2 Checkmate

Fire alights in eyes so bright,

Challenge the champion — charge and fight!

Listen and speak,

Plant your feet,

Grab hold of fate and hold on tight!

We step down onto the smooth bamboo platform of the station. Behind this sprawls a small village. Shops and houses stand on proud bamboo stilts as their thatch roofs rustle in the sweet smelling breeze. I breath in again. Jasmine and Honeysuckle.

I might have died and gone to heaven as I let my gaze wander to the hills beyond. Before me I see a strange tropical paradise untouched by modern convenience. I lift a hand to the side of my nose. I'm not in heaven. I haven't died.

I still have those wretched pimples.

The girl wanders over to a bench and sits down. She sighs as she crosses her legs and swings them back and forth, back and forth.

"Now what do we do?" I ask.

Only one other passenger had gotten off the train with us. She stood there, a wide smile on her face as she greeted her family, clasping their hands with the joy of sweet reunion. She's gone now, off into the village with her loved ones.

The train whistles again, one last long blow. And then its wheels begin to turn. Chug. Chug. Chug. I watch as it disappears down the tracks.

The girl shrugs her shoulders and gives another sigh. "Now we wait."

And we do, for nearly an hour. I pace from one end of the platform to the next and back again. I look toward the village where the woman and her family went. Proud houses and shops standing on stilts. I watch the clouds drift lazily in the sky above us, imagining them as first one shape and then another. And I breath in the scent of flowers and listen to the sound of birdsong somewhere off in the distance. As much as I would love to explore the village, I wait there with the girl.

She needs me.

This girl who knows my name, sought me out, drew me to this strange world. She's my guide, and I still don't even know her name. But I know this, I owe her the loyalty of waiting with her for whomever she is expecting.

When I'm finally brave enough to risk asking her, she laughs — probably at my accent, but then hers sounds just as strange. Then she tells me her name: Allegra May, but that I can just call her 'May'. I breath out a sigh of relief, knowing full well how silly her other name would sound coming from my mouth. My English is good, but not that good.

She also tells me that we're waiting for her father.

The supposed man we were supposed to be 'rescuing'.

"There he is!" She says, that sly smile returning. I glance over to where she's pointing.

A huge black horse with a white blaze is approaching the platform. He's so large that the man in the saddle almost seems too small to be riding such a beast. And as he rides closer, I get a good glimpse of this mysterious man. He's handsome, in a rugged sort of way. Tall, dark, and Asian. And true to this strange world's rules, he's wearing a white cowboy hat, trimmed with leather cord. But there's fire in his eyes as he looks down at his daughter. His boots hit the bamboo platform with a solid 'crack' as he dismounts. There's sharp spurs on the end of them that spin as he walks closer. He wears a leather holster on his hips. I can see the white bone handles of a pair of guns poking out.

"Allegra May! I've done searched half the valley and the next one looking for you!"

The man straightens his proud neck and his nostrils flare.

His daughter sniffs. She's equally offended that her father should worry that she'd run off without telling him first.

There is an awkward stretch of silence as father regards daughter and daughter regards father. They're set in a battle — a stalemate — with neither willing to give ground.

And then the girl breaks, letting her confession leak from her lips,

"I went to find myself a momma."

I blanch. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Immediately, I drop my eyes to my lap, wishing myself anywhere else but there.

"You impossible girl." The man gives a soft laugh as he turns his attention to me sitting there beside his daughter. My cheeks are burning — here I am, thirty and with the pimpled nose of a teenager. He gives me a once over, assessing me. "Where'd you pull this poor lady from, honey?"

"I don't right know," admits Allegra May. "Some sad fairy land with too tall buildings and not enough trees in between."

A laugh escapes my lips, not from humor but from the absurdity of my present predicament.

"I said I was going to get you a mail-order momma, Sweetheart. Not some good -for-nothing city-slicker woman."

The burning from my face switches to my chest as his unfamiliar insult takes a shot at my heart. I don't know what a 'slicker' is, but I'm not about to let him make those sorts of assumptions about me. I might have worked for a call center, but it was a decent, no nonsense sort of company.

"I —" I begin, only to be cut-off by Allegra May.

"She's just as good as any of them, just you wait and see, Pa."

I was about to say that he could just buy me a ticket home and we could forgot about this curious inconvenience I was causing him, but now that the girl was standing up for me, a crazy desire to prove myself overcomes me.

"This is crazy, Allegra May. You would have me believe that this city woman knows how to make a perfect kimchi flapjack?"

"I can make one." I say, with fire in my eyes.

"One's not going to cut it. I've got a dozen hungry ranch hands to feed and a daughter who eats as much as any of them."

"I can make many." I clarify.

"There won't be another train for at least six months. Marry me and you're stuck with me, you crazy woman. Cook and clean and I'll tolerate your presence, but don't expect much more than that.

I see sparks a-light in his eyes. This man is wild, dangerous, untamed.

I wasn't about to let a handsome man in a cowboy hat walk away from me that easily. I'm thirty — pimples and all — and I'm ready to quit my call-center job and settle down. If it means marrying a ruggishly good looking, but hot-tempered man like him, so be it.

I plant my feet squarely on the platform and stare him down.

"I'll marry you, but I need a new pair of shoes first."

Checkmate, Cowboy. Your move.