All the day you’ll have good luck…
The thing is, I haven’t had a day of good luck in weeks. And that sort of thing tends to make you cynical. It’s not as if I’ve walked under any ladders recently, and I haven’t had a black cat cross my path that I can remember offhand. Maybe I’m still working off the seven years I got for breaking some mirror long ago. I don’t know. But it seems unlikely that a penny’s going to do much at this rate.
But now I’m stuck thinking about it. It was just a block ago, winking at me like a golden eye. Now I feel like it’s taunting me. Come on, what’s the rush? I dare you. What could it hurt? Shut up. I was perfectly happy moping before and now you’re actually making me stop and turn around. Damn you.
All right. Comfortably in my left shoe now, giving me a corn. I have tried a thousand times to remember where I heard that superstition about putting the penny in your left shoe. Nobody I know has ever heard of it, but I’m sure I learned it somewhere. Forget good luck, wearing a penny inside two-inch heels ought to give you a Purple Heart. I feel like the princess with the pea. It’s going to be fused to my foot within the hour.
Now where’s my good luck?
I could get promoted today. That’d be nice. God knows I deserve it. Never mind the fact that I don’t want it. Can’t I get a raise without having to manage people? I hate managing people. I have enough trouble managing myself. As you can tell by my dependence on small change for assistance. At least I don’t have to ask for it with a tin cup. (Even beggars used to be able to afford tin cups. These days they’re paper. How society has fallen.)
Or I could find a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. I pick up those scratchers sometimes, praying in vain that the person who discarded it overlooked the last matching number. Never comes to pass, but then again, it could be the start of a nasty lawsuit about the fellow who paid for the ticket wanting the money, and I could lose more than I gain. God, I even manage to ruin my own fantasies. It’s enough to make a…
Holy mother of… oh… oh, shit, that hurts…
Or, on the other hand, maybe I could get plowed into from behind and end up on my hands and knees, my butt wiggling in the air, and the penny could go flying out of my shoe in sheer fright at having been associated with anyone so patently unlucky. Yeah, you stupid penny, who needs you, anyway? I have skinned knees and ripped pantyhose to deal with now. At least the person who rammed into me is apologizing and offering a hand. That’s kind of him.
Nice, warm hand…
Oh.
Oh, my.
Maybe that is a lucky penny after all.
