Preface to the Erotic Chess Story

Dear Readers,

As some of you are well aware, I am among other things, the singular inventor of the erotic chess story, a creation utterly unique in its combination of intellectual rigor and lascivious puissance. Yet, as I have saved this delicacy for my intimate circle, the greater world of letters and players remain ignorant of my contribution, a fact I was made poignantly aware of the other evening.

I was at my club, as usual, sitting through a rather workmanlike rendition of the “Giuoco Piano” when my opponent, his game and tongue over loosened with my selection of Amontillado, began to relate of how this game reminded him of a rather prurient anecdote from his younger days. He then began to relate, in the coarsest terms imaginable, some sophomoric venereal adventure that involved chess, hard cider, aqua vie, a furry rug, impressionable youth, upperclassmen and all of the secretions that a body is capable of. It was difficult of feign interest in either the profligate acrobatics and janitorial details of his anecdote or the pointless fencing of his bishops, and I maintained my polite poise with the old bird, as I always do, by picking out the least attractive feature on his person and constructing an erotic rhyme based on it: in this case a series of polyps that hung on a particular flap of neck like baggy dark medallions. Thus entertained, I finished the game and the peers’ erotic reverie with aplomb, before excusing myself, as Bacchus and Saturn finally got the better hand of Venus and the poor fellow drifted off like a moody prurient rowboat.

However, it occurred to me over the next morning’s speed matches that the old peer had been at pains for some time to publish his memoirs and had only been dissuaded from doing so by the active intervention of his family, who knew its thematic contents only too well. Only recently, however, its author had escaped all editorial oversight by simple attrition. Though his rude anecdote was alike to my creation as toilet humor to our immortal Swift, it suddenly occurred to me that his immanent publication might actually obscure the originality of my creation in the greater world.

Though I care nothing for the mere fugitive approbation of this world, I have been pressured by my circle of intimates not to delay a public edition and immediately release my creation to the world of readership at large: and so, with much modest protest, I do so here.

VC

TURN #82: WEEK 68; WORDS: 77,900
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