The Lesson (Kindle Single)
Jesse Ball
Language: English
Pages: 137
ISBN: B015VACHY0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Vintage Short
Loring is a widow and chess master who makes her living giving chess lessons; her newest student, who might be a prodigy, bears a striking resemblance to her dead spouse. Has her chess champion husband found a final move beyond the grave?
A chess fable from the wildly inventive, immensely talented author of A Cure for Suicide and Silence Once Begun, “The Lesson” is a surprising, poignant, macabre tale of games, children, and the unknowability of the beyond. Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig, Jesse Ball’s newest is a fabulous and entertaining novella that astonishes from first move to last.
An eBook short.
next road, they turned and came along past a ridge of rock or an old stonewall, it was hard to say which it was. Then there was a long grassy rise, and there in its heart, the back of the house. Of course, they could have reached it just as well by climbing down through the trapdoor, but Loring was not much good at climbing down through trapdoors anymore, and besides, it was not the same thing—to take someone out to sit on the grass and to take someone through a trapdoor to go out and sit on the
boy? Or anything, anything at all. A Grave Is an Empty Field The next morning early, Loring woke up, ate one piece of toast with the tiniest bit of butter and jam, drank one cup of tea, and set out for the cemetery. She was getting older. She had now, in fact, outlived her husband by five years. It was not clear that she would continue living, or that she would keep her health. Yet to Loring, there was simply the ongoing process of days, the rituals she had made and kept. She loved her husband.
He had died. His body was there, in the cemetery, and so she would go there. She would. As much as she might be permitted, she would be close to him. That she was embarked on this idea, regarding the boy, quite literally the way one embarks upon the sea in a coracle, made no difference. She visited her husband in his death in the grass, and sat by the tree day in day out. She had learned the shape of the bark on the near trees. Even the clouds that came and went there, they were familiar to her,
That’s how it is. The boy came around and sat on the hearth rug. —Shall I say what I want? He really didn’t look very much like a child at all. —That’s what a bargain is, replied Loring. —Will you answer all questions? Not just chess questions? —But you are here to learn chess. The boy started to say something, then stopped. He messed around with his foot and then spoke up. —My parents would never be able to tell. They don’t really know anything about chess. —I see, said Loring. Let’s
ship. The night was early in that sea, and the waves grew worse the closer it came to dawn. If the crack could not be found…All night, Loring had this dream, repeating, and each time she strained to remember how it had ended before, but could not. When she woke, she found that she was sitting in the chair in the parlor, and facing her husband’s picture on the wall. What could she say to him, were she to see him? One never knows the uses of the things one does. And then she was there at this