LUCKY

This is a new low for me, and I once passed through the entire digestive tract of a full-grown Schnauzer. But even in those dark hours, I never felt as terrified and lonely as I do right now in this dim, damp hole, peering out at the distant world through iron bars.

The bars see my fear and do their best to calm me down. They are hardy and good-hearted, and they shout out kindly, but ungrammatical, words of encouragement.

“Yall’s lucky, you is! Landed on that there leaf, and when waters rise, you’ll float, sure! See the world! Not bad for a little guy!”

They mean well, and I pretend to share their optimism, while I do my utmost to hide my disgust at the rust devouring their faces and the mud and moldy leaves clinging to their beards.

I’m a snob, I admit it, but I learned long ago that the world hates a snob. Especially my fellow pennies! I understand where they’re coming from, you get defensive when people won’t even take you as change. “Keep it,” they say, holding up their palms with barely-concealed disdain. And those who do deign to take you from the cashier, dump you in an old coffee can as soon as they get home where you end up being lorded over by every other denomination.

So they take it out on each other, especially anyone who is different. As soon as they see the 1982 D on my belly, they turn their tails, and before long I hear the whispering: “Someone thinks he’s better than us!”

I keep quiet and never give voice to my true feeling, which is, “Hell yes, I’m better! I’m the last of my kind, the very last casting of the true copper penny!”

Look, zinc is fine; I’m 5% zinc myself. But 97.5% zinc? Come on! Just enough copper to fool the rubes. But we know. They know; it’s why they're so defensive. A scrawny little dime has 30 times more copper than these pennies. It’s pathetic, but I say nothing.

I don’t tell them about being minted on the very last hour of the very last day of production, that I am the absolute end of a once-noble family line. Nor do I tell them about my many adventures, my perilous passage through the inside of a living canine, a journey none of them could make as they are toxic. They’d end up buried in a pet cemetery.

Is my current situation actually more dire than that strange odyssey, when gastric juices seemed determined to dissolve me? Probably not. Most likely time has melted the trauma, re-minted it as adventure. But I honestly don’t remember ever feeling fear in that dark world, only motion sickness when the idiot who had swallowed me rolled in every smelly mess he could find and disgust every time someone praised him.

“Good boy, my ass!” I’d yell as loudly as I could to amuse the aluminum tags who’d tinkle their lady-like, high-pitched giggles in response. They knew as well as I did exactly the kind of dolt we were dealing with, though of course they could never say it out loud.

Then one day, motion stopped. It was still just as dark, but the tags were gone, and the world grew cold. Nothing was nearby, but the patient, quiet grass. No one to talk to, not even the meat creatures to amuse me with their foolishness.

So I went to sleep. No bear ever hibernated as deeply as I did. Even when the spring rains washed me clean, and the summer sun warmed me, I lay as still as death, never even allowing myself to dream about reentering the world of the living. I let myself be buried twice, once by leaves, and a second time by snow, but nothing disturbed my slumber.

It wasn’t until the second summer that I stirred when the smell of smoke awoke me. Not that I’m afraid of fire, but I thought it would be lovely to see again the bold orange goddess of my birth. I looked around, eager for conflagration, but it was nothing but a single leaf, not even on fire really, but simply smoking from the rays of the sun that were somehow concentrated in a single spot.

I was attempting to puzzle this out when I was pinched between two fingers and raised aloft. I found myself looking through a round pane of glass at an enormous eye. A ten-year-old boy, the very apex of meat-creature stupidity, was looking at me with an expression of wonder reserved only for the truly moronic.

“Gee,” said a voice even more idiotic than usual, “1984 D!” And for a moment, I wondered if I had misjudged the lad. He held me tight and began running, and I thought, “Finally, someone who knows my value!”

“Look, Mom!” he said, holding me in the face of a singularly uninterested, middle-aged woman, “1982 D!”

She turned from her magazine long enough to pretend to look. “Mm-hmm,” was all she could manage in response. I’ve never seen a more bored face, and I’ve spent time with bank tellers!

“But don’t you see?” he went on. “It’s 1982 D!” And I was sure what was coming next. He’d tell her about the 2.95 grams of pure Montana copper (and the .16 grams of zinc - I’m proud of all my heritage!) that were poured into the most beautiful numismatic design ever created, a salute to the man who saved the Union, the only coin to depict a president twice, both in noble profile on the obverse and in miniature, seated in honor in his memorial, on the reverse.

But I was wrong. All he said was, “I was born in 1982! And I’m D! Get it? This is my lucky penny!”

“That’s nice, David” and the page of the magazine turned.

It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I came to love the boy. He had no more logic or common sense than pig iron, but I was with him for 30 years, and as any mother will attest, it is hard not to love anyone who is totally dependent on you. For David never made a single decision without consulting me.

At first, I found his method of prognostication as nauseating as it was ridiculous. Somer-saulting over and over through the air for the sole purpose of seeing which side I would land on - it was worse than tumbling inside that damn dog. But you get used to anything. I soon learned that if I kept my gaze on the horizon, my peripheral vision would reveal a glimpse of the world around me that most coins never get to see, and in time I actually looked forward to these acrobatics.

He flipped for everything. He flipped for tater tots vs. mashed, red shirt vs. blue, horror video vs. comedy. He chose his college by a coin flip, and then made the fatal determination to spend the rest of his life as an accountant on the basis of how many rotations I made in the air before landing in his hand.

And though it makes no sense, I came to care about the outcome of every toss. I quickly realized that obverse up pleased the boy. “Heads!” he’d shout, smiling, and if I landed reverse up, and no one was around, he’d likely flip again until he had the result he wanted. Despite myself, I wanted to please him, and though the power of will is small compared to angular momentum, it is not nothing. Over the years, through thousands of flips, I gave him the outcome he desired 51% of the time.

He never got any smarter, that’s true, but he had one quality very rare in humans: loyalty. Despite ample evidence that my guidance hadn’t exactly led to a life of luxury, he never gave up on me. Every day I was in his pocket, and at night I sat on his nightstand and chatted with the knobs on his clock-radio while he slept.

Then something happened that altered the pattern, and I was a part of that as well. One evening, alone as usual in his little apartment, David was uncommonly antsy. The TV was on, but he wasn’t lying on the couch watching it. He was pacing, walking back and forth for no reason that I could comprehend, when he pulled me out of his pocket. The flip that time was harder than usual, and I can remember noticing the dust on the tops of the blades of the ceiling fan. He caught me as always and smashed me down on his forearm, but there was a noticeable pause before he withdrew his hand and took a look. And when he saw the profile of our 16th president, he frowned.

He returned me to his pocket and took out his phone. His leg shook as he punched the buttons, and when he talked his voice hit notes I hadn’t heard since I first met him, but when he returned the phone to his pocket, I heard him shout “Yes!” so I supposed he must have had some sort of delayed reaction to flipping heads.

We moved around a lot more after that, not so much time on the couch watching TV. His step was livelier now, and he hardly ever took me out for a flip. There was another meat creature around most of the time, and at night, he’d forget all about me, leave me in his pocket on the floor with nothing to do but listen to the bed springs complain.

Then one day I met her. We were downtown, and David’s leg was trembling more than usual as he talked to somebody. There was metal nearby, behind glass, lots of metal, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Then after an age he put a small box in his pocket, and I knew.

“Your majesty!” I gasped, “Forgive my manners, I’ve never been in the presence of royalty.”

“Oh please,” she demurred, “I’m only an alloy like yourself.”

She was shaped like the edge of a coin with the center gone and a chunk of carbon was stuck to her at one end, but even that imperfection could not distract from her loveliness. When I was young, I sometimes met the ancients, coins made of actual silver, but gold! It was beyond my imagination. Her beauty radiated like heat. I found myself tongue-tied for the first time in my life, and naturally, she did not bother to converse with the likes of me.

Meanwhile, David seemed to be lost. My sense of direction is perfect, and I could tell we’d been walking north and south, north and south, for 20 minutes, so I was surprised that as soon as he pulled me out of his pocket, I recognized where we were, in front of the other meat creature’s apartment. David was staring at the door with a blank expression, and his hand was shaking, so I concluded the poor boy must have suffered a stroke, but he took me in his right hand, positioned his thumb, and gave a mighty flip.

And missed me! Thirty years, thousands - maybe tens of thousands- of flips and now he can’t catch me! His sleeve batted me aside and I struck the corner of the bottom step and rolled, down the sidewalk and off the curb. The last thing I saw, before I plunged into darkness, was David on hands and knees, desperately searching in entirely the wrong direction.

I’ll never see him again, I’m pretty sure of that. And I’ll never see her again either. The vision of her loveliness stays with me, but it only serves to make my current world seem even uglier than it is, as if she appeared only for that single purpose - to make my misery that much worse.

“Someone’s coming” say the bars, but they’ve said that so often, every time feet passed on the sidewalk above. They want to cheer me up, and I let them think they did.

“Great!” I shout through gritted teeth. But this time the shadow stops. I see a head; it’s him, stupidly peering into the darkness.

He doesn’t see me. The head withdraws, and I feel the little bit of hope I had dissolve before my eyes. I’ll sleep again, I think, hibernate a hundred years, a thousand, be found by some archaeologist unearthing an ancient civilization.

But there is a light now shining through the grate. It flicks around, searching the walls, the floor, until it finally finds my leaf. But the edge of the leaf casts a shadow over me and again I feel my heart sink; he can’t see me from that angle. Just then an arm emerges between the bars. The light turns and focuses straight down, shining directly on me. I hear a shout of triumph.

“Heads!”