We all remember where we were when the deer first came to our quiet town. It was the final match of Harfest’s least popular event: the chess tournament. We thought the deer might have been rabid or sick because it wasn’t put off by the crowd or the lights or the music. When it walked into our bandstand, pushed the challenger out of their stool with its hoof, and stood across the table from the reigning champion, Gordon Zeleskey, we realized that this deer was here to play.

They played the fastest game of chess in Harfest’s history. In the first match, the deer revealed it understood that its pawns could move diagonally. Zeleskey’s eyes darted across the board as he followed the deer’s improvisation. He protested that the deer wasn’t playing by the rules, but the cheering crowd led the mayor to think otherwise.

“Relax, Gordy,” the mayor said, patting the champion on the back, “it’s just a deer.”

The deer mated Zeleskey two turns later.

The festival’s sock hop was abandoned; everyone gathered around just in time to see Zeleskey get mated in four moves in the final game. The mayor’s wife put the gold medal on one of the deer’s antlers and presented it with the grand prize: a basket of her famous orange cranberry muffins. The deer lifted it by the handle, gazed at the assembled crowd as if performing some profane calculus, and walked away into the forest. Zeleskey sat frozen in his chair as the mayor’s wife bestowed upon him the silver medal and a pumpkin pie.

♟

The chess tournament at the next year’s Harfest was the busiest on record. Rubberneckers paced around the bandstand, watching the edge of the woods more than the games. There were a lot of faces that we’d never seen before, some from out of town, but most belonged to the folks who lived in the big houses down long, dirt roads, commuted every day for work, and wore clean boots. They said they had heard about the deer and were excited that something interesting finally happened in our town.

By the time the finals came around, a buzz filled the air. Zeleskey sat at the chess board, chewing through packs of xylitol gum and bouncing his knee like a piston. After being humiliated by the deer a year ago, Zeleskey dedicated himself to studying and training. He hired a chess coach of international renown and won so many larger tournaments that he became a national master. Unsatisfied with his progress, he liquidated most of his assets to fly from city to city and pay the homeless savants to play him over and over and over again.

His opponent in the finals was Anne, president of the middle school chess club. The deer emerged from the tree line, the gleaming gold medal dangling from his antler. Everyone had talked, but nobody (except for those of us who were there) believed. They stood and watched open-mouthed as it approached the bandstand, shoved Anne away, and once again stood across from Zeleskey. They bowed to each other, and the game began.

Zeleskey trembled as he moved his pieces and lost the first match in ten moves. The next game they played was the closest yet; Zeleskey panted as he captured pawns and yelled when the deer moved its knight twice in one turn by leapfrogging it off its rook. The match lasted an hour. The crowd began to dissipate around the twenty-minute mark and even the mayor was checking his watch after forty. When he was finally mated, Zeleskey fainted. The mayor’s wife wrapped another gold medal around the deer’s antlers. It shifted its gaze again to the crowd. This time, we met its gaze and breathed again. As it took another basket of muffins back into the woods, we heard the click of a rubbernecker’s camera.

♟︎

After the deer took its fourth gold medal, we institutionalized Zeleskey. Grandmasters and mathematicians studied each of their games and came up with names for all the new strategies the deer implemented: the Whitetail Rummy, the Buck Gambit, the Stag’s Opening, the Purdie Shuffle. It played moves that no one regarded as legal, but they believed they could counter them. Yet, neither the Birkland-Eyde Gambit nor the Frank-Caro Stratagem worked. And so it went: year after year, festival after festival, the deer arrived at the finals of every chess tournament, its rack heavier and more golden, and departed victorious.

And the winters got worse.

They were easy to write off at first. Bad winters happen, but it seemed that every medal that hung from the deer made them worse. By the eighth medal, the storms were so bad that everything south of the train tracks was either blown out by the wind or crushed under the snow.

Displaced people and families set up tents outside the mayor’s house. They were clamoring for relief, so the mayor and the chamber of commerce promised they had something in the works. But that year, they decided to spend the town’s budget on the Chess Wizard, a computer so massive and advanced that the only place it could fit was the high school’s gymnasium, which meant that the Groundhogs had to turn in their basketballs for chess boards. It doubled the strain on the town’s energy grid, rose into the rafters of the gymnasium, and had an interface no larger than an apple crate. It took thirty seconds to calculate its next move and produced so much exhaust that the town spent the next year’s budget on cooling towers.

The townsfolk held a special election to try to cancel the next Harfest. We were barely participating anymore; we’d put up banners and set up the pumpkins and lights, but the only event we’d attend was the chess tournament, and the only people who went were the ones with nowhere else to go. Each Harfest and subsequent winter meant more people setting up tents outside the mayor’s house. More homes destroyed. More children falling in the cold.

The mayor stepped in and vetoed the proposition . He said he understood where we were coming from but that this was the year we were going to beat the deer. That this was the year where everything would go back to normal. That this year, they were going to cheat.

They had one guy with a walkie-talkie at the bandstand and one in the gymnasium. They inputted each move the deer made into the Chess Wizard and radioed back with a counter. After the fifth move, the deer caught on. It trotted over to its opponent, pushed her out of her chair with its massive hooves, and stomped on the walkie-talkie. They continued the game. When it ended, the deer’s antlers grew heavier. We watched with a disinterest bred from helplessness and came to realize that, for us, this was normal. We left the bandstand that night as we’d arrived: preparing for the worst.

The next blizzard lasted five days and took out almost everything south of the drugstore in a bank of snow and ice nearly twenty feet tall. When it cleared, some of us adorned ourselves with cloaks and deer skulls and broke into the gymnasium. We destroyed the Chess Wizard using pipes and nails and concrete from our ruined homes. In opposition to the protest and outcry from the camps of tents pitched outside town hall, the mayor spent that year's budget on fixing the Chess Wizard. We destroyed it again the next day.

A faction of the town moved. They were tired of the winters and the deer and the increasing violence. Strangely enough, they were from the parts of town with the least damage. They fled their homes in the night carrying hat boxes and dog crates for toy breeds. The mayor left, too, and we burnt down his house when we couldn’t find his wife’s muffin recipe.

A town meeting was held by the new regime at the bandstand. We were each given a black chess piece and told that it was over. No more chess tournaments, no more Harfest. What point was there? We thought that the deer couldn’t be beaten, so why bother trying? Someone from the crowd proposed that, maybe, we hold one last Harfest. If the deer saw that it was just us, that everyone else had left, then maybe things would go differently. They were pulled from the crowd, bludgeoned with a rook-filled sack, and left to writhe on the floor of the bandstand while we breathed. Our silence at the agony of a man who was once our neighbor made us whole again.

♜

We spent Harfest that year in the community center, indulging in our warmth and festivity. We drank fermented cider and sang songs and pretended that we couldn’t hear the deer’s dread braying on the wind. That winter, the snow was briny and acrid.

 It was the next year, a decade since the deer first appeared in our town, that the Kasparov-9000 was invented. An automaton man, powered by electricity, whose sole purpose was to play chess. It had no legs, so they wheeled it around in a glass box. Not only was it faster and smarter than the Chess Wizard, but the Kasparov-9000 had been programmed with the ultimate chess technique. Developed by a team of the world's most prestigious mathematicians over ten years, the Gordian Maneuver was designed using data gathered from some of the deer’s first matches against Zeleskey. It was sent to our town with armed guards and installed on the crumbling ruins of our once proud bandstand. We told the engineer that if they only used the data from its matches with Zeleskey, then it was outdated. The deer had shown many new plays and techniques since then, but the engineer, with an ironed, tucked-in shirt, didn’t seem bothered.

He said that the Kasparov-9000 was made by experts, and they didn’t expect the deer to try anything new. From among us a voice shouted, “Why?” The engineer squinted at our huddled and shrunken forms as if we’d just asked where the sun went at night.

“Because it’s not supposed to.”

 Some chose to believe that this ultimate creation of mankind’s genius would finally beat the deer. They had always held out hope, praying in secret to hidden relics of the Chess Wizard behind locked doors as we patrolled the camps with pipes and bats.

Cheers echoed as the deer emerged from the woods that Harfest. Its rack had grown so large, tangled with gold, and burned so seraphic in the torchlight that it was difficult to behold.

The Kasparov-9000 clicked and whined as it moved its first piece. The deer moved its knight and the Kasparov-9000 let out a puff of steam as it computed its next move. Each clack of a piece against the board sent the crowd gasping and chattering. The deer grew agitated as the game progressed, snorting and dragging its hoof against the rotten floor of the bandstand. When it ended its turn, we heard the ding of an egg timer from the Kasparov-9000 and, for the first time, the deer was mated. It trotted around in a circle, braying and snorting. The crowd was silent; no one could believe what they were seeing. The deer returned to the board, and the crowd found out that its rooks could jump. It won the next two games in six and four turns respectively, reared back onto its hindlegs, and brought its weight down on the table. The wooden legs buckled and game pieces went tumbling through the holes in the bandstand floor. It lowered its head and drove its antlers through the glass box of the Kasparov-9000, sending sparks and plastic pieces flying in all directions. The Kasparov-9000’s guards pulled their pistols on the deer. It reared back and roared. We brought our pipes through the guards’ heads and breathed again.

♞

All of us who were able moved into the community center. A new law was issued: anyone with a Chess Wizard relic would be found, given a white pawn, and banished. We turned over only those who made it clear that they would not join our flock. Some left on their own, packed their things into pillowcases, and tried their own luck. We polished the black pieces they left behind and hung them from the ceiling with fishing line. They glimmered, even in the night, and we held each other’s hands and wished them stars.

The salted snow that the winters had brought ruined our chances of growing our own food. We sent out scavenging parties to loot through what was left of the town and gathering parties to hunt and trap in the woods. Those of us who stayed spent our time digging wells and reinforcing the ceiling. Anne had become a digger. Her aptitude at chess gave her dreams of becoming an annotatician, interpreting the deer’s will through an endless game of chess, but her family was found apostate. We held her in our arms as her parents, a candlemaker and a whittler, were sent away from our town. She wept on their black pieces and hung them above where she laid her head at night. So, then she dug. Snow, dirt, rubble. It was good for her. It had to be.

We fell into a rhythm of sorts. We were few, only a couple dozen of us left by that point, but we managed to make it through. Together, blanketed under drifts of snow and sheets of ice.

♛

Zeleskey was found dehydrated near the library. When he recovered, he told us something unthinkable—he finally figured out how to do it. In the hospital, they took away anything that might aggravate his condition: chess boards, sudoku, salt and pepper shakers, even pen and pencil. He said that every day that he was institutionalized, he’d replay each match he’d lost to the deer, setting up  games on the floor of his room using his fingernail clippings. His beard was long and white and still smelled of the salted, acrid snow he was found in.

When he first saw Anne, he cupped her chin in his hands, stroked her cheek with his thumb, and stared into her eyes as if performing some profound calculus. As he was being taken to speak in front of The Council, his lower lip quivered, and he spoke to ears not yet ready to hear:

“You are their coward’s hope.”

The Council let him stay when he said that he had no idea what a Chess Wizard was.

The next chess tournament saw Zeleskey defeat each opponent in less than five moves. We watched in dread as he cut through even the most devout players. We were silent as the deer emerged to face its challenger, the skeleton of the Kasparov-9000 bleached in its antlers. Zeleskey rose to greet his rival, stepping forward with arms outstretched and bringing its large neck in for an embrace. We stood in awe as the deer reciprocated, receiving Zeleskey as an old friend. He laughed as he returned to his stool, the deer taking its own spot behind the black pieces.

They played a game that confused the younger members of our congregation. They played like old men in the park. They laughed and winced and flourished the pieces as they played. We watched Zeleskey move just like the deer did, saw him counter the deer’s Wall of Jericho with a Purdie Shuffle. He moved the pieces in ways that only the deer could. Zeleskey took the first game in twenty-five turns by ricocheting his queen off the corner of the board. He smiled and clapped and rubbed his hands together as he took the deer’s king. He laughed and stroked his long white beard as he reset the board. A spark flew from the Kasparov-9000 as it twitched in the deer’s antlers. We thumbed the black pieces we held in our pockets, thought about what would happen if he won, swallowed the lumps in our throats, looked around to the rest of our town, and said nothing.

The deer snorted, and the second game began. The only noise to be heard was the clacking of pieces and the crackle of torches. Our hearts beat faster and stronger with each piece Zeleskey took. Our eyes darted between ourselves. Our brows dripped with sweat. Our fingers itched. When he took the black queen, nobody could breathe. What would we be without the snow? The deer took Zeleskey’s rook with its own. Zeleskey stroked his beard. His eyes widened, a smile drew across his face, and the ding of an egg timer rang out from the deer’s antlers.

As Zeleskey lifted his hand to move his queen, he was pulled from his stool into the crowd. The rotting wood collapsed beneath us as we leapt on top of him. Everyone joined in. Sarah broke a wooden plank against Zeleskey’s back. Anne, the president of the chess club for a school that was now gone and who still carried a sprocket from the Chess Wizard in her pocket, jammed a nail into the hand with which he reached for the queen.

The deer broke into a canter, braying and wheezing as it paraded the corpse of the Kasparov-9000 around us. It didn’t know that we had to do this for those of us who had endured, for Anne. It didn’t understand that this was all we had left. It didn’t want this, but it was just a deer.

The wood beneath our feet melted away into the cold, wet, autumnal earth as we listened to Zeleskey scream in pain. We beat his aged body to stillness on that site, which was once our bandstand.