Lucky
Christina Kapp
I never buy lottery tickets because I’m not a winner. This is not a statement about the lottery, just something I have learned about myself. I’m never entirely convinced I’ll win a soda when I put money in a vending machine, so when the New York Lotto says the chances of winning first prize are 1 in 45,057,474, I’m going to keep my dollar.
I may not be a winner, but I’m not stupid.
Even people who are winners don’t win lotteries. The odds are so remote that the luck it takes to be a lottery winner might as well be bad instead of good. For example, you are as likely to win the lottery as have your cat accidentally slit your wrists with a claw and kill you. Or get struck by lightning while making chili with tomatoes you’ve swiped from your neighbor’s garden. Or have Charlie Sheen parachute into your yard.
When I was coming home last Wednesday and the Powerball jackpot was up to something like 4 billion dollars, I stopped at the liquor store to get a bottle of pinot noir. Pinot noir does not involve luck or winning. The liquor store always has a cheap bottle of it and it is 100 percent guaranteed to improve my day.
Therefore, I was feeling about as winning as I generally get when the guy in line in front of me, who wore a Giants jersey that said “Manning” across the back and 2 shorts even though it was 20 degrees outside, tipped precariously into a chip display as he counted his money. I reached out and saved a falling bag of Doritos as the Giants man regained his balance and put enough money on the counter to
purchase a twelve pack of Bud Light and a fistful of lottery tickets. His transaction complete, he turned and tucked one of the lottery tickets between my fingers and the bottle of pinot noir.
“You’re a winner!” he slurred.
“Wait!” I said, holding out the ticket. “I don’t need this.”
But the Giants man wandered out of the store with his bounty. The cashier rang up my pinot noir.
“You never know,” he said. “You might get lucky.”
I shoved the ticket into the pocket of my ski jacket and ucked the bottle under my arm. “Not likely,” I replied.
I went home, opened my wine, and had settled in on the couch to binge watch The Fall on Netflix, which had Scully in it but no aliens, when I heard a crash. The crash was louder than the TV and forceful enough that the house shook. I also might have heard glass breaking, but I couldn’t be sure. My first thought, probably because of Scully, was that this could be some kind of monster attack. I’m a realist, however, and the odds of a monster attack seemed pretty remote. It was far more likely that entity causing the crash was human.
Either way, an immediate full-scale panic seemed reasonable. I ran into the coat closet, shut the door, and called my mother.
“Something is attacking my house,” I whispered, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to grab the bottle of pinot noir which, fortunately, had not been the origin of the glass-breaking sound.
“Why do you think that?” she asked. I could hear her TV on in the
background.
“There was this really loud crash, like that time all that snow fell off the roof and shattered the windshield of the car. Remember? A loud sliding and a boom?”
“It hasn’t snowed all winter,” she said. Then there was a pause and I heard her snort a little.
“I’m about to be killed and you’re watching TV. Could you pay attention for just one second?”
“I’m sorry. Phil is trying to give Jay a new grill and he nearly singed his eyebrows off. Anyway, it’s probably just an animal outside. Where is Diana?”
Diana was my housemate. She was at a conference in San Diego.
“I think you’re pretty calm considering I am about to be chopped into tiny pieces.” She had no right to choose Modern Family over her daughter’s impending death by psycho-killer.
“You’re not going to be chopped into pieces. Are you still watching
The Fall? Isn’t that Fifty Shades of Grey guy in it?”
“I have to call 911.”
I hung up on my mother and listened for footsteps, but the house was silent. I dialed 911, my thumb poised over the “send” button, but couldn’t seem to make the call. It did seem ridiculous. I didn’t live in a horror movie. Statistically speaking, people generally didn’t have strangers break into their house and axe murder them. What generally happens is that people overreact, call the cops, and sound like
morons when they tell their stupid stories about axe murderers who turn out to be squirrels in their attics, giving the neighbors something to laugh about all the way through the Easter season.
This is something that would to happen to me. I am no fool.
I opened the door.
The house was quiet. Scully’s face was still frozen on the TV. I tiptoed through the living room to the kitchen. Nothing. I looked in both bedrooms. They were empty. Diana and I lived in a pretty crappy little house and those few glances pretty much constituted a thorough search. There was no sign of anything amiss.
I started to think my mother was right. It was just an animal outside. Or maybe it had been the TV. The show was pretty intense, and maybe the bang hadn’t been as loud as I thought. I went to the front door. The glass was cracked on one of the little window panes at the top. Maybe someone threw something. Kids are jerks. They do these things.
That seemed a likely enough scenario, so I opened the door.
That’s when the attack happened. As soon as I turned the knob, the thing burst in all at once, lashing out at me and, yes, chopping me into tiny pieces. I swear I heard it roar and I might have yelled “Scully!” as I threw my arms over my head to shield my face. I closed my eyes and fell backwards, sending the phone flying across the room. As impossible as it had seemed, in that moment I knew beyond all doubt
that I had been wrong. Crazy things did happen. The improbable was possible, which is why I should have dialed 911 and risked dying of embarrassment rather than by the hand of whatever monster had shown up to kill me.
There was a rush of air and everything went very still. When I opened my eyes it was quiet again, but cold. Everywhere was splintered wood, and a dark tangle of fingerlike things pressed into my body.
I pushed them aside and crawled toward the phone.
By the time my landlord came in through the back door, I was bundled into my ski jacket and snowpants, well into the next episode of The Fall, and more than three quarters of the way through the bottle of pinot noir.
“How could this happen?” he said, looking bewildered.
I shrugged. “Trees fall.”
He kept touching the branches coming in through the front door. Apparently he wasn’t certain they were real.
“There’s no wind. No snow. No construction,” he said, running his hand through his thinning hair.
“Are you going to fix it?”
“The tree?”
“No, the house. Or at least the front door,” I said, poking a finger through the sleeve of my ski jacket toward the opening. “It’s freezing in here.”
He said something about an insurance company and made a show of inquiring whether I had been injured and needed to see a doctor before he went out to his truck and returned with a chainsaw, which would have freaked me out—a kind of weird semi-strangery man wielding a chainsaw while I was alone in my house watching TV—but the whole situation looked worse for him than for me, so I went back to watching Scully order around the boys of the Northern Ireland police service. I couldn’t hear the TV over the noise of the saw, but it didn’t matter. The pinot noir filled in the gaps of the cold and Scully’s badassery until he was finished and said he was ready to leave. I stood up with the thought that I should see him out the back door and say goodnight, but then I felt awkward about it and stopped. It wasn’t like he was a guest or something. I put my hands in my pockets and waited
for him to leave, but he didn’t and the two of us stood there looking at one another.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked, and as he stared at me with his semi-bald head and chainsaw, I thought maybe this really was it. My landlord was a chainsaw-wielding serial killer who had cut down a tree to gain access to my house and now I was going to die and get chopped into tiny pieces. It was possible. As possible as a tree falling into my house for no reason.
But I couldn’t say that, so I just said “sure” and took the lottery ticket out of my pocket. I handed it to him and he took it.
“Hey, you never know,” I said.
I may not be a winner, but I’m not stupid.
Even people who are winners don’t win lotteries. The odds are so remote that the luck it takes to be a lottery winner might as well be bad instead of good. For example, you are as likely to win the lottery as have your cat accidentally slit your wrists with a claw and kill you. Or get struck by lightning while making chili with tomatoes you’ve swiped from your neighbor’s garden. Or have Charlie Sheen parachute into your yard.
When I was coming home last Wednesday and the Powerball jackpot was up to something like 4 billion dollars, I stopped at the liquor store to get a bottle of pinot noir. Pinot noir does not involve luck or winning. The liquor store always has a cheap bottle of it and it is 100 percent guaranteed to improve my day.
Therefore, I was feeling about as winning as I generally get when the guy in line in front of me, who wore a Giants jersey that said “Manning” across the back and 2 shorts even though it was 20 degrees outside, tipped precariously into a chip display as he counted his money. I reached out and saved a falling bag of Doritos as the Giants man regained his balance and put enough money on the counter to
purchase a twelve pack of Bud Light and a fistful of lottery tickets. His transaction complete, he turned and tucked one of the lottery tickets between my fingers and the bottle of pinot noir.
“You’re a winner!” he slurred.
“Wait!” I said, holding out the ticket. “I don’t need this.”
But the Giants man wandered out of the store with his bounty. The cashier rang up my pinot noir.
“You never know,” he said. “You might get lucky.”
I shoved the ticket into the pocket of my ski jacket and ucked the bottle under my arm. “Not likely,” I replied.
I went home, opened my wine, and had settled in on the couch to binge watch The Fall on Netflix, which had Scully in it but no aliens, when I heard a crash. The crash was louder than the TV and forceful enough that the house shook. I also might have heard glass breaking, but I couldn’t be sure. My first thought, probably because of Scully, was that this could be some kind of monster attack. I’m a realist, however, and the odds of a monster attack seemed pretty remote. It was far more likely that entity causing the crash was human.
Either way, an immediate full-scale panic seemed reasonable. I ran into the coat closet, shut the door, and called my mother.
“Something is attacking my house,” I whispered, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to grab the bottle of pinot noir which, fortunately, had not been the origin of the glass-breaking sound.
“Why do you think that?” she asked. I could hear her TV on in the
background.
“There was this really loud crash, like that time all that snow fell off the roof and shattered the windshield of the car. Remember? A loud sliding and a boom?”
“It hasn’t snowed all winter,” she said. Then there was a pause and I heard her snort a little.
“I’m about to be killed and you’re watching TV. Could you pay attention for just one second?”
“I’m sorry. Phil is trying to give Jay a new grill and he nearly singed his eyebrows off. Anyway, it’s probably just an animal outside. Where is Diana?”
Diana was my housemate. She was at a conference in San Diego.
“I think you’re pretty calm considering I am about to be chopped into tiny pieces.” She had no right to choose Modern Family over her daughter’s impending death by psycho-killer.
“You’re not going to be chopped into pieces. Are you still watching
The Fall? Isn’t that Fifty Shades of Grey guy in it?”
“I have to call 911.”
I hung up on my mother and listened for footsteps, but the house was silent. I dialed 911, my thumb poised over the “send” button, but couldn’t seem to make the call. It did seem ridiculous. I didn’t live in a horror movie. Statistically speaking, people generally didn’t have strangers break into their house and axe murder them. What generally happens is that people overreact, call the cops, and sound like
morons when they tell their stupid stories about axe murderers who turn out to be squirrels in their attics, giving the neighbors something to laugh about all the way through the Easter season.
This is something that would to happen to me. I am no fool.
I opened the door.
The house was quiet. Scully’s face was still frozen on the TV. I tiptoed through the living room to the kitchen. Nothing. I looked in both bedrooms. They were empty. Diana and I lived in a pretty crappy little house and those few glances pretty much constituted a thorough search. There was no sign of anything amiss.
I started to think my mother was right. It was just an animal outside. Or maybe it had been the TV. The show was pretty intense, and maybe the bang hadn’t been as loud as I thought. I went to the front door. The glass was cracked on one of the little window panes at the top. Maybe someone threw something. Kids are jerks. They do these things.
That seemed a likely enough scenario, so I opened the door.
That’s when the attack happened. As soon as I turned the knob, the thing burst in all at once, lashing out at me and, yes, chopping me into tiny pieces. I swear I heard it roar and I might have yelled “Scully!” as I threw my arms over my head to shield my face. I closed my eyes and fell backwards, sending the phone flying across the room. As impossible as it had seemed, in that moment I knew beyond all doubt
that I had been wrong. Crazy things did happen. The improbable was possible, which is why I should have dialed 911 and risked dying of embarrassment rather than by the hand of whatever monster had shown up to kill me.
There was a rush of air and everything went very still. When I opened my eyes it was quiet again, but cold. Everywhere was splintered wood, and a dark tangle of fingerlike things pressed into my body.
I pushed them aside and crawled toward the phone.
By the time my landlord came in through the back door, I was bundled into my ski jacket and snowpants, well into the next episode of The Fall, and more than three quarters of the way through the bottle of pinot noir.
“How could this happen?” he said, looking bewildered.
I shrugged. “Trees fall.”
He kept touching the branches coming in through the front door. Apparently he wasn’t certain they were real.
“There’s no wind. No snow. No construction,” he said, running his hand through his thinning hair.
“Are you going to fix it?”
“The tree?”
“No, the house. Or at least the front door,” I said, poking a finger through the sleeve of my ski jacket toward the opening. “It’s freezing in here.”
He said something about an insurance company and made a show of inquiring whether I had been injured and needed to see a doctor before he went out to his truck and returned with a chainsaw, which would have freaked me out—a kind of weird semi-strangery man wielding a chainsaw while I was alone in my house watching TV—but the whole situation looked worse for him than for me, so I went back to watching Scully order around the boys of the Northern Ireland police service. I couldn’t hear the TV over the noise of the saw, but it didn’t matter. The pinot noir filled in the gaps of the cold and Scully’s badassery until he was finished and said he was ready to leave. I stood up with the thought that I should see him out the back door and say goodnight, but then I felt awkward about it and stopped. It wasn’t like he was a guest or something. I put my hands in my pockets and waited
for him to leave, but he didn’t and the two of us stood there looking at one another.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked, and as he stared at me with his semi-bald head and chainsaw, I thought maybe this really was it. My landlord was a chainsaw-wielding serial killer who had cut down a tree to gain access to my house and now I was going to die and get chopped into tiny pieces. It was possible. As possible as a tree falling into my house for no reason.
But I couldn’t say that, so I just said “sure” and took the lottery ticket out of my pocket. I handed it to him and he took it.
“Hey, you never know,” I said.
