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Random Rants and Other Nonsense

Lucky Coin
or
Two Sides of Every Coin
by PitchforkPrincess


On my tenth birthday my father took me to work with him. We had no money for a party and neither of my parents could afford to take a day off work to celebrate. They’d promised me a few presents later that night, but I did not hope for much. I’d wanted a bike, and had made small inquiries, but it was obvious enough to me that money was tight and I’d be lucky to get a set of matchbox cars. So when my father offered to take me to work with him, I was rather excited. The man he worked for, Mr. Thomas Lambert, had on occasion been known to support charitable causes, and a boy who wanted a bike, in my ten year old opinion, was a very charitable cause, indeed.

It was cold and stormy that day and already there was three inches of snow blanketing the ground. As I followed my father to the car, I paused to catch a snowflake on my tongue. My eyes were upturned so I was greatly startled when I heard a loud exhalation and an angry “Oh shit!” I couldn’t help but laugh to see my father splayed across the driveway and his hat skidding across the icy ground.

“Just my luck,” he muttered as he pulled himself to his feet and went sliding across the pavement after his hat. He bent to pick it up and it squished through his fingers, skiing further down the sidewalk. “Be a champ and fetch my hat, Frankie,” he said in a huff.

“Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll get it,” I said. I half slid, half ran down the street after his hat. When I had it in my hands I turned back to my father, who was rubbing his balding head self-consciously. After I returned the hat to him, we scrambled into the car away from the cold.

“I know this ain’t much of a birthday present, kiddo,” my father said with a sign as he adjusted the heater and backed out of the driveway. “But you’re always asking about where I work and I thought now was as good a time as any to show you the place.” He paused for a moment, biting his lower lip as if in great thought and signed once more. “I hope you’re not disappointed in me.”

I didn’t understand him. It was only a few years later that I finally grasped what me meant. He was a janitor for Lambert Industries, the lowest rung on the ladder. He was wrong, though. My father never once disappointed me.

Halfway down the block from our house, we had to swerve to miss hitting a stray dog. A mile from my father‘s work, an idiot in a fancy car ran a read light and almost sideswiped us. By the time we pulled into the parking lot of Lambert Industries my father was completely frazzled, muttering obscenities under his breath.

“If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have none at all,” my father said as he slipped out of the drivers seat and came around the back of the car to take my hand. I’d heard him say this many times before, usually after he’d narrowly escaped an accident or lost more than five dollars playing poker with his buddies. He’d once said it quite hysterically after falling from a ladder and dislocating his shoulder.

“You have to make your own luck, Daddy,” I said, nodding my head as if this were some great wisdom I’d just discovered. In truth, I’d heard my mother tell him this very thing a number of times before.

Laughing, my father ruffled my hair, then crouched and said, “Hop on, sport, pony’s waiting.” I scrambled onto his back and he gave me a piggy back ride into the building.

The first few hours of my father’s work day were very uneventful. He mopped up messes in the bathroom, installed new light bulbs, washed windows and took out trash. At one point, he got a page from Mr. Lambert’s secretary and we rushed to the twenty-fifth floor of the building to discover a great deal of water spill from under a door and across the secretary’s office floor.

“What’s happened now?” my father asked with a disgusted sigh. He rolled up his sleeves and padded across spongy carpet. I followed closely behind, making up all sorts of stories in my head about the errant water and it’s source. Perhaps the snow had begun to rapidly melt and the world was flooding. That idea fascinated me greatly. I imagined my father and I racing up to the roof where we built a boat and sailed away, rescuing my mother and our neighbors before we set off on many great adventures.

“I don’t know,” said the secretary, looking nervously about the room. “Mr. Lambert was in the bathroom a moment ago. He came out looking quite distressed and told me to call for a janitor. Then he disappeared. The next thing I knew, water was everywhere.”

My father screwed up his face, trying to look as disgusted as he could. It was a rather comical expression, all in all, as if to say he was used to toilets exploding and rich, crazy old men fleeing the scene of the “crime.”

With a grunt of loathing, my father opened the bathroom door and sloshed through the water. I followed after him and watched avidly as he bent over the toilet, water still pouring over the seat and onto the floor. Some of it soaked the front of his shirt but he paid it no mind as he turned the valve and stopped the flow of water.

“Daddy,” I said nervously, for he had a sour look on his face, “you got dirty water on you. That’s gross.”

“Don’t worry, kiddo,” he replied as he rolled his sleeve even further up his arm and plunged his hand into the toilet bowl.

“Icky!” I cried and stepped backward, because now he was bringing his hand out of the toilet and trying to show me something. “I don’t want to see poopie, daddy!”

This made him laugh uproariously. “No sweat, sport. I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he said mischievously, and began to ring out a sopping piece of cloth he’d pulled from the toilet. “Rich old cranks like Mr. Lambert don’t use secretaries toilets for personal business. They like to flush strange objects down them just to make the rest of us miserable.”

At that moment, the secretary poked her head into the bathroom and pursed her lips. “Has he done it again?”

My father held up the piece of cloth he’d pulled from the toilet and I saw that it was a handkerchief, with the initials T.M.L. embroidered on one wet corner. “What was it last time, Mrs. Douglas? A tie?”

“A sock,” the secretary said, rolling her eyes. “A wad of napkins the time before that.”

“What is he trying to get rid of, do you think?” my father asked.

“Drugs, ill gotten money, a mistress’s jewelry? Who knows?” Mrs. Douglas answered with a sigh. “Too bad none of it ever shows up. I could really use a raise.”

“You and me both, ma’am,” my father said with a snort. He dropped the handkerchief in a trashcan beside the toilet and stood at the sink to wash his hands.

“And who might you be, young man?” the secretary asked and I turned shyly to look at her. I rung my hands nervously and gave her a bashful smile.

“That’s Frankie, my son,” my father answered for me. “It’s his birthday. The big one-oh.”

“Ahh,” Mrs. Douglas said with a sly smile. “Well, happy birthday, Frankie dear. I do hope your day goes better than your father’s has.”

At this my father laughed. He dried his hands on a wad of paper towels and discarded them in the trashcan. “We’ll run and fetch a mop and finish cleaning this mess up.”

“And lets hope it’s the last,” the secretary said distractedly. She seemed to have something on her mind.

As my father and I headed back downstairs we were stopped several times in the hallway. One woman requested a new ream of paper and another asked that my father replace a blown fuse, but both did so with strange little smiles at the corners of their mouths. My father promised to get to them as soon as he had “a serious clog” taken care of. Both women laughed at this, as if they’d heard him say the same thing many times before.

Once my father had retrieved a mop and a bucket from the janitor’s closet, we headed back to the elevators. There was an “out of order” sign on the door. A note below it said the elevators on the fifth floor were the closest operable ones.

“This is just not my day,” my father muttered.

We climbed the stairs to the fifth floor where another woman stopped my father. She didn’t request anything, but she made idle small talk for several minutes. Finally, with an embarrassed smile, my father excused himself and we entered the elevators.

When we finally arrived in the secretary’s office once more, the strange behavior of the women in the building became more clear. They’d been stalling for time so that Mrs. Douglas could call the bakery down the street and have them hurry over a cake. Written in frosting across the top of it was “Happy 10th Birthday Frankie.”

“You shouldn’t have,” my father said, smiling awkwardly. He put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me forward a step. “What do you say, Frankie?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I answered quickly. I was quite shy in those days and getting me to say anything to strangers was “like pulling teeth”, my mother often fondly explained.

Mrs. Douglas smiled kindly and said, “You’re quite welcome, young man.” She cut me a slice of cake and pulled up a chair at her desk. As I sat down to eat, my father excused himself and stepped into the bathroom, where he began cleaning up the mess Mr. Lambert had left behind.

I ate mostly in silence, stealing little glances at Mrs. Douglas from time to time. Every time our eyes met, I looked away shyly. There was rarely an occasion in my life when a stranger had done something so kind for me.

After my father finished his janitorial duties he sat down and had a piece of cake as well. He chatted idly with Mrs. Douglas about things I didn’t quite understand. A few phrases stuck out and I considered them. “Loosing it” was one of them. They were speaking of Mr. Lambert in hushed tones. I wondered what it was he’d lost. At one point I looked up from my cake and said, “Maybe we should help him find it.”

“Find what, kiddo?” my father asked.

“What Mr. Lambert lost,” I answered. This caused my father and the secretary to laugh uproariously.

After we’d all had our fill of cake, Mrs. Douglas put it in a box marked “Tasty Cakes Bakery” and handed it to my father. “Why don’t you take this home with you,” she said with a smile.

“Thank you, ma’am,” my father said, and for the life of me I swear I saw a bead of moisture in the corner of his eye. I didn’t understand then, but I think he considered it a great kindness Mrs. Douglas had done.

As we turned to leave, the door to the office swung open and an old man, dressed in a three piece suit and looking utterly lost stepped in. His wrinkled face was puckered up and he looked as if a great deal was on his mind. He ran a hand through his grey hair and turned to Mrs. Douglas.

“What going on?” he asked, though not unkindly.

“Hello, Mr. Lambert,” Mrs. Douglas said, plucking at an edge of her skirt nervously.

“Cake?” Mr. Lambert asked distractedly as his eyes settled on the bakery box my father held.

“Yes sir,” my father said uncertainly. “It’s my son’s birthday and Mrs. Douglas was kind enough to have a cake brought up.”

“Birthday?” Mr. Lambert said with a jerk. His eyes moved from the cake to me with great interest. “Well now, how old is the birthday boy?” He asked this with great interest, nodding his head to himself as if he’d discovered a great secret and wanted to pursue it further.

“Ten,” I said nervously. Here was a man who owned an entire company, a very powerful man who could fire my father with a flick of his hand, if it so suited him. “I’m ten, sir.”

“Ah yes, a very good age, indeed,” Mr. Lambert said. “And a birthday boy needs a present! Now, let me see, what do I have that might interest a ten year old boy?”

My father twitched nervously. “That’s not necessary, sir,” he said, looking embarrassed and put off. I’m sure it had something to do with the fact that, for some odd reason, people had taken a sudden interest in his son and were giving him gifts left and right, as if he couldn’t provide for his own family properly.

“Oh, think nothing of it,” Mr. Lambert said dismissively. He fumbled around in his pants pockets for a moment, frowned as if he’d lost something important, then shook himself and reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out a shiny object. He held it in trembling fingers for a moment and then a genuine smile lit his face. “This,” he said breathlessly, “is a lucky coin. I made my first small fortune with it. It was given to me by a very important man.” He failed to elaborate further on who this significant person might have been. Instead, he bent down and placed it firmly into my palm. “Would you like it, young man?”

I looked at the coin warily. It certainly wasn’t the bike I’d been hoping for. It was a strange little bit of metal, with smooth edges. I examined it more closely and saw that on one side was a strange symbol which somewhat resembled a star, though there were too many points and its lines were curved inward. I flipped it over and on the other side was the image of what I imagined was a joker, though it looked nothing like the pictures I’d seen on playing cards. The man had a crocked grin and eyes that seemed far too big for his face. It made me nervous and strangely excited all at the same time.

My father nudged me and muttered, “What do you say, kiddo?”

“Thank you, sir,” I told Mr. Lambert and gave him a forced smile.

“So you’d like it then, young man?” Mr. Lambert said, then knelt in front of me until we were looking each other straight in the eyes. His intense stare frightened me but I could not be made to look away. Something in his gaze held me on the spot, terrified of what might happen if I looked elsewhere before answering his question.

“Oh yes sir,” I said, “I’d like it very much.”

Suddenly, Mr. Lambert shuddered. It was brief and I hardly noticed it at all. I was too busy praying that he would look elsewhere, anywhere but straight into my eyes, as if he were reading everything that passed through my mind. Finally, he shook himself as if waking from a trance and said with a slanted smile, “Then I pass it onto you.”

My father made a strange sound and I pulled my gaze from Mr. Lambert to stare warily at him. He had an odd look on his face, strained and a little annoyed. He cleared his throat and said, “I had better get back to work, sir.”

Rising from his crouch, Mr. Lambert muttered, “Right-o. Well I won’t keep you. Have a good birthday, young man.” Then, as if in a daze, he strode from the office and disappeared down the hall.

“Well, that was rather strange,” Mrs. Douglas said, scratching her head in confusion. She smiled stiffly and shook her head. “The poor man really is a bit strange, isn’t he?” She didn’t seem to be talking to anyone in particular and neither my father or I chose to respond.

With a muttered, “Thank you for the cake,” my father excused us from the office. I followed closely behind him, examining the coin Mr. Lambert had given me, rolling it around in my hand and trying to sense what, if any magic, the little trinket might hold.

The rest of the afternoon went on rather uneventfully. My father cleaned up messes left behind by careless people, did some repairs around the building and clocked out at five p.m.

On the drive home we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things my mother needed for dinner that night. I gazed longingly at the toys on display, particularly at a train set that advertised “Realistic scenery“ as part of it‘s appeal. My father caught me staring and knelt down beside me to examine it as well.

“Sorry, kiddo, we can’t afford it,” he said with a sigh, looking every bit as sorry as he sounded.

“Are you sure?” I asked casually, and my fingers strayed to my pocket, where I fingered the “lucky coin” Mr. Lambert had given me. I fished it out and held it up to the light. It shined strangely under the fluorescents in the supermarket.

“It’s a train set or new shoes,” my father said sternly, “and I don’t think your mother would appreciate it if I let you run around in those broken down things you’re wearing much longer.”

I thought about this for a moment, then examined my shoes. They looked perfectly okay to me. The stains and tears didn’t seem like a problem, but of course all little boys would rather have a new toy than a new pair of clean, sturdy shoes. I looked up at my father, frowned stubbornly and said, “What if we flip for it?”

Of course, I didn’t expect my father to fall for any such thing. It was worth a try, however pointless the suggestion might be. So I was surprised when my father said, in a dazed tone, “Well, why not? Heads, you get new shoes. Tails, you get a train set. Sound fair?”

I was dazzled by his sudden agreement. I turned to look at him, to test the waters. I didn’t know whether he was serious or just putting me on. He wasn’t looking at me, however, but at the coin I held in my hand. He seemed transfixed by the shiny bit of metal and that’s when I began to realize that the coin, indeed, might be magical.

So, I flipped the coin. It tumbled up and up into the air and I swear I saw the joker on one side wink at me, but the thought was lost when the coin came back down again, turning end over end, to hit the supermarket floor. It spun in a circle for a moment and I watched it, mesmerized by it’s glow, until it tilted to one side and landed.

Tails. I got my train set. Later, when I realized what it had, in reality, cost me, which was much more than a new pair of shoes, I shattered it to pieces with a baseball bat. But that was much later on.

We went home and my mother was not at all happy to discover that my father had spent money we didn’t really have in the first place. They fought for a while and I hid in my bedroom, fiddling with my train set, not really understanding the concept of money and “not having any.”

Finally, after the shouting had died down and my mother had grudgingly accepted that my new toy would not be returned, my parents called me downstairs to open a few meager presents. We ate the rest of the cake Mrs. Douglas had given me and then they tucked me into bed, each kissing me on the forehead and wishing me a happy birthday.

-----

I slept in late the next morning. I was awaken from a strange dream of deformed stars and laughing jokers by an agonized scream. It was followed by horrible denials and shouted curses. I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the door, when I poked my head out warily and called for my mother. When I got no reply but more bone rattling screams, I began to shake. I stepped out into the hallway and called once more.

A police officer appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He held his hat in his hands. “Come on down here, young man,” he said warily, speaking with a strong, firm voice, trying to override the screaming.

I crept down the hallway and stumbled down the stairs. At the bottom, the police officer took my hand and guided me toward our living room, where my mother was collapsed on the floor, weeping and clinging to another officer.

“Mommy!” I cried, alarmed to see her in such a state, and ran to her. She opened her arms and I fell into them. “What’s wrong?” I demanded, and gave her a firm shake.

“Oh baby,” she wept, encircling me in her arms and holding me so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Oh god. Oh no. Oh honey.”

“Mommy, you’re hurting me!” I shouted, and pulled roughly from her embrace. “I don’t understand. Why are you crying?”

One of the police officers stepped forward and helped my mother into a chair, where she tried to compose herself. After many minutes of soft gasps and stifled sobs, she found her voice and said, “It’s your daddy, honey. He’s been…” Here she paused and sucked in a deep breath, armed the tears from her face and blurted, “he’s been killed in a car accident.”

It was the worst shock of my life. I screamed and I cried, I lashed out at my mother, hitting her with my closed fists, telling her to take it back, to stop saying such awful, terrible lies. But of course she couldn’t recant, couldn’t leap up and say, “Just kidding!” My father was dead. He would never come home. He would never kneel down and say, “Hop on, sport, pony’s waiting.”

Through my tears I caught bits and fragments of conversation between my mother and the police officers. On his way to work, my father’s car had stalled on the railroad tracks and he’d been unable to free himself before his car had been pulverized by an oncoming train. The conductor claimed not to have seen the car until the last moment, and by then the breaks had done no good. My father had died in an instant, the police officers assured my mother, he hadn’t suffered.

But, of course, suffering is for the living, not the dead.

-----

I tried enjoying my train set, the last thing my father had given me before my death, but of course that was impossible. I couldn’t look at the thing without breaking down in tears and begging God to send my father home to me. Eventually, my mother put it in a box and stowed it away in the attic.

-----

When I was twelve years old, my best friend Johnny had a baseball bat I coveted. It was autographed by a famous player, for the life of me I cannot remember who, and it seems unimportant at this point. I wanted the baseball bat like I wanted nothing else in life, except maybe to see my father again. Of course, Johnny could not be parted from the thing, wouldn’t even let anyone else touch it, and that drove me wild with jealously.

One morning, while we were all gathered on the baseball field readying ourselves for a game, I said to Johnny, “Why won’t you share your bat?”

He laughed and told me, “My dad gave me this for my birthday. I don’t want anyone’s grubby hands on it!”

This upset me so much that I sat down hard on the bleachers and nearly bawled my eyes out. My fingers strayed into my pocket and I felt the smooth edge of something metal in my pocket. I pulled the object out and saw that it was the strange coin Mr. Lambert had given me two years earlier. My eyes widened and a sudden thought occurred to me.

“Why don’t we flip for it?” I said dismissively. Like with my father and the train set, I didn’t expect Johnny to agree to such a thing.

“Flip?” he asked, distractedly. I turned to look at him and saw that his eyes had drifted to the coin, which I walked over my knuckles with practiced ease. “Okay,” he said a little breathlessly, his eyes following the little silver trinket as if he were hypnotized. “Heads, you get the bat, tails…” His eyes pulled away from the coin for a moment and he searched the general area, until he finally caught sight of a baseball and glove I’d brought with me. “…I get those.”

So I flipped the coin. I watched it flip through the air and even before I caught it in my hand I knew what I would see. Heads. I won the baseball bat.

Later that night, after I’d settled in front of the TV with my newly acquired toy at my feet, the phone rang. My mother answered and after several minutes of hushed conversation came into the living room, tears in her eyes. With a gasped sob, she sat me down and explained to me that my best friend was dead.

Apparently, after I’d left the baseball field, Johnny had stayed behind to play one more game. Standing on the pitchers mound, he’d thrown a ball that the batter returned at high speed. Instead of flying off into left field as it probably should have done, the baseball had hit Johnny in the face so hard it shattered his nose and jaw and caved in his skull.

Suffice it to say, the baseball bat went into the attic with the train set.

-----

A few years later, when I was fifteen, I jokingly asked my girlfriend if she’s flip a coin to determine whether or not to give her virginity to me. Heads, yes. Tails, no.

Heads. I had a blissful night of awkward arms and poking knees, breathless pants and whispered promises. It was a night I’ve never forgotten, though not for the obvious reasons.

Two days later, they found my girlfriend’s bloody and ravaged body. She’d been accosted walking home late one night from a friends house. After savagely raping her, the assailant slit her throat with a straight razor and left her in a ditch to rot. They never caught him. I’m not sure he existed for more than a moment. What I’m more certain of is that he probably had a leering smile and eyes too big for his head.

-----

It should have been easy to discard that cursed coin, which brought with it supernatural luck at a cost I dearly did not want to pay. People might have told me it was just coincidence, that there was no way a simple little piece of metal could give me anything I wanted yet take away everything that mattered to me. But I never told anyone of it’s existence. I couldn’t have found the words to explain it, anyway.

I swear I tried to rid myself of the coin. I threw it into the river. I left it on the train tracks to be flattened. I dropped it into a storm drain. When I was on a class trip to Washington D.C. at the age of sixteen, I left it in the motel room, tucked away between the pages of the Bible. I did every thing I could to be rid of it. I always found it again, in my pocket, under my pillow, or in my locker at school. I could not be shed of it.

And I could not stop using it.

My friend Tony received five hundred dollars from his grandparents for his eighteenth birthday. We flipped for it. I won. He died robbing a liquor store, shot to death by the owner with five hundred dollars in stolen cash grasped in his bleeding hands.

My girlfriend Tina, who I’d met in eleventh grade and fallen madly in love with, won a car through a sweepstakes. I won the car though a flip of a coin. She was run down by a drunk driver two days later.

My grandfather came to stay with us one winter. Grandma had passed away the year before. One death that was not my fault, thank God. My grandfather loved his cigars. One afternoon he took the last of them from a wooden case on the table and pressed it to his lips, ready to light it and enjoy its harsh taste. I said, “Let’s flip for it.” The next day we found him dead in his bed. The autopsy found cancer throughout his lungs. No one could explain why, the year before, his physical had shown him in perfect health.

Death was all around me, death was in me. I was the reaper and I couldn’t keep from killing all the people I loved. The coin was a curse and I vowed to get rid of it, no matter the cost.

The first time I wrapped it in a towel and tried to flush it down the toilet, I couldn’t understand why my mother stared at me as if I were insane. The second time I did it, it occurred to me that I’d seen this scenario played out before, only I had been a witness to the madness of the coin, not it’s perpetrator. I remembered Mr. Lambert and my tenth birthday with some horror.

When I went to him, to demand an explanation, he looked at me through sad, tired eyes and said, “Pass it on. Give it away. Until you do, it will continue to use you.” I couldn’t understand what he’d meant. Hadn’t I been using the coin all this time? It occurred to me that his words were closer to the truth than I wanted to understand. I was not using the magic in the coin, it was using me.

From some perusal of library computers, I unraveled a secret story of riches and sacrifice. Mr. Lambert built his empire on the misfortunes of others. Everywhere, the trail of money he had amassed ended at a tombstone. Strange deaths followed him everywhere. Some said he was cursed, though by what they couldn’t say. Had he offended some malevolent spirit? Had he made a deal with the devil? Oh, but I knew, I could see the truth in all the misdirection. He’d been given a “lucky” coin, passed on to him by someone would could stand the curse no more. Years later he’d passed it on to me.

I tried to give the coin away, but the torment of the thoughts of who I’d curse in my place were too hard to bare. I’d used the coins magic for my own needs, and though I had not gotten from it the great fortunes its previous owners had, I’d made my bed and I’d sleep in it.

So I flipped the coin and people died. I went on and on like this for years, having my wishes granted and killing friends and strangers alike in the process. I’d resigned myself to this pitiful existence, unable to disobey the will of the cursed coin, unable to part with it. Until the day my ten year old daughter came home from school with a bag of candy under her arm.

“Hey kiddo,” I said, ruffling her hair the way my father had once done. She smiled up at me, showing me a mouth missing its two front teeth.

“Hi daddy!” she said, popping a piece of hard candy into her mouth and delighting in the taste. “Look what Bobby gave me today!” She held up the bag of candy and smiled blissfully.

“Can I have a piece?” I asked. I reached out and playfully made a grab for the bag. She laughed heartily and sidestepped my seeking hand, holding the candy just out of my reach and sticking her tongue out at me.

“Gee, I dunno!” she said, teasingly. “I think maybe I ought to keep it all for myself.”

And then I said the words I dreaded to hear, the words which had cursed so many innocent people to death. “Why don’t we flip for it?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the hateful coin, began walking it across my knuckles, and all the while I raged against the pull of the coin, against the need to flip in through the air and see it come down.

It was a bag of candy. It was a bag of fucking candy! And I was about to kill my daughter, the light of my life, just to have it.

She laughed and opened her mouth to say the dreaded words: okay, Daddy, let’s flip for it!

I hit myself in the face, my hand fisted around the coin so tightly my fingers tingled. My daughter became very still, staring at me as if I’d gone insane. Then her eyes clouded over and she opened her mouth. “Okay, Daddy, let’s…” she mutter and I began to scream. My hand had fallen open and the coin was exposed once more. I forced my fist closed and hit myself harder.

“Daddy? What’s wrong?” she asked, pulled out of the hypnotic state once the coin was out of sight. She looked terrified, shaking all over and tears pouring down her face. I couldn’t bear to frighten her more, but I opened up my mouth and screamed, “GO TO YOUR ROOM!” She fled.

I almost gave chase, but with every last bit of will forced myself to stumble from the house and to my car. I fled the neighborhood in a daze, not sure where I could go to escape the pressing fate of the cursed coin. Finally, after long minutes of driving aimlessly, I came to a stop in front of the grocery store where I’d once, long ago, flipped the coin and killed my father.

Standing on the curb was a homeless man with a sign which read: “Any little bit helps.”

I flew from my car, grasped his dirty shirt collar and demanded, “Do you have friends? Do you have family? Do you have anyone, anywhere, whom you cherish?”

“No,” he said, his eyes wild with fright. I’m sure he thought me a madman. Probably, he was right.

“Do you want this?” I held up the coin, and it trembled in my fingers. “Do you, do you?” I demanded, crying all the while, begging God that this man without family, without friends, without love would please, oh dear God please, take the cursed coin.

“Sure, guy, sure,” he panted, shaking a Styrofoam cup full of change at me. “Any little bit helps.”

My fingers loosened, the coin fell through air, end over end, and disappeared into the cup he held. I swear the joker on one side of that cursed thing winked at me before it was out of sight. My legs collapsed beneath me and I fell to the ground, sobbing and gasping. I wiped my face with a shaking hand and said, “Then I pass it on to you.”

-----
 
Author's Notes: I wrote this based on a very simple writing prompt: a coin. It is my favorite of all the short stories I've written.