A box of dice and a bag of tricks

"Daddy, what's in the bag?"

"A box of dice and a bag of tricks, love," he would respond, sometimes pausing to kiss her forehead, sometimes stroking her cheek with a faraway look in his eyes. She loved the evenings after school. Her dad was always just waking up when she got home; he would help with her homework and then make dinner while she watched her favourite television shows. They would eat dinner while watching the news and wait until her mum came home. Her dad would take the bag from her mum and head out for the night.

"Mum, what's in the bag?" she would ask as her parents whispered to each other in the kitchen.

"Your future, my present, and more past than you need to know, Crystal," her mum would reply, handing the bag over to dad. They never really looked at the bag, her mum and dad, they just traded it like a relay baton when walking in and out of the small apartment. "Say goodbye to daddy, baby, it's time for bed."

"Goodnight, Daddy. I love you, will you show me a trick soon?"

"Maybe not these tricks, Krissy, honey," her dad would reply laughing, leaning down to pick up Crystal and give her a kiss. "I'd never fool you with these ones."

Crystal sat on the edge of her dad's bed, looking down at his fragile form. "A box of dice and a bag of tricks, Dad?"

"What else could I say, Krissy?" he croaked, hand reaching out to sit on Crystal's knee. "We never wanted you to know, we had a plan. You were never to know." He broke down into another fit of coughing. It sounded so much worse in the sterile emptiness of the hospital room, the machines beeping to accentuate the silence between each of his wracking breaths.

"So why?" Crystal rested her hand for a moment on her dad's limp fingers, and then pushed his arm away from her. "Why do I find out three days before I go to college, why do I find out at all? And why like this?"

"The money, baby. Not a lot, but enough, for you," his eyes were full of guilt, glistening with tears that could not have been far from falling. "Your mum decided that we had to stop using as soon as you were born, but we could still push, we still needed to push, for you, so you saw normal, so you saw us as normal. But your mum fell first, and when she did, I fell soon after. We still pushed, but we lost our way."

"Why didn't you stop when she died? I wouldn't have known, Dad, why would I have known?" Crystal turned her head to look at the doorway, trying her best not to sniff audibly or let her shoulders convulse. "She just disappeared, you let me think she just disappeared!"

"Krissy, I'm sorry. For what good it does, I am sor--" her dad broke into a violent episode of coughing. Crystal looked down at him, at the intravenous tube in his arm adding little to the pinhole damage already in existence, at the blood starting to show through the bandage around the gunshot wound in his chest, and she could feel the shaking in his legs from withdrawal. "I didn't know any other way. I still don't."

"A box of dice and a bag of tricks, Dad." she stood up and looked down at her dad's gaunt face. "Thank you for putting me first, but fuck you for how you did it!"

"It's always gambling and illusion, Krissy, always," his voice had died halfway through the sentence leaving Crystal to read the rest from his lips. She leaned down to kiss his forehead for what she knew was the last time, and left the room to the sound of his ever-weakening cough.

A box of dice and a bag of tricks, she thought. How much do I owe to chance and magic?

A six petal rose

I can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought wryly. If someone was filming , they could make a straight-to-tv, midday movie from this tripe. With a smile, he shook his head slightly and pulled the first petal from the long-stemmed rose in his hand. It was a yellow rose, chosen not because of preference for colour, but because it was wilting and had been marked down for quick sale at the florist. Frugality was not a part of it either, he had simply chosen not to waste a healthy rose on what he was about to do.

He was looking out over the ocean from a cliff edge high above the frothy white  mess of wave meeting rock. It was a long drive to get here, but the location had come instantly to mind the moment he decided what he was going to do. Isolated, unblemished by human touch, and windy enough to let nature bite him while he admired her beauty.

He placed the rose petal on his upturned fingertips and stretched his arm out over the edge. An up-draft from the sea below quickly grabbed the petal from his hand and carried it out toward the horizon.

“She loves me.”

The old man and the sixpence

She waited at the bus stop, lost in thoughts of what the day — the future in general, really — might have in store for her.  It was a big risk this, and she knew it. The first day of her new job, a job she had left everything behind for — family, friends, house and memories — to cross the country and start anew. She stared across the road through the constant stream of traffic, trying to ease her nerves and remember the path to take from the bus set down through the city’s streets to her new workplace.

A shuffling sound she had initially mistaken for the whisper of wheel rubber kissing bitumen brought her head around to see an elderly man approaching along the footpath. His short, sliding steps were not fast, but he displayed the economy of movement and familiarity seen from someone accustomed to working with slightly faulty tools. She looked up at him as he turned to sit on the bench beside her. His face was wrinkled, skin loose from age, corners of the mouth held down by cheek muscles bound with the worn elastic of old age, and despite the thick strands of white hair poking out around his temples, she immediately knew he was balding underneath the grey, woollen flat cap he wore. Her eyes met his for the brief moment before she looked away and she was surprised to see vibrant blue irises and perfect whites — a startling contrast next to the grey radiating out of every other part of him; from his bushy eyebrows to the grey trousers he wore.

She resumed staring through the traffic across the road, watching the old man in her periphery as he reached into the pocket of his sports jacket. A moment later she heard a faint metallic ping and turned her eyes in time to see a coin tumbling through the air, to be caught deftly on the old man’s hand. From his closed fist, he turned it out onto the back of his other hand. The coin showed heads.

The old man looked at the coin and as his face broke into a smile, all assumptions she had made about his disposition vanished. His whole face seemed to glow as the wrinkles came together to accentuate his sparkling blue eyes.

“Heads,” he breathed. Her bus arrived.

…

Double-entendre

Pop! Goes the something or other.

I woke up sporting my usual morning glory and rolled over to rub it against her back. Morning glories were our shared favourite flower and this was the way she liked to wake up.

“I’m always so horny in the morning,” she said drowsily. “Can you do something about it?” I leaned over and removed the Viking helmet she was wearing.

“There you go,” I said. “You really do choose some strange sleeping attire.”

Wentworth Went

Wentworth was the littlest duckling in a small family of little ducklings. Like most ducks, he could not afford the excessive rental prices of a medium-density residential area, so he lived in a tiny pond found in a miniature park on the shortest street in the smallest village in the— Well, Wentworth was not really certain that there could be anything larger than the village so he did not think about what the village might be in because he was a duck, and ducks did not give much time to speculation.

From very early on Wentworth knew that he was not a typical duck. For one thing, he had a name — something that none of his duckling siblings seemed to have. He would never mention it of course, but Wentworth could not even tell if his kin were girls or boys and when it came time to buy Christmas presents, he usually relied on how masculine or feminine their “quacks” were . Another thing that made Wentworth different from other ducks was that he celebrated Christmas and could use words like “masculine” and “feminine” correctly, even if it was only in his internal monologue.