Winning Time

$20, 683.34.

Carla stared at the number representing her bank balance. It had never been nearly so high before. Yesterday it had been $683.34. Now, twenty thousand six hundred eighty three dollars and thirty four cents. Wow! She smiled. She could quit her job. Finally!

Not that this was enough money to retire on or anything like that, but it would see her through, oh, at least six months or so. She could get out of the grocery store and focus on writing.

Six months to write, to finish her book. Carla inhaled sharply, bit her lower lip, then shook her head, banishing doubt. She could do it. She would do it. After all, this $20,000 boost was prize money. First place prize money for a story she had written. So, she would use it to write and earn more money, maybe enough to cover a whole year of writing. Then she could write her next book, and that would set up a cycle, and hey!, presto change-o!, she would be an author, earning a living with her writing. She had so had enough of stocking shelves!

Working through the pandemic had been effed up.

When it first hit, and everything started shutting down, and everyone was rushing out to buy every roll of toilet paper they could lay their hands on, her instinct was to run away to a cabin in the woods far from anyone else, and sit it out. But she had just made her big move to the city a few months previously, and sunk all her money into first and last months' rent, and needed to work.

'Luckily', she had just started stocking shelves at a grocery store, and there was no shortage of work. The shortages on the shelves, though, meant nothing but stress. Customers were always coming up to you, breathing all over you, mostly not wearing masks back then, demanding to know when there would be more pasta on the shelves, or flour, or sanitizer, or beans, or any other of a hundred things that suddenly everybody needed to have ten of stocked up in their cupboards at home, in case they could never shop again.

The aisles had been claustrophobically congested! You'd haul your pallet through the crowd to the right shelf, and have people trying to pull things off before you even had it unwrapped. You had to squeeze it in at the side of the aisle and not block access to the shelf you had to stock or shoppers' access to the few items left on the shelves – it was a nightmare! And it hadn't gotten much better over the past year. There weren't so many empty shelves now, but people were feeling the strain.

Even those whose jobs weren't deemed 'essential', who had been able to stay home for months, getting government money to sit around. Carla had trouble sympathizing with them, and she writhed with envy any time she saw posts about people who had been creating like crazy during their period of self-isolation. Musicians releasing multiple albums, knitters knitting kilometer-long scarves, beaders, bakers, painters, writers – so many people at home with nothing but time on their hands, so they put their hands and brains to work producing. While she stocked produce.

Carla had tried to keep writing, but mostly she didn't get more done than a few paragraphs jotted down in her little black notebook now and then. Until she saw a post about the writing contest. That galvanized her. Imagining the possibilities of what she could do with the money – find a bigger apartment, or one with a view, or buy a car, or a new couch...!

She spent the money a million ways in her head, mostly in fantasies that ignored the whole covid thing – travel restrictions and social distancing and all that. Eating out at crowded restaurants, dancing to live music, shopping without sanitizing, trotting around the globe...! She let her mind go crazy with contagious behaviour. But she knew what she really wanted. Time to write.

With determination, she put her mind to a story. Write from personal experience, ran the usual advice. Hmm.

A couple of years previously, she had found a twenty dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat from a secondhand store. She remembered how rich she had felt with even that single bill, what discovered treasure it had been. Okay. That was her starting point.

Cosmic Feathers

The Chewer and the Chewed

Marlene made some great scores at the second-hand shop that day. She found an elaborately painted blue jug perfect for holding spoons and spatulas and stuff, jeans and three T-shirts for her son Brian, a small black notebook with writing on only one page (and in pencil, so easy to erase), and a big, navy-coloured, down-filled coat for only eight dollars, because it was spring and winter coats were half price. It looked like the lining of the coat had been mended in the past – there was a single line of hand-stitching down the center of it – but the coat seemed otherwise in perfect condition.

Seeing as it was spring, the coat went in the back of the hall closet when she got home. The blue jug she washed, filled with utensils, and set on the kitchen counter. The jeans and T-shirts went in the laundry, while the notebook she had stashed in her purse at the checkout, to have handy for jotting down observations and making lists.

***

Next winter it wasn't until January that it got cold enough for the down coat to come out of the closet. By then there was a puppy in the house. Brian had been asking for one for a year – well, had wanted one for years before that, but had become more persistent, promising he would feed it and walk it and train it and everything!, honestly he would!, and it wouldn't be any extra work for his mom! She made a list of pros and cons in the notebook, and that fall, when a friend's dog had pups, she agreed he could have one.

Marlene took Brian to choose a puppy when they were only three weeks old. Of course the pups were adorable, biting and crawling all over each other, tumbling about together. Brian held each of them in turn, and when a squiggling, hairy, brown and black handful squirmed up out of his arms to lick his face, the bond was made.

Five weeks later, at the beginning of December, Cosmo came home with them. Turned out he was a chewer. Socks, rugs, and shoes were his favourites, mainly because they could reliably be found on the floor. Anything that ended up there was fair game, though, in Cosmo's opinion.

They bought him lots of chew toys, and got used to keeping anything they didn't want holes in up off the floor, and out of Cosmo's reach. Marlene hung hooks in the front hall for coats and hats, and put shelves in the closet for so they could fit more footwear in it.

Brian's room had never been tidier. He at first smiled, the day he got home from school and found Cosmo curled up with his favourite hoodie. When the dog jumped up off the sweatshirt to greet his master, however, he revealed the chewed edges of a large hole where the gaming logo should have been. Brian's smile disappeared. The boy yelled at his puppy, who looked abashed, wagged his tail, and was forgiven. Marlene didn't even have to point out that if the hoodie was in a dresser drawer as it should have been, it wouldn't have been chewed. After that Brian kept his clothes stuffed into drawers or jumbled with shoes on his closet floor, with the door firmly latched.

One morning just a few days after the hoodie incident, Marlene opened her bedroom door to small white feathers drifting through the apartment. “What the-?” she thought. “Oh, Cosmo.” Sighing, she went to see what he had ripped apart this time, and how he had gotten at it. The trail of feathers led through the living room towards the front hall. There was also a chewed, feather-covered twenty dollar bill on the floor. Marlene picked it up and smoothed the feathers off it, frowning. Her down coat? Had the twenty been in the pocket?

She reached the hall and caught sight of her coat on the floor, the hook pulled from the wall and lying beside it. She stopped in her tracks. Her mouth dropped open. “O. M. G.” she mouthed slowly to herself. The bottom of the coat was ripped open, and feathers and money spilled out on the floor. Lots of money.

Marlene dropped to her knees and started gathering up bills. Twenties, fifties, even hundreds! Her hands trembled as she filled them with money. A few of the bills had tooth marks in them, but Cosmo apparently preferred fabric and feathers to paper. Marlene piled the bills on the table, and just stared at them. She broke into a happy dance, then got down on the floor again and ripped apart the rest of the coat.

Half an hour later Brian bumbled sleepily into the kitchen, Cosmo trotting jauntily at his feet.

“Good morning!” his mother greeted him brightly. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her little black list book in front of her.

“Oh, hey Mom,” he said blearily. “I saw feathers on Cosmo. What did he get into now?” He squinted at her. “You have feathers on you, too.”

“Yes I do,” his mother agreed cheerfully. “From what?” Brian asked.

“My coat,” his mother replied happily.

“Oh, I'm sorry – ”, the boy started to apologize for his dog.

“I'm not,” she replied.

“Huh?”

She held up two stacks of bills she had been hiding in her lap, and waved them at her son.

His eyes opened wide and he took a step forward, amazement instantly driving sleep from his brain. Brian involuntarily reached out his hands. His mother put wads of money in them. “What?” he asked, hefting them, turning them over. “Where'd this come from?”

“My coat. It was sewn into the lining.”

“Huh? There's, like, thousands of dollars here!”

“Twenty thousands,” she confirmed.

Brian's jaw dropped. He stared at her, at the money in his hands. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Brian sat down heavily, spread the money on the table. Hundreds, fifties, twenties... “Twenty thousand dollars?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand dollars.” Marlene grinned at her son, jumped up and kissed him on the forehead. She scooped Cosmo up and gave him a kiss, too, before starting on getting breakfast ready. She hummed and danced about the kitchen, feeling light and free.

Brian examined the money. He couldn't stop touching it – sifting through the bills, flipping them over, peering closely at the hundreds and fifties (he had seen plenty of twenties, if never so many at once). “What are we going to do with it all?” he asked his mother wonderingly.

She simply smiled and tapped the latest list in her notebook:

Education savings account

Holiday!

VR game set

Chew toys

New winter coat

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Contemplating possibilities the story led to in her own life, Carla wrote her new bank balance in her notebook, circled it, and smiled at it. She snapped the book shut.

Time to write! She logged out of her bank account and opened her word processor. She took great joy in crafting her first piece – a letter of resignation from the grocery store.