My Short Story for Kathleen
Confessions of a Compulsive Gambler
Mac placed his old 1934 quarter on the silver scratch off surface and began running the ridged edge of the coin back and forth against it. One pear. Two pears. Come on! One more pear...an old boot. Damn.
He placed five more dollars into the machine and pushed the “play all one kind” button and then pushed the button for his favorite scratch off game “Fruit Basket”. The machine spit out ten fresh cards waiting for him to reveal their destiny. Mac began scratching. On the fourth card he won. Ten dollars. On the sixth card he won again. Fifty cents. That was it in the hand.
Delighted, Mac walked up to the front counter of the Food Lion to clam his winnings. Behind the counter was a young girl. Much younger than Mac, but that wasn’t saying much. He couldn’t remember her name, even though it was pinned to her blouse. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. He’d admit that. But at least he could see his cards.
“Back again Mac?” The young girl asked with a smile. Mac could hear snickering behind him.
“Of course.” He replied with a cheerful smile. He handed the young girl his two winning cards. She took them, looked at them and then went to her computer to put in the information. Within a moment the drawer to her cash register opened and she took out ten dollars and fifty cents.
Mac took it with a smile. A huge smile. A smile that said (if you didn’t know any better, that is) that he had never won a single thing in his life.
He walked back to the machine, placed the ten dollar bill into the slot and again pressed the “play all one kind” button. He began scratching again.
~*~
Later that night, around eleven (about the same time The Food Lion was closing for the night) Mac sat back in his Lay-Z-Boy recliner and attempted to read the paper. The recliner was old and tearing at the seams. Much like Mac himself. He held the paper up almost to his nose. He refused to wear the glasses that his doctor had prescribed for him, unless, of course, he was driving. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Back in ’84, when Mac was in his 70s, there had been an accident. A terrible one that Mac never fully recovered from. He hadn’t been hurt—physically, but it was in that accident that his only child had died. Granted she was at the time in her 40s, but Mac still considered her his little princess.
Grace (his daughter) had never married. She had no kids of her own, and therefore Mac had no grandkids. His wife, Gloria, had died only two years before the accident in her own terrible accident: she slipped in the tub one morning while Mac and Grace were out doing who knows what now. He couldn’t remember the details. When Mac and Grace returned from their errand they had found her naked, lying in the tub, face down in the pooling water. Her skin had turned blue and she was drenched. The sight had never left Mac; he was still haunted by it to this day.
The closeness of the deaths of the only two people in his life left Mac devastated. Actually, devastated is an understatement. For the first two weeks after Gloria’s death he didn’t leave his room. He had loved Gloria in a way a drunk loves his alcohol. His quench for her was inconsolable: he couldn’t get enough. He only loved one person more, and that was Grace. She was, in fact, what finally got him out of his bed room. And she suddenly became his life.
Unconsciously Mac began seeing Gloria in Grace’s face. Then it got worse; he saw Gloria in everything Grace did and said. He could smell Gloria in Grace’s hair and feel her lips when he kissed her.
And he kissed her often.
It started out innocent enough: a kiss goodnight (Grace had moved back in with her father when her mother had died to help the grieving old man), a kiss good morning. But then one day he decided, semi-consciously, to push it just a bit farther.
It was on his birthday—his first birthday without Gloria, and he was lonely. Grace gave her father his birthday present, a new chain for his pocket watch (his old one was falling apart just as fast as Mac’s self control) and she leaned in to kiss him on the lips. She soon felt her father’s tongue try and enter her mouth. It pushed against her closed lips and she obediently opened her mouth (only very slightly) to allow her father entrance.
Grace lay in bed that night thinking about what had happened, but she didn’t cry. She knew what had happened had been wrong, but she considered it to be a one time thing. Something that happened because her father missed his wife. And that was true…at least the last part was.
~*~
The next morning, bright and early at noon, Mac walked into the Food Lion to continue his unhealthy gambling habit. In all honesty Mac didn’t even realize that he played those scratch off games as much as he did. He didn’t realize that he would spend hours in the store with his lucky ’34 quarter in between his fingers.
He heard the laughter and the chuckles from behind him, but he just figured it was just the kids that worked there having a good time. He never realized that they were laughing at him.
The kids that worked there all loved Mac. Loved to make fun of him that is. They would often ask each other what they thought he did when he went home. One kid, a sixteen-year-old named Kevin wiped “I bet he masturbates to the commercials for the lottery!” They all laughed, except for Monica, the older woman who worked the “teenager shift”. She felt sorry for Mac and often wondered if there was anything she could do for him. She too wondered what he did when he was home, but not in the same way the kids did.
After Mac finished his round of gambling (he won thirty dollars that day, but spent most of his winnings on more cards) he decided to do some shopping. He was short on bread and milk and other various items one would find at the super market. As he walked up and down the isles he glanced at the different products that were available. He began to walk down the international food isle, one he rarely visited, but it just happened to be the same isle that offered soup, and today he was in the mood for some clam chowder.
He examined the soup section looking for his favorite Campbell’s Clam Chowder when he spotted a bright yellow sign protruding from the shelf. It exclaimed “NEW ITEM! TRY IT, HALF PRICE!”
It was a new brand of soup…called Grace’s.
A tear slid down his face as he picked up the clam chowder variety of the new brand and put it in his basket. His mind began to wonder back to that fateful day.
~*~
Mac and Grace had been going to visit Gloria at Point of View Cemetery that day. How ironic it seemed now to Mac. It was snowing, pretty heavily, and Mac, not wearing his glasses (against the constant protests of Grace) was driving. “I know the way like the back of my hand. I don’t need no damn glasses!”
The windshield began to fog up and, since the car was old, it didn’t have a working defroster. Something Mac said he’d “get around to fixing…one day.” So he took his handkerchief, ridged with dried snot, out of his back pocket to wipe down the windshield. As he struggled with the handkerchief he inadvertently turned the steering wheel slightly to the right.
But it was enough for the front right tire to hit the small patch of black ice on the narrow, windy road. Only driving with one hand (the other was still lodged in his back pocket) Mac tried to correct his mistake, but the tire slid on the ice and he lost control of the car.
The proceeding accident was surprisingly silent. Mac didn’t hear any loud crash. He didn’t hear the tires squeal (although they did). And (thankfully) he didn’t hear Grace scream. The accident was also surprisingly dark even though it was only early afternoon. For the life of him, Mac couldn’t remember hardly any of the accident. He figured it was God’s way of shielding him from the trauma. He couldn’t see out the windows (they were fogged up), but he could feel the accident.
He felt the car roll down the hill and land on the passenger side in a pile of large rocks. The one thing he could remember…the most horrible part of the whole ordeal…was seeing the shard of rock lodged into Grace’s stomach. He could remember the blood. He could remember seeing her eyes rolling back in her head. And he could remember the last thing she said to him: “I told you to wear your damn glasses.” And then she was gone.
Mac didn’t have a cell phone and there were no houses around where the accident happened. He was hanging from his seatbelt, hovering over the dead body that once was his daughter. He just hung there and starred at her for nearly an hour.
By the time it had gotten dark Mac had finally come enough to his sense to realize that he need to get out of the car and get warm. He braced his right foot on the arm rest that was located between the two seats and carefully unclicked the seat belt. His foot didn’t support him as well as he had hoped and he fell onto his daughter. Mac pushed the experience out of his head immediately and, standing on his daughter still, unlocked the car door and climbed out. He heard bones crunch under his feet, but ignored them. The noises came back to haunt him later.
Mac made his way up the snowy slop to the road and waited in the cold for a passing car. When one finally arrived he waved his hands franticly and did a dance that would have been funny if the situation had been different. The car, covered in remnants of the snow and the salt the city had (supposedly) put on the roads, screeched to a halt. A teenage girl dressed in a faux fur trimmed coat rolled down her window suspiciously. Then she saw the blood (Grace’s blood, but she didn’t know that) that was quickly staining Mac’s shirt.
“Ohmygod! Are you, like, okay?” she spat out.
“My daughter…” Mac began between chattering teeth, “she’s still in the car. I think she’s…” but he couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I’ve got a cell phone.” The girl offered. Mac nodded then, as she handed it to him he said, “I don’t know how to work it…could you?”
The girl pulled her arm back into her car and dialed 911. As she talked to the dispatcher, Mac stood outside the car shivering. He couldn’t hear what the girl was saying. He was still in a state of shock.
Then suddenly her voice jolted him back to where he was.
“Oh duh! You want to, like, get in the car? You look totally cold.”
Mac responded by opening the back door and getting in. Instinctively he put on his seat belt.
Soon an ambulance and a couple police cars arrived and the girl in the snowy car went on her way fresh with a story to tell at school in the morning. Mac couldn’t really remember all that had happened after the police had gotten there. The one thing he did remember was seeing a stretcher with a black bad being pushed up the side of the hill.
~*~
Mac finished his grocery shopping and went to the front counter to pay for his items. He and the girl behind the counter exchanged a few words: “How are you today?” “Win much today?” the usual banter. Then Mac took his five dollars in change and went over to the machine.
He placed the five dollars in the slot, but instead of playing “Fruit Basket” he opted for a five dollar game called “Morning Glory”. The name reminded him of his wife, and he was feeling a bit sentimental today.
The object of the game was to match three flowers in one of the eight lines on the card. The reason it was such an expensive game was that the maximum amount you could win was 500 dollars. That is, if you matched three Morning Glories.
Mac took out his lucky quarter and began scratching. One Morning Glory…two Morning Glories…Holly Shit! THREE Morning Glories. Mac just won 500 dollars.
He went to the front office again, calmer and without a smile on his face this time. He handed the card to the girl and her eyes got as wide as a four lane highway. As it just so happened she had the money in the safe so she was able to give Mac his pay off right then and there. After he filled out a few forms.
Mac took the money, mostly in twenties and fifties, but he had asked for a few tens. He walked back to the machine, placed a ten dollar bill into the slot, and pressed the “play all one kind” button again.
Mac began to scratch the silver coating as if nothing unusual had happened.
Mac placed his old 1934 quarter on the silver scratch off surface and began running the ridged edge of the coin back and forth against it. One pear. Two pears. Come on! One more pear...an old boot. Damn.
He placed five more dollars into the machine and pushed the “play all one kind” button and then pushed the button for his favorite scratch off game “Fruit Basket”. The machine spit out ten fresh cards waiting for him to reveal their destiny. Mac began scratching. On the fourth card he won. Ten dollars. On the sixth card he won again. Fifty cents. That was it in the hand.
Delighted, Mac walked up to the front counter of the Food Lion to clam his winnings. Behind the counter was a young girl. Much younger than Mac, but that wasn’t saying much. He couldn’t remember her name, even though it was pinned to her blouse. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. He’d admit that. But at least he could see his cards.
“Back again Mac?” The young girl asked with a smile. Mac could hear snickering behind him.
“Of course.” He replied with a cheerful smile. He handed the young girl his two winning cards. She took them, looked at them and then went to her computer to put in the information. Within a moment the drawer to her cash register opened and she took out ten dollars and fifty cents.
Mac took it with a smile. A huge smile. A smile that said (if you didn’t know any better, that is) that he had never won a single thing in his life.
He walked back to the machine, placed the ten dollar bill into the slot and again pressed the “play all one kind” button. He began scratching again.
~*~
Later that night, around eleven (about the same time The Food Lion was closing for the night) Mac sat back in his Lay-Z-Boy recliner and attempted to read the paper. The recliner was old and tearing at the seams. Much like Mac himself. He held the paper up almost to his nose. He refused to wear the glasses that his doctor had prescribed for him, unless, of course, he was driving. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Back in ’84, when Mac was in his 70s, there had been an accident. A terrible one that Mac never fully recovered from. He hadn’t been hurt—physically, but it was in that accident that his only child had died. Granted she was at the time in her 40s, but Mac still considered her his little princess.
Grace (his daughter) had never married. She had no kids of her own, and therefore Mac had no grandkids. His wife, Gloria, had died only two years before the accident in her own terrible accident: she slipped in the tub one morning while Mac and Grace were out doing who knows what now. He couldn’t remember the details. When Mac and Grace returned from their errand they had found her naked, lying in the tub, face down in the pooling water. Her skin had turned blue and she was drenched. The sight had never left Mac; he was still haunted by it to this day.
The closeness of the deaths of the only two people in his life left Mac devastated. Actually, devastated is an understatement. For the first two weeks after Gloria’s death he didn’t leave his room. He had loved Gloria in a way a drunk loves his alcohol. His quench for her was inconsolable: he couldn’t get enough. He only loved one person more, and that was Grace. She was, in fact, what finally got him out of his bed room. And she suddenly became his life.
Unconsciously Mac began seeing Gloria in Grace’s face. Then it got worse; he saw Gloria in everything Grace did and said. He could smell Gloria in Grace’s hair and feel her lips when he kissed her.
And he kissed her often.
It started out innocent enough: a kiss goodnight (Grace had moved back in with her father when her mother had died to help the grieving old man), a kiss good morning. But then one day he decided, semi-consciously, to push it just a bit farther.
It was on his birthday—his first birthday without Gloria, and he was lonely. Grace gave her father his birthday present, a new chain for his pocket watch (his old one was falling apart just as fast as Mac’s self control) and she leaned in to kiss him on the lips. She soon felt her father’s tongue try and enter her mouth. It pushed against her closed lips and she obediently opened her mouth (only very slightly) to allow her father entrance.
Grace lay in bed that night thinking about what had happened, but she didn’t cry. She knew what had happened had been wrong, but she considered it to be a one time thing. Something that happened because her father missed his wife. And that was true…at least the last part was.
~*~
The next morning, bright and early at noon, Mac walked into the Food Lion to continue his unhealthy gambling habit. In all honesty Mac didn’t even realize that he played those scratch off games as much as he did. He didn’t realize that he would spend hours in the store with his lucky ’34 quarter in between his fingers.
He heard the laughter and the chuckles from behind him, but he just figured it was just the kids that worked there having a good time. He never realized that they were laughing at him.
The kids that worked there all loved Mac. Loved to make fun of him that is. They would often ask each other what they thought he did when he went home. One kid, a sixteen-year-old named Kevin wiped “I bet he masturbates to the commercials for the lottery!” They all laughed, except for Monica, the older woman who worked the “teenager shift”. She felt sorry for Mac and often wondered if there was anything she could do for him. She too wondered what he did when he was home, but not in the same way the kids did.
After Mac finished his round of gambling (he won thirty dollars that day, but spent most of his winnings on more cards) he decided to do some shopping. He was short on bread and milk and other various items one would find at the super market. As he walked up and down the isles he glanced at the different products that were available. He began to walk down the international food isle, one he rarely visited, but it just happened to be the same isle that offered soup, and today he was in the mood for some clam chowder.
He examined the soup section looking for his favorite Campbell’s Clam Chowder when he spotted a bright yellow sign protruding from the shelf. It exclaimed “NEW ITEM! TRY IT, HALF PRICE!”
It was a new brand of soup…called Grace’s.
A tear slid down his face as he picked up the clam chowder variety of the new brand and put it in his basket. His mind began to wonder back to that fateful day.
~*~
Mac and Grace had been going to visit Gloria at Point of View Cemetery that day. How ironic it seemed now to Mac. It was snowing, pretty heavily, and Mac, not wearing his glasses (against the constant protests of Grace) was driving. “I know the way like the back of my hand. I don’t need no damn glasses!”
The windshield began to fog up and, since the car was old, it didn’t have a working defroster. Something Mac said he’d “get around to fixing…one day.” So he took his handkerchief, ridged with dried snot, out of his back pocket to wipe down the windshield. As he struggled with the handkerchief he inadvertently turned the steering wheel slightly to the right.
But it was enough for the front right tire to hit the small patch of black ice on the narrow, windy road. Only driving with one hand (the other was still lodged in his back pocket) Mac tried to correct his mistake, but the tire slid on the ice and he lost control of the car.
The proceeding accident was surprisingly silent. Mac didn’t hear any loud crash. He didn’t hear the tires squeal (although they did). And (thankfully) he didn’t hear Grace scream. The accident was also surprisingly dark even though it was only early afternoon. For the life of him, Mac couldn’t remember hardly any of the accident. He figured it was God’s way of shielding him from the trauma. He couldn’t see out the windows (they were fogged up), but he could feel the accident.
He felt the car roll down the hill and land on the passenger side in a pile of large rocks. The one thing he could remember…the most horrible part of the whole ordeal…was seeing the shard of rock lodged into Grace’s stomach. He could remember the blood. He could remember seeing her eyes rolling back in her head. And he could remember the last thing she said to him: “I told you to wear your damn glasses.” And then she was gone.
Mac didn’t have a cell phone and there were no houses around where the accident happened. He was hanging from his seatbelt, hovering over the dead body that once was his daughter. He just hung there and starred at her for nearly an hour.
By the time it had gotten dark Mac had finally come enough to his sense to realize that he need to get out of the car and get warm. He braced his right foot on the arm rest that was located between the two seats and carefully unclicked the seat belt. His foot didn’t support him as well as he had hoped and he fell onto his daughter. Mac pushed the experience out of his head immediately and, standing on his daughter still, unlocked the car door and climbed out. He heard bones crunch under his feet, but ignored them. The noises came back to haunt him later.
Mac made his way up the snowy slop to the road and waited in the cold for a passing car. When one finally arrived he waved his hands franticly and did a dance that would have been funny if the situation had been different. The car, covered in remnants of the snow and the salt the city had (supposedly) put on the roads, screeched to a halt. A teenage girl dressed in a faux fur trimmed coat rolled down her window suspiciously. Then she saw the blood (Grace’s blood, but she didn’t know that) that was quickly staining Mac’s shirt.
“Ohmygod! Are you, like, okay?” she spat out.
“My daughter…” Mac began between chattering teeth, “she’s still in the car. I think she’s…” but he couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I’ve got a cell phone.” The girl offered. Mac nodded then, as she handed it to him he said, “I don’t know how to work it…could you?”
The girl pulled her arm back into her car and dialed 911. As she talked to the dispatcher, Mac stood outside the car shivering. He couldn’t hear what the girl was saying. He was still in a state of shock.
Then suddenly her voice jolted him back to where he was.
“Oh duh! You want to, like, get in the car? You look totally cold.”
Mac responded by opening the back door and getting in. Instinctively he put on his seat belt.
Soon an ambulance and a couple police cars arrived and the girl in the snowy car went on her way fresh with a story to tell at school in the morning. Mac couldn’t really remember all that had happened after the police had gotten there. The one thing he did remember was seeing a stretcher with a black bad being pushed up the side of the hill.
~*~
Mac finished his grocery shopping and went to the front counter to pay for his items. He and the girl behind the counter exchanged a few words: “How are you today?” “Win much today?” the usual banter. Then Mac took his five dollars in change and went over to the machine.
He placed the five dollars in the slot, but instead of playing “Fruit Basket” he opted for a five dollar game called “Morning Glory”. The name reminded him of his wife, and he was feeling a bit sentimental today.
The object of the game was to match three flowers in one of the eight lines on the card. The reason it was such an expensive game was that the maximum amount you could win was 500 dollars. That is, if you matched three Morning Glories.
Mac took out his lucky quarter and began scratching. One Morning Glory…two Morning Glories…Holly Shit! THREE Morning Glories. Mac just won 500 dollars.
He went to the front office again, calmer and without a smile on his face this time. He handed the card to the girl and her eyes got as wide as a four lane highway. As it just so happened she had the money in the safe so she was able to give Mac his pay off right then and there. After he filled out a few forms.
Mac took the money, mostly in twenties and fifties, but he had asked for a few tens. He walked back to the machine, placed a ten dollar bill into the slot, and pressed the “play all one kind” button again.
Mac began to scratch the silver coating as if nothing unusual had happened.
posted by Octopusouphut at 10:25 PM
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