Million

Tuesday was the day she would buy her lotto ticket. The bin beside her desk was littered with little shavings from the scratch-and-win tickets which would keep her through the week until Tuesday. The usual jackpot. A million. A million was what she needed to finally leave. All she knew was the grey sky, the grey walls, the grey ground; even her little coin purse was the same shade. When she’d walk into the corner store on Tuesday, she’d take out two silver coins —half a day’s pay— and receive in exchange a shiny ticket. Aside from the ticket, colours have never been so vibrant: before, only the most basic hues existed in faded graffiti on the sides of crumbling apartments.

She chose to buy her ticket on Tuesdays because she was born on one. Tuesday had always been her special day. But not for the lotto. The other days never offered much luck for the scratch-and-wins either. For most others, Tuesday was a normal day: smog warnings and meaningless advertisements drove the day along. Tuesday was also the day when the smog got so thick it was like walking through the shavings at the bottom of her bin—a sea of thick waste—the day that all she could make out was the faint glow of the neon jackpot estimate but not the burnt-out headlights of an ancient car equally as lost as she. A million.

Her coin purse was lost. Maybe it’s colour blended in too much with the road or someone got lucky and picked up a little extra money. Whoever took it would have seen the same vibrant colours—a whole spectrum of reds, yellows, even some blues from the bent-in front of the car. The next Tuesday the winning ticket was bought from the same store. The prize. A million. More than enough for a new car...and a trip away from the smog.

80km/h

Midnight at the gas station was always haunting. Pitch black. Empty highway. And the neon sign from the station glowing in the dark like a supernova. Usually no cars would come; a few trucks needed to make a midnight pit stop would occasionally stop in only to use the run- down washroom. The gas station was a piece of capitalist heaven in the darkness. The white fluorescent lights illuminated the fancy packaging of chocolates and candies and the coffee machine’s metallic cover. Coffee was the other beacon for truck drivers. The cheap, bitter liquid would drip out of the machine which would rumble more loudly than most of the eighteen-wheelers that would pass by.

At midnight a truck came. White. Graffiti on the side. It looked like the outside of the station. A woman walked out. Unusual. Usually, it was overweight, balding men whose limited daily steps was all the exercise they got. But she was different. If anything, she looked more like a carjacker than a truck driver. Maybe she was a carjacker, and down the highway there was the real truck driver out of cell phone reception with only his thumb. She got out of the truck—didn’t refuel.

She had no shoes on; the ground was dry. But she was wearing sunglasses. She opened the door and the little bell jingled. No candy. No coffee. Just a lotto ticket; she said today was her lucky day. She got back into her truck and drove off into the darkness. She was gone. Out of her rearview mirror, she would have seen nothing save for a glowing neon sign: $1/L. From the gas station, she couldn’t be seen. There were no highlights as she drove off. Her big truck was nothing. Nothing was anything in the dark. In a few hours when the sun would rise, maybe her truck would reappear, lucky day.