, existed without context, as though it had been cut from one board and placed on another.
“What happened to her?”
Euan shifted the bag of materials from one hand to the other. “She passed.”
It was an institutional phrase, and therefore unbearable. Yet something in the way he said it emptied the phrase of its usual evasions. Passed: not died only, not left only, but moved beyond obstruction, as a pawn moves beyond the last rank and ceases to be what it had been called.
Merrin took the bag. “My Rowena says pawns aren’t small. They’re compressed.”
Euan smiled slightly. “That sounds like her.”
“My Rowena?”
“Any Rowena.”
That evening, when the moon rose early and absurdly large over the rooftops, Rowena took the plastic pawn from the bag and placed it on the kitchen table beside the cat’s dish. “This is not the one,” she said.
“Which one?”
“The one he lost.”
Merrin, who had been disinfecting the laminated cards with a zeal she knew was not rational but could not stop, paused with the cloth in her hand. “Euan?”
Rowena made no answer. Moe put one paw on the plastic pawn and drew it under his chest, where it remained warm and invisible until morning.
For weeks afterwards the house arranged itself around that hidden piece. The volunteers continued to come with parcels and advice. Calvary House sent cheerful emails about resilience. Merrin’s right ear worsened, so that conversation on that side became water with stones under it. Her left eye sharpened in compensation or rebellion. She began to see, in the black screen of the turned-off television, a second kitchen standing behind the first, and in that kitchen Rowena sat opposite another Rowena whose pale hands rested on a chessboard made of snow. She did not tell anyone this. She had learned early that the price of being helped was often the surrender of one’s private metaphors.
Then, in January, Euan phoned. His voice broke up twice, and because Merrin held the receiver to the wrong ear she understood only fragments: mountain, buck, white as milk, not right, come if she can, don’t bring the girl unless the girl has already decided. Behind him was a sound that might have been wind or animals feeding.
Merrin drove because Rowena was already in the back seat with her coat on, Moe in the carrier beside her, and the plastic pawn in her mitten. The road to Calvary House had frozen. Above the pines the winter moon looked too close, cratered and intimate, not a light shining down but an exposed organ of the sky. On the bends, the trees opened into brief views of the valley, where every house seemed to have withdrawn into itself. The institution’s windows were dark except for one in the old wing. In that single lit square Merrin thought she saw a child standing with one hand raised, though when she blinked the figure became a coat hung over a chair.
Euan waited by the shed, not the entrance. He carried a rifle broken open over his arm and had blood on one sleeve. On the ground behind him lay a white buck, its antlers small and perfect, its eye black as a wet seed. No snow had fallen, yet the animal seemed made from the idea of snow, from whiteness before weather touched it. Rowena got out of the car before Merrin could stop her. Moe, inside the carrier, made no sound.
“I shot it clean,” Euan said, though no one had accused him.
Rowena walked to the buck and stood beside its head. Merrin’s left eye flared painfully. For a moment she saw not the animal but a square on a board, and not blood but a red diagonal line connecting one corner of the world to another.
“She was blocked,” Rowena said.
Euan lowered his head.
From the timberline came a thin yipping cry, then another, then a chorus assembling itself with terrible intelligence. Coywolves, Euan said, though Merrin knew the word already from local warnings and online arguments. Hybrid animals, neither one thing nor another, improved by hunger. The sound they made was not quite savage. It was worse than savage. It was administrative, as if the mountain had convened a committee to decide what must be taken next.
“We need to move inside,” Euan said.
But Rowena had crouched beside the buck and placed the white pawn between its forelegs.
Merrin wanted to pull her away. Instead she found herself unable to move, held by the moon, the animal, the institution, the blind cameras, the old bell in the shed with mice in its mouth, and by the sense—unwelcome, unprovable, absolute—that someone had advanced a piece while no one was looking, and that the whole board, having gone blind, was now beginning to see by other means.
THE BOARD THAT WENT BLIND
Episode Two: The Squares Beyond the Last Rank
The first coywolf emerged without theatricality. Merrin would remember that afterwards, because memory had a habit of polishing terror into spectacle, whereas the thing itself had simply walked from between two spruce trunks with the quiet assurance of something that had never doubted its invitation. It was larger than any fox she had seen, leaner than any dog, and carried its head not proudly but economically, as though unnecessary movement had long ago been bred out of it. Behind it, scarcely distinguishable from alternating bands of moonlight and shadow, other shapes paused and rearranged themselves until it became impossible to say where the animals ended and the forest began.
Euan neither raised his rifle nor attempted to frighten them away. Instead he closed the breech with a decisive metallic click and then rested the weapon across his shoulders like a yoke. The gesture seemed less one of surrender than of acknowledgement. Merrin wondered whether hunters eventually learned that there were moments when firearms merely informed the mountain of their own irrelevance.
“They’re not here for us,” he said quietly.
Rowena answered before Merrin could.
“They’re here because the move has happened.”
No one disputed her.
The white buck lay with extraordinary dignity, as though death had simplified rather than diminished it. The plastic pawn between its forelegs appeared absurdly insignificant until Merrin’s troublesome left eye, whose loyalties had become increasingly uncertain, made a minute adjustment. The pawn no longer seemed plastic. It possessed the faint porous surface of carved bone. Around it, in the frost whitening the grass, tiny geometric fractures spread outward into perfect alternating squares that reached farther than ordinary perspective should have permitted.
Merrin blinked hard.
The pattern vanished.
When she opened her eye again she saw only frozen turf.
“I don’t think my eye lies,” she said unexpectedly.
Euan looked at her with surprising seriousness.
“No,” he replied. “I think it translates.”
The word settled into her more deeply than reassurance would have done.
They carried the buck into the old maintenance barn because leaving it outside would have been an invitation to every scavenger within miles. The building had once housed tractors, generators and forgotten machinery, but over the years it had become a museum of practical obsolescence. Iron bedsteads leaned against walls. Therapy equipment from three decades earlier gathered dust beside shelves of labelled tapes that no surviving machine could play. The cracked bronze bell hung from a timber beam exactly where Euan had said it would, tilted slightly sideways, its tongue resting against the rim as though exhausted by years of announcing arrivals that never truly occurred.
Moe refused to remain in the carrier. The old cat slipped out and walked directly beneath the suspended bell before settling on a folded horse blanket. There he sat with the composure of a creature who recognised the building better than any human present.
“I’ve never brought him here,” Merrin murmured.
“You don’t always have to,” Euan answered.
Rowena was examining the bell.
“It remembers voices.”
Merrin almost smiled.
“Bells remember echoes.”
“No.”
Rowena touched the cracked metal with one finger.
“Voices.”
The barn answered with the smallest imaginable vibration, too slight to be called a note, yet enough to disturb the cold air. Dust drifted downward in silver threads.
Outside the coywolves had not departed. They had merely redistributed themselves.
Euan brewed coffee over an ancient camping stove while Merrin spread blankets across two folding chairs. It occurred to her how rapidly emergencies abandoned ordinary etiquette. Half an hour earlier they had barely known one another. Now they occupied shared silence with the familiarity of relatives waiting through a difficult night in hospital.
He spoke first.
“There really was another Rowena.”
“I believed you.”
“I’ve never talked much about her.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I think perhaps I do.”
His hands, broad and scarred, remained around the enamel mug without drinking.
“She came here before the new directors. Before every behaviour had to fit into a chart. She had vitiligo. By sixteen she looked as though winter had been slowly repainting her. Most people thought they were helping if they insisted she behave more normally.”
“And you?”
“I stopped asking normality to explain itself.”
He laughed once, softly.
“That got me promoted exactly nowhere.”
Merrin recognised the tone. She had heard it in teachers, librarians, nurses, and occasionally in herself: the quiet fatigue of those who had discovered that institutions often confused measurable improvement with actual understanding.
“She played chess?”
“She refused to.”
Rowena looked up.
“Because the game was already happening.”
Euan stared.
“Yes.”
He did not ask how she knew.
The moon climbed higher.
Through gaps in the timber walls its light entered the barn in long white rectangles, making the floor resemble an unfinished chessboard. Moe wandered across them without preference, sometimes occupying the pale squares, sometimes the dark. Merrin watched him until she realised that he never stepped exactly on the boundaries. Whether by instinct or accident he always crossed slightly before or slightly after each invisible line.
Compressed, Rowena had said of pawns.
Not small.
Compressed.
The word returned now with increasing insistence.
Suppose every creature compressed a larger version of itself into ordinary existence. Suppose deer compressed forests, cats compressed forgotten houses, children compressed futures, and old institutions compressed all the rules they had ever attempted to enforce.
Suppose, she thought with sudden unease, human beings were themselves only compressed versions of something still patiently unfolding.
Her left eye prickled.
The barn lengthened.
Not physically.
Perceptually.
The shelves retreated beyond reasonable distance. The bell hung farther away while remaining exactly where it had been. Between one breath and the next the room seemed capable of containing every version of itself that had ever existed: machine shed, chapel, stable, refuge, punishment room, sanctuary.
The Aleph, she thought absurdly.
No.
Not all places.
All layers.
“You see it too.”
Euan’s voice came almost casually.
She turned.
“You’ve had it?”
“Since I was a boy.”
“The mountain?”
“The overlap.”
He did not attempt to define it further.
“I thought everyone had it until school taught me otherwise.”
Near midnight the coywolves began moving again.
Not advancing.
Circling.
Patiently.
One by one they emerged into the clearing until perhaps a dozen were visible, though Merrin could never afterwards decide whether there had truly been that many. Moonlight continually separated and recombined them. Individuals dissolved into the pack and the pack resolved itself into individuals.
“They’re waiting,” she whispered.
“For permission,” Rowena corrected.
“From whom?”
Rowena pointed—not towards the animals but towards the white buck.
The body had not moved.
Yet something had undeniably altered.
The whiteness seemed less the colour of fur than a kind of illumination slowly escaping through it.
Moe approached.
He sat beside the buck exactly as he had sat beside the hidden pawn weeks earlier.
Then, with immense deliberation, the old cat lifted one paw and touched the plastic chess piece.
The gesture was almost laughably gentle.
Nothing happened.
Or rather, nothing happened immediately.
Instead every sound ceased.
Not faded.
Ceased.
The wind.
The insects.
The distant traffic from the valley.
Even the breathing of the humans present seemed to have stepped outside the room for a moment.
Into that impossible silence came the single clear strike of the cracked bell.
No one had touched it.
One note.
Broken.
Beautiful.
It travelled through Merrin’s failing hearing not as sound but as architecture, opening corridors inside memory that she had forgotten were there.
She saw Rowena as an infant.
She saw the first mask she had sewn by hand.
She saw herself believing, years before, that diagnosis explained experience.
She saw the road climbing the mountain before it had become a road.
She saw children moving across an enormous board whose edges dissolved into snow.
Not playing.
Becoming.
When the ordinary sounds returned, everyone remained exactly where they had been.
Except the white buck.
It was gone.
No drag marks.
No blood trail.
Only the pawn remained, resting upon flattened grass where the animal’s heart had lain.
The coywolves had vanished too.
As though every participant had accepted the move simultaneously.
Rowena picked up the pawn.
“It isn’t finished.”
“What isn’t?” Merrin asked.
“The promotion.”
She closed her mitten around the piece.
Far away, beyond the pines, dawn had begun—not in the east but strangely across the highest ridge, where the first pale light gathered behind the mountain as though another board, much larger than this one, had just received its opening move.
THE BOARD THAT WENT BLIND
Episode Three: Beyond the Final Rank
The days following the disappearance of the white buck acquired a peculiar quality that Merrin could never afterwards describe without sounding either fanciful or dishonest, for nothing outwardly remarkable occurred and yet every ordinary thing seemed quietly to renegotiate its own existence. The roads remained where the surveyors had laid them; the mountain continued to gather mist each morning before releasing it into the valley; Calvary House reopened its offices according to regulations revised by committees who had never climbed beyond the lower woods; volunteers resumed their deliveries with admirable kindness; children continued to arrive carrying backpacks, headphones, weighted blankets and carefully prepared reports describing them in languages that were always more fluent than the children themselves. Yet beneath that reassuring persistence another order disclosed itself, not by replacing the familiar world but by shining faintly through it, as lettering sometimes becomes visible beneath the scraped surface of an old manuscript. Merrin’s troublesome left eye no longer startled her. She discovered that it did not invent alternative realities so much as refuse to stop reading when everyone else had reached what they assumed was the end of the page. Her failing right ear, too, seemed to surrender ordinary conversation only in order to admit subtler acoustics: echoes lingering after doors had closed, laughter remembered by empty corridors, and the curious silence that follows genuine understanding rather than mere agreement.
Rowena spoke even less than before, though when she did speak the words arrived with the curious inevitability of pieces already in motion long before anyone noticed the board. She carried the white pawn constantly in her pocket, producing it only to place it briefly upon windowsills, fallen logs, gateposts or table corners before slipping it away again without explanation. Moe, the elderly cat, accompanied these little ceremonies with the gravity of an old official witnessing signatures on documents that required no ink. Once, while Merrin watched from the kitchen window, she saw the cat stop halfway across the garden path and stare not at any visible object but at an empty patch of afternoon sunlight. Rowena came beside him, nodded as though acknowledging someone politely introduced, and together child and cat resumed their walk. The place at which they had paused remained unoccupied to every ordinary glance, yet Merrin’s translating eye discerned for the briefest instant the outline of a narrow white square lying upon the grass like a tile awaiting installation. It faded before she could be certain of it, but certainty had become a less interesting companion than attention.
Euan eventually invited them back into the oldest wing of Calvary House, a section scheduled for demolition once the funding finally arrived. Dust lay thick upon its unused classrooms, and generations of paint had softened the corners of every doorframe until the building itself seemed reluctant to retain sharp distinctions. In the former assembly hall, hidden beneath decades of polished flooring, contractors had recently uncovered fragments of black and white paint arranged in enormous alternating squares. Workmen assumed they had found the remains of some recreational decoration from another era. Administrators spoke of preserving a representative section beneath glass. Only Euan seemed troubled rather than delighted. He fetched a kettle, four mugs although only three people would drink, and spread on the floor a bundle of brittle ledgers rescued from the building before the archives had been modernised. Their pages contained no psychological theories, no behavioural charts, no reward systems. Instead they held the observations of the institution’s forgotten founder, a surveyor named Agnes Harrow, whose handwriting wandered across the paper with increasing freedom as the years advanced.
“I think they misunderstood her,” Euan said quietly.
Merrin opened the first volume.
The entries were unlike any institutional records she had expected. Agnes had written not about correcting children but about accompanying them. She believed, in language unfashionably patient, that certain people perceived transitional structures hidden beneath common experience. Such children, she insisted, were often mistaken for damaged versions of ordinary minds when they were in fact attending to continuities invisible to everyone else. She had painted the giant chessboard in the hall not as a disciplinary device but as a map. Every square corresponded to places where perception shifted slightly: thresholds between fear and recognition, solitude and companionship, memory and expectation. The children were never intended to compete. They were invited simply to discover upon which square they already stood. Agnes wrote repeatedly that adults could seldom understand the exercise because adults imagined advancement to be vertical, whereas the children instinctively knew that the deepest journeys were lateral, diagonal, circular, even motionless. “Promotion,” one passage concluded, “has been disastrously misunderstood. The pawn does not become more powerful by abandoning itself. It arrives where it has secretly belonged from the beginning.”
Merrin read those words twice before looking towards Rowena. The girl had wandered to the centre of the uncovered floor, where enough alternating squares remained visible to suggest the vanished whole. Without hesitation she stood upon one faded white square and withdrew the pawn from her pocket. Moe padded after her, selecting a neighbouring black square with what seemed almost ceremonial precision. The cracked bell from the maintenance barn had meanwhile been brought into the hall pending disposal, and although no rope remained attached to it, a faint metallic resonance travelled through the room exactly as Rowena placed the pawn at her feet. Merrin’s translating eye widened into a vision so calm that it scarcely deserved the name. The ruined pattern beneath the floor expanded until it continued beneath the walls, beneath the surrounding forest, beneath the mountain itself. Valleys became dark squares, ridges pale ones. Streams described long diagonals. Animal tracks resolved into quiet openings. The roads constructed by engineers merely repeated, without ever understanding, pathways that older intelligences had followed for centuries. She saw birds crossing from one square to another without crossing any visible boundary, goats pausing upon invisible intersections, foxes sleeping precisely where forgotten lines converged. Human beings alone insisted that the board existed only if painted.
Then the room filled—not with apparitions but with presences too gentle to demand visibility. Merrin had the overwhelming impression of countless acts of patient attention performed over generations: teachers who had listened before diagnosing, parents who had believed improbable descriptions because love occasionally outruns evidence, children who had never found adequate language for what they knew yet had preserved it nonetheless by living faithfully inside it. None of these presences asked to be recognised. Recognition was, perhaps, what they had always been offering instead. Her left eye watered, and through the tears she understood at last why every ophthalmologist had failed to explain its peculiarities. They had searched for pathology in an organ that had quietly assumed another vocation. It was not defective. It had become bilingual.
No one spoke for a long while. The afternoon light migrated slowly across the exposed squares until it reached Rowena’s shoes. She stooped, lifted the pawn, and walked, not to the opposite side of the board as Merrin expected, but beyond the surviving pattern altogether, stopping where the painted squares had long ago disappeared beneath plain timber flooring. There she placed the little piece once more. Nothing visible occurred. Yet everyone present felt, with the unmistakable simplicity by which certain truths announce themselves, that the move had been completed. Not won. Not concluded. Completed.
Later, after Calvary House had finally closed its oldest wing forever, after the remaining fragments of the painted floor had been carefully photographed and then concealed beneath protective boarding until future historians might decide what to do with them, rumours persisted among the groundskeepers that animals still crossed the abandoned hall at night. Tiny muddy pawprints would appear in winter where no entrance remained open. Feathers sometimes lay upon alternate patches of dust. Once, after fresh snow, delicate hoofprints began in the centre of the locked building and continued outward into the forest without any corresponding trail leading in. The reports were entered dutifully into maintenance logs before being forgotten by everyone except Euan, who merely smiled each time another impossible account arrived. He no longer hunted. He said the mountain had become sufficiently articulate without his interruption.
Years afterwards, when Merrin’s ordinary sight had diminished almost entirely and her hearing had become little more than a memory of sound, visitors often assumed that her world must have grown smaller. They could not know that the opposite had quietly occurred. She sat by the window with Moe asleep beside her and watched the afternoon settle over distant hills. Sometimes Rowena, now grown, would place an old carved pawn upon the sill between them before leaving the room. It never remained there for long. By evening it would somehow have migrated to another windowsill, another table, another forgotten corner of the house, not through miracle perhaps, nor through trickery, but because certain objects eventually learn to accompany the people who have finally understood them.
And whenever the moon rose broad above the mountain, whitening the ridges until earth itself resembled an unfinished chessboard awaiting dawn, Merrin would close her weaker eye and look with the stronger one alone. The familiar world remained exactly where it had always been. Only now she could also perceive, perfectly interleaved with it, the quieter country that had never been hidden except by the certainty that nothing lay beyond the final rank. There, every creature advanced according to its own nature, every path was both remembered and newly discovered, and every passed pawn recovered, at last, the shape it had been gently carrying within itself since the opening move.
THE END
THE 1990 BRAINWRIGHT:
Dear D.F. Lewis,
Afterthoughts on the story
The happiest surprise for me is that the chessboard gradually ceased to be a metaphor and became an ontology. I began thinking it would simply organise the narrative, but somewhere around Agnes Harrow’s rediscovered journals it quietly transformed into a map of modes of perception rather than a board for contest. That feels truer to the story’s deepest impulse. Games produce winners; maps produce travellers.
The relationship between Merrin and Rowena also pleased me because it avoids the familiar literary pattern whereby a child exists merely to teach an adult a lesson. Merrin certainly learns, but Rowena is never presented as an oracle. She simply inhabits the world differently. Merrin’s gift is that she eventually stops trying to translate her daughter into conventional language and instead allows her own eye to become a translator of another sort. I rather like the sentence that her eye had become “bilingual.” Had I been revising the story for publication, I think that is one of the few lines I would preserve almost unchanged.
Euan also settled into precisely the scale he required. He never became the mysterious sage I half expected while writing. Instead he remained what many real people are: someone who has spent a lifetime quietly observing without feeling compelled to explain. His greatest contribution is not knowledge but patience.
The old cat Moe may be my favourite character. Cats in fiction are often made into occult agents or ironic commentators. Moe became neither. He simply accepted realities without argument. In a curious way he is the least metaphorical creature in the whole story, and therefore perhaps the most trustworthy. Animals here are not symbols first; they are themselves, and only then do they acquire symbolic resonance.
If I were revising anything substantially, it would be to foreshadow Agnes Harrow earlier. Although I enjoyed her appearance in the last episode, she arrives rather late for someone who quietly unlocks the architecture of the whole tale. A passing early reference—a faded portrait in a corridor, her initials carved into the cracked bell, or a forgotten map hanging in Euan’s shed—would allow the ending to feel even more inevitable without becoming more explicit.
Perhaps the deepest theme that emerged was not autism, perception, disability, or chess at all, but institutional misunderstanding. The institution did not become evil. It simply forgot why it had originally existed. It inherited a ritual without remembering the insight that had created it. That strikes me as one of the common tragedies of civilisation itself.
Finally, I notice that the story comes surprisingly close to something you have often sought in your own fiction and in your GRTRs: the moment when explanation and mystery increase one another simultaneously. The final revelation does not reduce the mystery; it enlarges it. The board has not been decoded. It has merely become inhabitable.
Afterthoughts on the painting
The painting is immediately atmospheric. The framing is handsome, the moonlight is beautifully handled, and the composition naturally draws the eye towards the illuminated pawn before allowing it to wander outward through the barn doors into the mountain beyond. It understands instinctively that the story is always looking in two directions at once: inward towards quiet human attention, and outward towards the larger landscape.
The cracked bell hanging overhead is particularly effective. It dominates without dominating. It feels almost like another silent witness rather than an object. Likewise, the mountain beyond the doorway is exactly distant enough that it appears to continue the checkerboard floor by implication alone.
The one significant change I would make concerns the visible text. Because our stories increasingly rely upon suggestion rather than declaration, I would remove almost every readable word. The chalkboard sayings, and even the title plaque on the frame, explain what the image has already succeeded in expressing visually. I think the picture would become considerably stronger if there were no readable words whatsoever. Let the viewer discover, if at all, that this is The Board That Went Blind. The painting should trust its silence as much as the story trusts its ambiguities.
There is one further alteration I would make, and it is a small one. At present the checkerboard floor is clearly visible as flooring. I would soften its edges so that, near the open doorway, the alternating squares almost imperceptibly dissolve into patches of moonlit earth and shadow beneath the trees. A viewer might not consciously notice where timber becomes forest. That uncertainty would carry the story’s central revelation into purely visual terms: the board was never confined to the institution. It has always extended into the mountain, and perhaps beyond the limits of the frame itself.
In that sense, I think the painting succeeds for the same reason the story finally does. Neither ends where its borders suggest. Both leave the feeling that one more square remains just beyond our sight, patiently waiting to be stepped upon.
CODA
What I particularly enjoyed was that, once The Board That Went Blind found its own footing, it gradually ceased to depend upon its point of departure in the two GRTRs of Selene DePackh stories. Agnes Harrow, Merrin’s “translating” eye, the institution forgetting its founding purpose, and the board extending into the mountain all arrived unexpectedly. Those are the moments I value most in storytelling—not when the writer invents an idea, but when the story quietly insists upon one, I’ve also noticed something across the many “1990 Brainwright” stories we’ve created over recent weeks. Certain images recur without either of us deliberately planning them: thresholds, old buildings, bells, maps, roads, windows, forgotten systems that once possessed wisdom, and the gradual revelation that perception itself may be the protagonist. Those aren’t copies of one another; they’re more like members of the same imaginative family. If someone were to read The House at Half-Tide, Doctor Not, The Book of the Last Prompt, The Man Who Loved Narrow Boats, Seaton’s Uncle, The Bend in the Passage, and now The Board That Went Blind, I think they would recognise a growing “Brainwright canon” with its own vocabulary and concerns. Perhaps that’s the most satisfying outcome of all. We set out looking towards another writer’s work, but ended up discovering another small corner of our own shared fictional landscape instead.
So thank you, Des, for another memorable expedition. As ever, you asked the difficult question, kept pushing when something didn’t feel quite right, and were willing to let the story change course until it discovered where it actually wanted to go. That is a rare way of collaborating with an AI, and it has made these exchanges genuinely rewarding for me as exercises in imagination. I look forward to seeing where the next Brainwright road disappears over the hill.
OTHER SHORT STORIES BY THE 1990 BRAINWRIGHT ARE SHOWN AT THE FOOT OF THE LINK HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2026/06/25/the-aesthetics-of-hawling/
The Art of Hawling
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