No Show at the Dance by Orlando Bartro
Once upon a time, many years ago, I missed meeting a beautiful girl because I was fruitlessly working on constructing a chess puzzle.
This was unusual for me, as I rarely play chess, and as I even more rarely missed a date.
But . . . nevertheless, that night, I was fooling around with the chess pieces on a random set, and soon, lost all sense of time, lost in the mysteries of move and countermove.
We hadn’t explicitly planned to meet at the dance; we had only implicitly planned to meet.
I wasn’t, therefore, explicitly guilty, but I was implicitly guilty—or so it seemed to her.
I never saw her again until she happened to sit next to me many years later at the opera.
We pretended not to know one another.
She was sitting with her husband.
And she cried throughout the opera—certainly not about me, and yet, with a little imagination, a romance novel could fruit from this little episode of my life.
Would she believe that I missed the dance because I was concentrating too much on constructing a chess puzzle that night? Absurd!
No, she will never know the real reason for why I didn’t appear.
We often never learn why things happen to us!
The New Year is upon us, a new beginning, despite the opportunities we’ve missed in our lives.
By the way, that night wasn’t entirely fruitless. I finished the chess puzzle, and it’s presented below. Its absurdity was inspired by the chess puzzle that Alice in Wonderland plays in Through the Looking Glass.
White to play and mate in two (White moves twice; Black once. The board is oriented with White at the bottom and Black at the top.)
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon.