We create our own goddesses, me and sister. The chessboard welcomes our myths. Our figures of ruin and prayer. Mother teaches us papier-mâché; our hands are sticky newsprint, joyful glops of wet flour. Our goddesses muck about, pondering names and colors. We make our sixteen pawns from water in the creek.
Our sixteen handmaidens bathe in the creek. Before they’re shaped, dried, painted by me and sister. We argue about colors. We paint the myths. Each handmaiden holds a flower. Each flower is a prayer.
Mother doesn’t like our prayers. She drowns them in the creek. Then fills our house with flowers. I weep with sister. Mother says no myths. We begin again in secret and don’t argue about the colors.
Our goddesses guard their shapes and colors. Each chess piece is a weapon and a prayer. Is a goddess clutching her myth. In every story there is a creek. In every story a sister. A flower.
One queen holds amaryllis, traded for her daughter with the Witch of Flowers. The other queen holds hibiscus, each petal a different color. The queens are sisters. They fight on the board but end each night together with a prayer. Rooks are stronger in endgame so we take them to the creek. There is an end in every myth.
The knights are women warriors in our myth. And in the end, they crouch in snow, camouflaged in flour. Iced creek. No color. Just a prayer. And a sister.
Claudia Monpere writes and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash appears in Split Lip, The Forge, Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize and will appear in Best Small Fictions 2024.