Is that checkmate, Daddy?
The Little Lady wriggled and wiggled and jiggled on her chair excitedly as her gaze flicked back and forth between me and the chessboard placed between us.
A contemptuous Jabba-like chortling issued out of my face.
Checkmate. Ha, was she having a laugh? I mean, she was fucking eight-years-old. How the fuck was an eight-year-old going to checkmate me?
I mean for fuck sake. I had just watched the whole of The Queens Gambit there was no way I was getting horsed by a child at the ancient game of Kings.
I examined the board to see what absolutely bilge my beautiful young daughter was talking. No doubt she had secreted a fucking unicorn or something onto the board and it was waterbending or some such tosh.
We had been playing non-stop for a couple of months. Someone had mentioned it in her school and she had asked me to teach her.
And teach her I did.
I taught her all the best styles of play. Dragon-Style, Flowing River, you name it, I showed her it. I showed her moves of devastating simplicity and beauty that would bring an opponent to their knees offering their own heart out on bloody loser hands after having torn it from their very own chest.
She had taken to it like a duck to water, insisting on at least a game daily. After the first couple of weeks, she had actually begun playing like a sentient organism and not like a squid flobbing about in a pan of hot water.
She was never going to beat me though. My brain was like a supercomputer with quantum lava spurting through its many crevices.
I didn't want her to lose heart though so I went relatively easy on her when playing and tried my best to keep the winning celebrations down to under a couple of minutes at the end of each game.
Something was wrong though.
I frowned portentously then twitched as a frisson of something that could have been described as fear riffled through my chest.
This wasn't right? I examined the board before me, there was no unicorn. Instead, her Castle was in the row immediately before my king and her queen had sailed in like an old wooden prostitute to grab me in what looked, at least on the surface, Checkmate.
I stifled down one of those burpy shits you get when genuinely terrified.
NO.
The word shouted in my mind.
I mean, just no? I was a ninja at this game. I was so ninja I was practically shitting smoke bombs and throwing stars.
I threw my head back and laughed in nervous horror at this thing that my daughter had become.
It is, Daddy. Isn't it? It's checkmate?
I looked at the board again. Yup, it was fucking checkmate. The little bastard had stabbed me in the back by fucking winning. How dare she?
I pondered my options.
I could graciously and magnanimously accept defeat.
I could shout that there was a massive fox in the garden and when everybody got up to look, tip the board up and mess up all the pieces?
I could look for an excuse, like the laptop that open to my left with the homepage of https://cubdefi.com/ open showing my little cubs plopping out of the ether and into my wallet.
I could claim the mighty Sunday hangover had clouded my thinking and that the beer was to blame?
I took a deep breath.
The Little Lady looked up at me, her eyes gleaming with happiness and excitement.
My decision was made, I would be magnanimous in defeat. It was only fair.
Just then, to my utter astonishment, a massive fox ran into the garden...