Chance and Chipmunk

To dabble with chance is to stand in front of a waterfall and hope that you won't get wet. Sometimes the wind is blowing the right way, or the water is slow from too many days without rain, or trees provide shelter from the mist.

Other times, you get wet. Plain and simple. So wet, in fact, that your shoes squeak and your socks squish and your hair will never be the same.

Chance eluded Gus, the same way a chipmunk will avoid humans who seem more intent on wringing its neck than giving it a peanut. Gus would buy lottery tickets, three every week, and he never won. Not on the scratch and win, not on the pick six in 49, and not even in the pull open for charity game, where every third ticket is a winner.

Not Gus's tickets. Nope. He would sit in the mall, near the lottery kiosk, and in his first move, he would carefully scratch each symbol. Sure, sometimes two would match, sometimes more than one pair. But never three, the winning combination. Next, he would pull open the charity cards, revealing an assortment of lemons and cherries, but never the combination that shouted out victory. Finally, he would dig in his pocket for last week's forty-niner, and walk slowly up to the kiosk. The self-help scanner would then inform him, again, that he should try again.

"I always do," he would tell the machine. Funny, but the machine never thanked him, or laughed at his misfortune, or gave him advice.