Come Forward

powerball
photo by rwhite..

She left without so much as a word. He tore apart the kitchen looking for a note—isn’t that where women always left their notes in the movies—and then went to the bedroom to collapse in exhaustion and found the note, resting on his pillow. All that the note said was “I’m leaving you.” No shit, he thought. But why? Sure, in no way could someone say this was marital bliss, but we had our good times, didn’t we? You liked when I made fun of actors during movies, or at least you laughed. Some of the time. I know you hated how my spoon scraped the cereal bowl, and how I couldn’t stay on a television channel for more than five minutes, and how I had to buy a Powerball ticket every weekend. You always thought that was my ticket for escape. It was, baby, but not from you. It was our ticket out of this neighborhood with its crack house and thumper cars. It was our ticket out of our jobs, so I could go into the Garage and tell the foreman to go fuck himself, and so you could tell the school that you were done dishing food onto the plates of all those thankless delinquents.

That’s when he realized: the last Powerball ticket was not on the nightstand, where he usually kept them.

Later that evening he heard on the news that the winning ticket had been sold from his home town, from the convenience store that he always bought his ticket from, but the winner had not yet come forward.