Young Author

---

JANUARY 2018

CASTLING

SHREYAS KARKI

  
Grandpa died while playing chess.

We were sat on a park bench that day. His soft ivory hair fluttered in the chill breeze that made its rounds like a scout plane sweeping into lowlands, and he was two moves from a checkmate. He looked at me with his reticent, butterscotch eyes - not judging, but simply tracing the curl of my lips and the jaunt of my jaw. He liked watching me think. I stared, with furrowed eyebrows and a palm on the masonite, at the little sculpted knights and pawns. My grandfather hid a patient smirk behind a translucent, mottled brown hand.

Continue reading.