Wearing her yellow sleeker that had no buttons because she had ripped them off to play pogs with the other kids, they all laughed when she held out her palm, revealing how she intended to play.  Troy, always sheltered in her backpack, never laughed at her.  Troy was her doll, but he didn’t know it yet.  Dolls come of age just as their owners do.

She was twelve, jumping on her neighbor’s trampoline in the rain by her lonesome.  Thinking of reflection in the rainbow that had not yet appeared but soon would, she thought about colors and their seemingly endless possibilities and other things kids think about when they’re jumping on trampolines by themselves in the rain.  She decided she wanted to jump from one trampoline to another and then to another for eternity.  Her trajectories would be like arching rainbows, though hers would not lead to tangible pots of gold.  Instead, the journey itself would be her fortune.

And then she heard what sounded like a violent rattling of a cage.  She no longer found herself jumping on a trampoline.  Instead, she was keeled over a gutter as chocolate-tinted water gushed violently downhill.  She found herself inexplicably grabbing for anything solid that lay near her.  Soggy newspapers bleeding ink stained her fingers as she sought to slow the persistence of physics.  Lava rocks, weeds, fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, long-forgotten tennis balls and numerous other suburban leftovers would soon join the newspapers in her construction of a dam.  She felt like what she was doing was symbolic, but she didn’t quite know of what.  Just when she thought the dam was strong enough to hold, it broke and she was swept downstream.

She lay on her back as she was instructed to do in her YMCA swim class.  Looking above she saw dark clouds mingling with lighter ones as a kind of vortex formed (think Donnie Darko’s space traveling wormhole).  Marshmallow hail, violet gumdrops, and rock candy mingled together to form a secret recipe Willy Wonka would tip his tall hat to.  She whimsically stuck out her tongue to sample this novel flavor of weather.  Surprisingly bittersweet, it bludgeoned her back to her mid-thirties.

The pool of drool on her desk was almost enough to convince her she was still the kid she told herself she was.  Her eyes, slow in adjusting to the artificial light, strained to focus on the computer monitor before her.  She had been dozing for twenty-three minutes, though it had felt more like twenty-three years.  Without noticing, she had begun to write an email.  She soon forwarded it to everyone in her office.

rainy day woman # 12 & 35

sweet the possibilities

pour a familiar rain

each drop alike yet all their own

with their own art

they paint each other’s way

There was a part of him that actually wanted another firestorm to hit the county. The previous two had rekindled his affinity with this most forging of chemical reactions.  During the cool autumn evenings of his childhood he stared religiously into the fireplace as if it were a kind of prehistoric television set.  The multitude of programming a single burning log could broadcast had always impressed him as each wavering flame channeled its own tune of being.

The real love affair sparked when he went to Universal Studios and experienced Backdraft during his fifth grade field trip.  Never before had he encountered heat in such an intimate way.  The intense sensation felt on his pre-pubescent skin was enough to send his biorhythms into overdrive.

During his middle school years, while his friends were busy flirting with girls, he found himself at the heart of a different sort of love triangle—the three components needed to start a fire being fuel, a source of ignition (most often understood as energy released in the form of heat), and oxygen—and so he did his best to stay somewhere in the middle.  He spent hours drawing blueprints for innovative potato gun designs when he should have been solving for the value of x.  But his precocious mind could see that math was really only valuable when it was placed into the appropriate, scientific context.   And so shooting a flaming potato a half-mile became that context.  As did burning bathtubs, melting old sneakers, devising makeshift flamethrowers from cans of hairspray and Pam, making tennis ball bombs with strike anywhere matchsticks, and so on.

By high school his pyromania had started to smother a bit.  What before was an exponentially hotter relationship fizzled lukewarm as curves of a different sort began to take shape in the blueprint of his entrepreneurial mind.  One curve, in particular, became an obsession.  And it belonged to a woman by the name of Carmen San Diego.

His hours were no longer spent burning miscellaneous household items, but rather on his dated Macintosh playing this computer game.  Just where in the world was Ms. Carmen San Diego?  He had to find out, but why?  Where did this obsession come from and what did it mean about his old flame, Flame?

It came from an article he stumbled upon at the library while he was doing research for an English assignment pertaining to Joseph Heller’s wartime novel Catch-22.  He was asked to write an essay examining the way in which history influenced the book and vice-a-versa.  It seemed rather obvious how history had played into the development of the book.  What wasn’t so obvious was how the book had influenced or shaped history.  He decided to focus on the way in which the novel’s title had widely worked its way into today’s lexicon.

He searched the catalog for uses of this term in the mainstream media.  While filtering through several pages of search results his eyes were drawn to an article entitled, “Carmen San Diego and The Catch-22 of Technological Advance.” The author’s thesis was that as technology continues to progress at increasingly exponential rates, there will be a point in time in which it will be mathematically implausible for technologies to be truly improved upon.  That is to say, like all substances have their own specific melting points, so to do all technologies have their own function limits.  When the majority of these limits are exceeded, the author argues, humanity will have reached its ultimate Catch-22.  “Like trying to catch up with Carmen San Diego, you’ll continually be one step behind.  And by the time you do catch her, it’s already too late.  Some lonely computer programmer is already at work developing a newer, ’smarter’ version of her.  At what point does Carmen San Diego lose her appeal and efficacy?  Technology speeds us up as it slows us down.  The more information we are inundated with in inherently shorter and shorter time spans, the less time there’s available for our minds to spend grappling with the complexities, implications, and applications of that information.”

These were big ideas.  He felt their importance as one feels the importance of hunger.  He wanted to better understand the author’s analogy with Carmen San Diego so he borrowed the game from this kid Brad who lived a few houses down the street.  It was no secret that Brad only befriended him because of his potato gun.  That didn’t bother him.

He became instantly hooked with the game.  Through tracking Carmen across the globe he was able to learn much more about world geography than he ever had in school.  She became a symbol for the immense possibilities of the world as fire had once been.  Yet the more geographically savvy he became through chasing Carmen, the more geographically isolated he actually was, cooped up in his room like the child he still seemed to be.

And then one day his house burnt to the ground.  Carmen set the fire.  It was the eve of the release of the new Carmen San Diego game.  She wanted to go out with a bang before Carmen 2.0 could bury her to antiquity in years of accumulating dust.  While he lost all his things, they were just things.  No one besides Carmen had been harmed.  And standing there behind the yellow caution tape, watching the few remaining embers smolder among a crowd of empathetic spectators, he finally understood why fire mattered.

Fire is among the most ancient technologies of man.  It has survived the testament of time because it has no real function limit.  While modern man has adopted fire into its arsenal of sophisticated instruments and weaponry, fire’s apparent evil intentions are matched with its less apparent better intentions.  It is a natural spectacle and has had a place in our ecosystems before we humans altogether redrew the boundaries of those ecosystems.  Fire doesn’t demand our improvement, but it does demand our respect.  Fire has a unique way of bringing people together.  Think the fusion of our Sun.  Think about every camping trip you’ve ever been on or bonfire you’ve ever been to.  Fire encourages us to share ourselves in a different kind of light.

And while the previous firestorms started not from the hands of Mother Nature but rather from hands of our own, there is still something to be said about how we chose to respond.  Some of us fought fire with hoses and flame-retardants and some of us fought fire through hugs and tears.  Looking back, that shared sense of loss felt like a gain.

The marquee read “Happy Hour 4-8, $2 Coronas/$1.50 Tacos,” at the Horizon Casino Resort. Horizon’s happy hour was what one might expect on a Tuesday night during South Lake Tahoe’s rather subdued fall season.

A half-dozen or so middle-aged men drinking beer and watching college football on digitally enhanced televisions. No matter how enhanced the screens, the lives of the men at the bar would enhance no more than the lives of the hookers chain-smoking coyly at the pulsing slot machines, the junkie cocktail waitresses squeezing into outfits unsuitable for their aged skin but too strung-out to notice, the anonymous Johns salivating for the leftover buffets of women with fake names, the dealers coaxing greed comfortably for days without ever seeing the sun, or the bartenders dressed in referee stripes to camouflage their boredom with slurred conversation.

D and his two friends, Trevor and Kyle, were new to the South Lake Tahoe scene. They had made the drive just days before from sun drenched San Diego and now found themselves in the cold, dry high air of the Sierras. The bronze tans that each had effortlessly acquired during the summer months had already started to fade. These twenty-something, college graduate dreamers had toyed with the notion of extending their glory days just a bit longer by moving up north for the long awaited snow season, delaying the reality of career life just a bit further.  While natural snow is somewhat scarce to the San Bernardino Mountains, those of Tahoe are gluttons for heavy snowfall.

Kyle starts out with three Coronas, to himself.  D and Trevor go for a few tacos first, then a beer. Kyle is on a mission to get tanked, his first guzzled within seconds. The tacos look pretty good to Kyle, but he isn’t interested in eating; his is a strictly liquid diet.

“So what you guys wanna do tonight? Just cruise around and scope this town? It’s inevitable that I’ll be gambling tonight.”

“Yeah no crap Kyle. I mean you are in a casino and I know you can’t just sit in a casino and not gamble. That wouldn’t fit your notorious MO,” Trevor replies.

“Well I’m not going to deny that. But as long as we’re here…”

“I thought you said you were just going to be drinking tonight,” D says with a mouthful of carnitas.

“I did. Things change.”

“Like that’s not a cliché. Those churros look legit. How ’bout I buy you a churro and you don’t gamble at all tonight?”

“A churro? You think a churro is going to coax me into submission?”

“Whatever. I’m getting one.”

After a few more rounds and a churro for D, the three amigos wander the casino floor not really sure where the disorienting lights are guiding them. Kyle’s hungry now, the liquid diet succumbing to the temptations of a pure greed. He pulls out his unevenly creased wallet and fetches two Andrew Jackson Portraits. Fitting, as Jacksonian ideals seem suitable to the night’s aura.

Kyle throws his forty dollars down on black at the dizzying roulette table.  Kyle’s always preferred no skill gambling.  The strategy, patience, and finesse needed to be a successful poker player had never complimented his all or nothing style.  Roulette is quick, easy, and often devastatingly harsh.  Less often it’s a quick way to win big.

“Red nine, odd,” the apathetic ball spinner announces.  Kyle looks directly into the man’s languid eyes to make it clear he takes the loss personally.

Nine happens to be Kyle’s favorite number and has been his entire life.  Every little league jersey of his had been stamped with the number nine.  He isn’t sure why he likes the number so much and immediately feels guilty about not having played it.  So guilty, in fact, that he makes a speedy trip to the closest ATM and takes out a hundred dollars.  He stomachs the surcharge, rationalizing that the earnings awaiting him will counter the present loss.  He exchanges the hundred-dollar bill for a black and white stripped chip and puts it on nine.

“Kyle…dude what are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about it dude.  Seriously, trust me on this one,” Kyle challenges Trevor, who has been quietly watching his friend’s almost instantaneous demise.  Trevor hadn’t gambled since his twenty-first birthday in Las Vegas when he blew half his summer job’s earnings in one rather intoxicating hour.

Kyle looks away from the whirling wheel, each of his fists tightly clenching like he’s getting ready to punch in someone’s face, anyone’s face.

Whether or not Kyle’s one hundred dollar bet, which would pay out thirty-five hundred dollars, hits or doesn’t will not change all that much in the larger schema of his life.  Assuming that little shiny white ball lands on any number but nine, his is an obvious loss.  Yet the not so obvious loss is the more important one.  Kyle’s choice to gamble, albeit a compulsory one, is dangerous.  Life is short but a gambling addict’s life is inherently shorter.  Even if Kyle wins, he almost certainly returns, thinking his luck will continue.  If Kyle loses, he almost certainly returns, thinking his luck will show up sooner rather than later.  This irrational behavior is like that of Sisyphus.  Kyle does not know who Sisyphus is or why his story is important.  He has instead spent much of his seemingly valuable time frivolously gambling away what some charitable, miraculous being has so under-appreciatively afforded him.

©Glenn Francis: www.PacificProDigital.com

As Pacific Classic Day wanes, a bleeding sunset pours generously upon Del Mar signaling the unofficial end of summer. For some of the 42,000-plus attendees the party is just getting started. With Audrina Patridge hosting a cause celebre just down the street at the world class L’Auberge Hotel, there is sure to be plenty for a guerrilla journalist such as myself to observe and eventually divulge.  I envision Audrina as many probably do, three-quarters naked chowing down a hearty Carl’s Jr. Teriyaki Burger, her still buzzing bikini commercial fresh on the mind.  I’ve come to crash her party and see if this ‘It’ So Cal belle is worthy of the hype her August 944 cover shoot has generated.

Mingling with celebs is somewhat new territory for me and so I hearken back to all those dizzying A-list parties one encounters in the typical Bret Easton Ellis novel.

Terrence Howard, Kate Beckinsale, Salma Hayek, and Phil Mickelson smoke Cubans as they discuss the influence of psychoanalysis on the development of reality television.  Joe Rogan talks steroids with Trent Reznor over bruschetta and a bottle Cabernet Sauvignon.  Ashton Kutcher throws a tray of California rolls off the balcony; he then notifies the world of this through a tweet.  The tray lands on the still somehow glistening head of Hulk Hogan, who then stumbles over Amy Winehouse’s pet albino guinea pig.  The guinea pig lets out a deafening shriek, startling J Lo’s driver and causing him to rear-end Kevin Costner’s Mazerati.  Mr. Costner then proceeds to exit his car from the window for no apparent reason and offers the driver a cold Budweiser from his back pocket, introducing himself as Roy McAvoy as he apologizes for being on time.  Mischa Barton glows orange as she binges on carrots and Harvey Wallbangers.  Jared Leto salsa dances with J Lo.  Eddie Vedder, dressed like Zorro, speaks Portuguese with a Brazilian supermodel dressed as a New England Puritan.  Seth Rogen eats cheese fondue with Jessica Biel and Mickey Rourke.  Tom Delonge, discussing microeconomics with Owen Wilson, makes eyes with Christina Ricci.

Which brings us to Audrina, who is nowhere to be found.  I picture her in some private villa with some anonymous Mexican drug cartel drinking Zimas, slurring Bing Crosby’s, “Where the Turf Meets the Surf.”  In the meantime I mingle with the Chula Vista Little League team, devour a plate of seared ahi with Vince Vaughn and Kirsten Dunst, recite Shakespeare over White Russians with William Shatner, and sketch self-portraits in crayon alongside a much too sober looking Laura Linney.

“Hey Linney, you’ve played a lot of lawyers.  I’m a lawyer,” I offer.

“I don’t know that many lawyers that draw pictures of themselves with crayons,” she says indifferently.

“Well I’m not a lawyer, but I did get into law school.  I lied.  Doesn’t that technically qualify me as a lawyer?”

“Something like that.  And for the record, counselor, I’m not Laura Linney.  That’s Laura Linney,” she says pointing across the terrace. “But you wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.  It’s either her or Ally Sheedy from the Breakfast Club.”

“Oh my bad.  Double vision.  Can we make a toast?”

“I suppose.  To false identities.”

“Cheers.”  I swig down something that is alcoholic but beyond that, unidentifiable.

“So you just drink like a lawyer then… Well, what do you do when you’re not creating masterpieces with Crayolas?”

“I write for the tabloids.  I suppose that’s even worse. It’s shallow but like the beach we can’t all venture out too deep or some of us will drown,” I say, unsure of my words, unsure of myself.  I’m faintly reminded that alcohol is a depressant.

“Oh I LOVE the tabloids.  Gratuitous celebrity gossip and Swedish Fish are my two primary vices.”

“What the hell’s Swedish Fish?”

“Are you serious?  Only the best candy EVER. It’s basically a red Sour Patch Kid but without the sourness. I’m an addict.  They’re my cigarettes.”

“Let’s get one then.”

She pulls out a Coach handbag, fishes for the red fish, and plops a half-dozen in my hand, which I just now realize is swollen from punching William Shatner.  I half-remember something about me referencing a quote from Fight Club and wanting to destroy the face that gave shape to the Halloween mask of Michael Myers.

“They’re okay.  Not sure about that whole ‘best candy ever’ spiel.”

“Well that’s just because you’re a fish you drunky.  Clearly your act of cannibalism has tainted your taste buds.”

“Clearly,” is all I can summon as I find myself drowning in the martinis of her eyes, olives bathed in Bombay Sapphire, blue as the nearby Pacific.  I realize I no longer want to be rescued by Audrina Patridge or any other ‘It’ girl for that matter.  “My turn. What’s your profession?”

“Well, when I’m not catching up with celebrity dirt, which believe me takes up a lot of my time, I’m a public health specialist at Johns Hopkins.  I was presenting a paper at an infectious disease conference but figured I might as well stay through Labor Day.”

“Impressive resume.  I guess celeb dirt infects even the smart ones then.  A different kind of infectious disease I suppose.”

“Right Right. But really, you must have dug up at least one juicy tidbit from this gathering?”

*                                              *                                                *

Photo by 'Carter Photography' via Flickr

Five hours earlier.

The doorman, mistaking me for Bradley Cooper, asks, “Where’s Jen?” to which I reply, “It’s Renee now.  Haven’t you seen the cover of this week’s US?”  I don’t wait for an answer.  I’m in Turf Club trying not to sweat out my monstrosity, the dress code as stifling as the swarm of sycophants that surround me.  A herculean gentlemen wearing a baby blue zoot suit stands alongside Audrina, her bodyguard I assume.  She’s drinking a vodka Red Bull as I watch her from across the crowded Celebrity Suite.

Audrina’s naivety, her synthetic beauty, and above all her utter insipidity make her an attractive choice for my most ambitious artistic endeavor to date.

*                                               *                                                 *

The next morning Audrina Patridge, or rather what remains of her, is found stuffed inside a suitcase by a transient rummaging through a dumpster in Valencia Park.  When the authorities arrive they’re faced with the difficulty of identifying the deceased as the once iconic face has become altogether unrecognizable.  The fingers have been removed, most likely with a pair of pliers.  The jaw, too, is missing and so there’s no hope for a match through dental records.  Instead, the most intact portion of the corpse is the chest.  Back at the coroner’s lab it is ascertained that the victim had previously undergone a breast augmentation surgery.  This seemingly irrelevant fact would be key in identifying the victim as one Audrina Patridge, the barcodes on the implants eventually leading investigators to a positive identification.

And so it remains to be seen as to whether this will be remembered as my masterpiece or not, a daring work of both conceptual and performance art.  Wanting to call into question what Audrina and the likes of her represent, to challenge this seemingly uncontested disease of celebrity culture and its ever-increasing pervasiveness, these were my motives.   What’s revealed when something as artificial as a breast implant is the only clue left in the formation of one’s identity and what does this say about how we see ourselves in relation to such idolized fabrications?  Ultimately I leave these questions for you, the audience, to ponder.  After all, it is you who decide the value of the work you’re presented with.

Photo from 'Rita Molnar' via Wikimedia

Nicole Kidman has been cast to star in an upcoming movie, ‘The Danish Girl.’ Based on the real-life transformation of painter, Einar Wegener, the film is about the first person to undergo a sex change operation. The film has been adapted from David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel also titled ‘The Danish Girl.’

Einar Wegener was born a male and married Greta, an artist, in 1904. Einar first began his transformation when Greta needed a female model to pose for one of her paintings and Einar stepped in. The success of the painting made Greta encourage Einar to continue posing as a woman for her paintings.

In 1930, Einar decided to change his outer appearance to match his inner persona and underwent several operations to become a female. He was thought to be intersexual, born with both male and female organs. This was confirmed during his surgeries.

After his initial surgeries were a success, Einar Wegener changed his name to Lili Elbe and had hopes of becoming a mother. In 1931 she underwent a fifth operation in which doctors attempted to transplant a uterus into her body. The operation proved to be fatal, however, and Lili Elbe died three months later at age 49.

Director Tomas Alfredson will have a tough time ‘butching’ Nicole Kidman up. Kidman’s slender physique and feminine features will be a great challenge to overcome when trying to portray her as a man.  Charlize Theron was originally set to play the role of Einar Wegener’s wife Greta, but dropped out of the project. Nevertheless, director Alfredson remains excited and focused, saying “We have been in talks for close to a year, and we are soon going into production.”

Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve from mikol_ice via Flikr

It’s true that he wanted the bone to be of human origin. He carried it with a delicate sensibility, knowing that if it indeed was he would not be guilty of egregious disrespect for the deceased. As he returned home along the State Route 56 bike path, dozens of cyclists sped past him without seeming to notice his recent discovery. Or maybe it was they just didn’t care; they were living and so why bother worrying about an old bone?

The dead had always been a preoccupation of his; he simply found them more interesting than the living. Many of his generation, including himself, spent what seemed like an excessive amount of their time in front of lit screens. This increasingly two-dimensional virtual existence sometimes felt like a pestilent, digital plague and he did best to seek refuge in the safety of the dead; their possessions, ideals, stories, and now their bones.

His father would be able to rule out the possibility that the bone was of animal origin as he was a respected large animal veterinarian. When he was eight years young, he remembered seeing his father conduct an autopsy in their oil stained garage. The splayed wolf carcass helped diminish the otherwise romanticized allure of the animal he had encountered in the stories of Jack London.

He had examined hominid bones in an introductory anthropology course in college. He figured it was large enough to be a human leg bone, perhaps a bit too large. If this bone was from bipedal man, it would have had to of been one large man indeed.

Why had he wanted it to be human so badly? Was it out of boredom? Did he simply want the public notoriety of having been the sole finder? Had one too many viewings of Indiana Jones films gone to his head? A genuine, deep seated interest in local history perhaps? In truth, all of these were contributing factors to his compulsory need.

“Dad… I got something for you to take a look at. I need your expertise,” he announced upon walking through the door. He grabbed a brown paper bag from the closet and rested the bone gently on top.

“So what do we got here?” his father asked, putting on his glasses.

“You tell me boss.”

“Well it’s darn well too big, you see here at the joint, to be human because I know that’s what you were hoping for,” he offered quickly as he picked it up and studied it from different angles.

“And how do you know that’s what I was hoping for?”

“Call it logical deduction. Well it looks like what you got here is the tibia bone of probably a horse. It could be from a small cow but I’m leaning towards a horse, which doesn’t surprise me as this area was pretty open territory not all that long ago.”

This is true. Rancho Peñasquitos is a relatively young community in San Diego. While several adobes dating back to the 19th century can still be found in the nearby Los Peñasquitos Preserve (the inhabitants of which grazed cattle in the once vast openness), the majority of the area has since become a sprawling suburban plateau. Even he could remember when PQ (its popular referent) was significantly less developed. A substantial portion of the local habitat had been left untouched. Much of the surrounding canyon was where he and his friends spent most their free time as youths. A lot had changed in the subsequent years. The majority of the canyon, that frontier of dependable adventure and exploration, of sound peace of mind, of real experience with the truly natural world, had been depleted in just over a decade of development.

And yet naturally he knew that’s how things worked. Indeed, the house he still lived in (he being a member of the boomerang generation) was the result of even earlier development in the region. The comfortable home provided its own kind of habitat and he was really more a product of that environment. His real want was found in the discrepancy of these two closely cornered, conflicting environments.

Had the bone been human it would have helped appease this want in an explicitly tangible way. The three-dimensionality of the bone could have provided him with more solid a substance than that which he otherwise found in the increasingly two-dimensional life he lived. To grip the mortality which inevitably awaited him, to feel its weight, that was his ultimate need.

His initial dejection soon subdued as he grabbed a cold soda from the refrigerator and threw himself on the leather couch. He wanted to challenge his father’s verdict but decided against it. He figured he could still believe the bone was human and in that intangible belief find some kind of value. Some beliefs are based on the merit of concrete evidence while others are based in the absence of such concreteness. He decided that wasn’t necessarily problematic and so he turned on the television, believing the Padres could come back from a 6-O deficit. It turned out they could. The 18-inning game ended, however, as a noble loss.

In the first installment of our short story fiction series, contributing writer Michael Dykstra gets us ready for horse racing season with a tale from a day at Del Mar.

We showed up as the horses for the fifth race were trotting through the sun soaked paddock.

Normally I would’ve been sitting on a shaded bench under the Don Jose clock tower, waiting for someone to leave so I could retrieve their car. From there you can’t see the horses warm up, let alone race, so you have to tune your ear just right to hear the thunderous announcer with a British accent yelling as fast as the horses run.

Today I decided to take my one day off for this summer and I had nowhere better to go than here, with Ms. Sarah Lawson.

“So is this like gambling?” she asked as I was pointing out the better-looking fillies of the bunch.

“Sure is.”

“So how do you bet then?”

“There’s all sorts of ways to bet on horses.” Though I figured sticking to the basics was probably the safest bet here. “Well, I like that 2 horse there in the baby blue. I mean look at those yoked-out deltoids. Mine are almost there.”

I scanned her face out of the corner of my eye to see if she smiled—she had—and then to the program to see who was riding.

“And see here it tells you that Alex Solis is the jockey. He’s been winning a lot of races the last few weeks. But you also might want to bet according to the odds.”

“What are those?”

“K, say for the 2 horse, if I put five dollars on it to win, and it’s listed at ten, that means I would make fifty dollars because you get ten dollars back for every dollar you bet, that make sense? The higher the number, the less likely it will be that that horse is a winner.”

“I’m bad with numbers. Here,” pulling money out of her designer handbag. “Just bet for me. Pick the 2 horse, and I like the horse in green, number 7.”

The fillies now sauntered their way towards the track, signaled by the ceremonious trumpet call that I heard at least eight times a day. As the 2 horse, Firestorm, casually followed its predecessor she suddenly threw her head up in an alarming fashion, forcing Solis to jump back a bit. She was feisty and I liked that in a horse. Actually, I liked that in just about anything. Her glazed-over eyes sharpened with a palpable intensity. An animal such as a horse can silence a crowd just as easily as it can stir it into a living thing all its own. I knew that this horse would be a winner, but now it all depended on how much fire she had breathed into the lungs of the crowd. I was engulfed.

By the time the gates opened and the horses stampeded the dusty track, Firestorm was a heavy favorite.

“Look, the 2 is out in front. You were right.”

“Actually, that’s not always a good sign. Frontrunners tend to tire easily.”

I was beginning to tire myself with my smug conversation. Had I let this place and the people I waited on every day start to infect me? Truth was, I felt guilty betting on horses. Horse racing seems so uncivilized and yet the boredom of this job continually lures me to its carnality.

Sarah’s horse was saving itself as the pack converged around the ominous final turn.

“As they come for home, it’s Brooke’s Angel winging for it. Brooke and Fool’s Gold are neck and neck. Brooke, Brooke, and Brooke’s Angel is the winner, then Fool’s Gold and Primetime Player runs third,” the announcer strummed out in one, long gasp of seemingly endless air.

“No way Matt, my freaking horse won.”

“Yeah, so much for my advice on the 2 horse. I should’ve just asked you. How’d you decide on the 7 anyway?”

“Everyone knows it’s the luckiest number. Duh you moron,” she offered with a painfully sardonic smile that intoxicated me much more potently than the nine dollar margarita I had been sipping. “Wait, what was the name again, something Brooke?”

“Yeah, Brooke’s Angel. You know a Brooke?”

“I used to know a Brooke,” she replied softly, her compelling, dark green eyes slowly drifted downward. I finished my margarita and led her towards the booth to cash out.

“Where we going, to get more drinks?”

“Well, that could be arranged. But I figured you wanted to cash your ticket ASAP.” I sort of realized then that maybe that wasn’t exactly a top priority of hers. Sarah came from a pretty financially stable family and drove the kind of car I parked about thirty times a day.

“Actually I don’t think I’m going to cash it today…maybe never.”

“What a highroller you are Ms. Lawson. How about you pay for the next round of margaritas then?”

It wasn’t until a few weeks and dates later when I realized money wasn’t Sarah’s concern that day for another reason altogether.

I was unaware that Sarah had had an older sister for most of her life. Brooke was an attractive brunette who loved riding horses. Tragedy had struck the Lawson family years earlier when Brooke passed so prematurely in an auto accident.

I obviously had never known Brooke, but I did know her Angel for the 6 ½ furlongs she raced that day at Del Mar. While the odds had piled against her (48-1), the final stretch was where she flashed her brilliant speed to the amazement of thousands. Sarah had known the horse was a winner despite being unaware of her name. Was it simply the luck of number seven or was it something else entirely?

What stands as the clearest sign of divine intervention is the winning ticket that remains behind glass in the empty horse stables found in the Lawson’s backyard. At dawn each morning, the sun’s radiant rays strike that ticket with its myriad of colors. In this prism of life, Brooke can be seen riding her horse in but the few brief moments of purest sunlight. There, every dew-laden dawn, Sarah waits.

When the two sisters meet vis-à-vis, Sarah’s already 100-proof smile momentarily doubles in strength. This unrivaled smile intoxicates all those fortunate enough to have encountered its transfixing power before, so that upon waking their day is but a further continuation of their night’s most pleasant dreams.