The Scratch Ticket
1/1/23
One day in 2018, there was a girl walking on from a breakup, a parent she loved, a boy she liked who she could now date, her old roller skates, and other things, and they all swam in her head. She walked aside the trees. She paused for a moment and looked at the trees. They were strong, so she must be, too. Then a man who came up to her was trying to be funny, she thought, when he asked,
“Would you like to have one of these scratch tickets?”
In his hand was a rectangular sheet of neon orange colored card. It was covered in a surface one could scratch off with a coin, key, or the back of an earring. The ticket had numbers and letters to match for prizes.
“I don’t want a scratch ticket,” she said. “No thanks.”
“But why not?”
A mail carrier was walking down the street. He turned and gestured, and the girl felt less threatened, realizing she was in a neighborhood.
“Come on, I’m not going to do you like that hunny.”
“What do you mean?” asked the woman.
“Come on. Scratch the ticket.”
“I don’t gamble.”
“You little chick!”
“Woah,” exclaimed the young lady. “What? Why are you calling me little chick?”
The man was wearing a tan jacket with buttons. He tried to push the scratch ticket into her hand. She cried out and hit his arm away, then he cracked his jaw like he had too much coffee, and he transformed into a squirrel and ran up into the tree. The woman felt bad for the other squirrels who were in the tree.
She went closer to the branches and tried to see the man who had just called her that biting name.
There was a punk squirrel in the thick of it, reclining on the branch on a tiny cellphone, totally sucked into the internet-feed.
He looked at her and said,
“I didn’t do nothing.”
The mail carrier was up the street some ways. She looked at the ground. There was the scratch ticket the man had offered her. There was no way she was picking that up.
Two days later, the young lady was out with some girlfriends – she had drunken alcohol and did not want to drive. A few nice guys at the bar reminded her not to be driving, and three offered to take her home. She said no but kissed one guy and gave him her phone number as one of her favorite Rihanna songs played,
“YELLOW DIAMONDS IN THE LIGHT.”
The man with the phone number was super psyched and went home with his friends keeping the number to himself for good luck and privacy.
The next day, Jonathan sat cross-legged, smoking by his window. He looked out the window. On the side of a nearby deli, there was an advert showing several scratch tickets splayed to be attractive. Jonathan thought, ‘If I can make some more money quick, I can get this girl I met a gold bracelet or something like that for our first date.’
So first Jonathan texted her,
[Good morning beautiful.]
And then he walked to the deli, bought a chocolate milk, then also a scratch ticket. Meanwhile, the girl was leaving her girlfriend’s flat, saying goodbye as she went home after about twelve hours of being at her girl’s. When she was in her ride-share home, the girl looked out the window and saw there was the same scratch ticket the man had tried to force into her hand the other day stuck to the window.
She almost screamed so that the driver could recognize this was happening. The girl was afraid to witness the paranormal by herself.
The young lady, whose name she preferred not to share, took deep breaths in and heard her mom say, ‘This is almost over.’ The car exited the tunnel. The scratch ticket had slipped into the car and now was in her hand. She reached into her purse and pinched a penny. She did not check the year on the penny. She just thought, ‘Whatever curse is on this scratch ticket, I hope it ends here.’ She scratched her numbers, ended up matching three 8s like the directions proposed. The prize bar was at the bottom of the sheet. She scratched it, and the prize box read:
{You have won a brand-new day}
She breathed, not feeling relieved.
She looked around. A nerdy man was facing the ground and walking like he had a big bag on his back. There was a gardening store, a grocery store, and she saw women around her, and she thought, ‘They are all being strong. It is okay if I don’t know what something means.’
She replied to the text message from the dude at the bar,
[Thanks.]
The driver of the car, Isiah, had been patting his steering wheel and singing to the rock music in a faint voice.
They went over a bridge.
An old woman named Patty was in a car on the bridge and had just lost her mother. She was crying over the river. Isiah drove to the address he was given and let out his passenger. The girl walked up the stairs. There was a terrible buzzing in her head that told her she should think about something from two years earlier, but instead she looked at the scratch ticket and read it again:
{You have won a brand-new day}
Across the street, in an apartment on the second floor, there was a couple in their twenties who believed they were well off because they had met each other.
They embraced on the purple carpet full of crumbs.
Each had their heroes’ faces on posters on the wall.
And they sat in thin linens waiting for food to be delivered, forever.
At the end of the street, there were people who slept in the park. A few had also been given scratch tickets by the changeling.
As one man scratched the scratch ticket, he chanted,
“This is it! Es que!”
He won 5 dollars!
A philosopher down the street shouted,
“This is pointless!” and he meant everything, and he smoked!
The young lady, who had been going through a lot in the past weeks and still did not understand why the demon squirrel had tempted her in the first place, was looking forward to work that week as it would give her something to do. She laid on her comforter. She put on the fan. The electrical fan blew air and made a mechanical sound that relaxed her chest. Then she giggled. She sang a song. That evening she went to the store, and she bought five more scratch tickets from the selection of many neon-colored sheets of numbers and letters. She went into a strange woman’s car as she said she now had a scratch ticket addiction and needed a sister’s support.
She had one more ticket to scratch.
“This is the one,” she said.
So she scratched this ticket and matched three 7s.
“Yay!”
Then she scratched the lowest box, the prize box, and read:
{Congratulations, you can go back in time one week from today!}
Suddenly, the girl was outside by the trees again. She was walking on the street. Random things were swimming in her head. There were trees aside her, and the same man approached her to ask,
“Would you like to scratch a scratch ticket?”
“How do you have scratch tickets in the first place?” she asked. “You’re giving them for free?”
“Yes…see, I’m doing a social experiment to see who would want one.”
So, she accepted a scratch ticket and scratched, and she won a thousand dollars.
“That’s wonderful,” she said.
She used the money to get the scratch ticket tattooed to her thigh. She had the design put on a mug. She had towels made with the scratch ticket. She had taken a picture of it so she had it on a file. Months later, she moved to the apartment downstairs in her building and kept aging. A young man who was in love with another man lived upstairs from her apartment. He was crying because his boyfriend broke off their relationship.
A big owl came to the window.
The owl said,
“I am the unraveller of mysteries. I visit all people. I must tell you something about your neighbor that may shock you.”
“Will it be a help to me?” asked the young man.
“Maybe…”
“Okay, so tell me.”
“Hoot hoot – She has believed her present was the past...when really it is the future from a past that was erased.”
“Wow – that’s crazy gossip.”
“…”
“What is love, old owl?”
“Love – well, it is hiccups and swells of air, it becomes small so we love other people, but it is always enormous as the whole world, and all we love has different colors and shapes and noises, and when we think we lose Love, Big Love, we become afraid or insecure, for the bodies go, old or wise, but Love must always be accessible for those who will Love.”
That was all. The next morning the sun rose so the sunbeams went through the curtain and onto the once gambling woman’s feet.
On her sofa, there were pillows made with the first scratch ticket she had won. Though, that phase was over and now she could sleep, having come to terms with her experience.
From 2023