You’ve got to get your ass moving, girl,” Jolene said. “You got to quit sitting in your own funk.
Trolls live in caves. Elves live everywhere. Elves have the power of adapting themselves to extraordinarily difficult environments, such as this one.” He waved a shaky hand out toward the lake, spilling gin on his shirt. “I am an elf, Doctor Bryce, and I live alone everywhere. Altogether everywhere alone.
There was a certain relief in seeing him make the move. She had been forced to consider several other replies; now the lines from them could be dropped from her mind.
Beth had learned not to believe in God during her time in Methuen’s chapel, and she never prayed. But now she said, under her breath, Please God let me play Beltik and checkmate him.
I don’t know how good I really am.” “I know,” he said. “You’re the best there is.
Do you still like my hair?
In her room that night she could not get to sleep because of the way the games kept playing themselves over and over in her head long after she had stopped enjoying them.
She could do her own training. She had been training alone for months. She finished off the last of her coffee. She had been training alone for most of her life.
Do you do problems?” “No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural. White to move and mate in two. It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.
She stayed where she was, not worrying about time, until she had it penetrated and understood. Then she got up, washed her face again and walked back into the gym. She had found her move.
The thought of picking up the phone and calling someone seemed distant now. There was a barrier between herself and whatever world the phone would attach her to; she could not penetrate the barrier.
He did not become drunk in quite the same way that the humans did; or at least he thought he did not. He never wished to become unconscious, or riotously happy, or godlike; he only wanted relief, and he was not certain from what.
No one had come back by morning. She made scrambled eggs and ate them with two pieces of toast before having her first glass of wine. It was another sunny day. In the living room she found Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” She put it on. Then she began drinking in earnest.
Peter Piper picked up a peck of pickled peppers.
She would have to bring her rook up to protect. He would take the knight with his queen, and if she took the bishop, the queen would pick off the roof in the corner with a check, and the whole thing would fall apart.
With the pawn gone, she was open to rook-bishop mate because of the bishop on the open diagonal.
It’s foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.
But she slept beautifully and awoke refreshed at eight, feeling confident, smart and ready.
Despite the Mexican reputation for gaiety and abandon, it was a quiet place, and the crowd seemed more like the crowd at a museum.
Beth never participated in these conversations; she already was what she wanted to be.