W B - 13 Luck

W B - 13     Luck

James had always known that he was unlucky. He was famous as the only guy around who could produce an ‘edge’ from a ‘heads or tails’ when tossing a coin - no binary for him. He had always been known, even at school, as ‘Lucky Jim’ - irony started at an early age where he came from. He started to carry a lucky penny in addition to his rabbit’s foot in an attempt to change his luck but he soon lost the penny and his rabbit’s foot got eaten by his sister’s black cat which crossed his path one day. He tried to take up bird watching but he only ever managed to see one magpie at a time - he sometimes wondered when a blackbird would peck off his nose.

Because of his bad luck he had long ago stopped buying lottery tickets after he worked out the odds of winning for a person with an average sort of luck. The odds of any one ticket winning the jackpot were just under 13 million to one against. He figured out from this that, if he bought one ticket a week, he would win once every 250 thousand years. He didn’t think he would live that long. Because of his reputation, he had been banned from the lottery syndicate where he worked - at a bookies. His boss had concluded that his bad luck would rub off onto the punters so increasing the profits, which is the only reason he kept his job. He also worked out the odds of surviving a parachute jump so he didn’t take up that sport; why place your trust in some plastic sheeting and a few bits of string when you can stay in a perfectly good aeroplane?

James was descending into depression, everything he tried turned out wrong, he failed at everything. The last straw was when he was sacked from his job at the bookies, profits were down because the punters were winning too often.

He decided to prove once and for all that he had some luck left so he got his dad’s souvenir revolver from his time in the war, loaded it with one round and then spun the chamber. He held it to his head with a shaking hand and pulled the trigger, expecting to hear a bang and then nothing as the bullet entered his skull and macerated his brain.

He heard a bang but he had not held the gun steady enough so the bullet went wide, skimmed the side of his head and took his ear off. It whistled down the hallway and went through the front door, leaving a neat hole in the glass. James had been temporarily deafened by the bang so did not hear the scream from the man with the briefcase who had just reached the front step of his bungalow. 

James was now laying on the floor in the hallway, dazed and not aware of anything. The man on the front step had also dropped to  the ground with a wound to his arm that was now bleeding all over James’ front path. He had dropped his briefcase, which split open, spilling the lottery tickets over the ground and the cheque made out to James for 35 million pounds.

Later as they sat in James’ living room having just got back from A & E , they sipped a sweet cup of tea each and reviewed the events of the afternoon.

‘I was lucky because I won the game of Russian roulette at my first try,’ insisted James.

‘But you lost because you hurt your head and lost your ear,’ argued the man from the lottery, who was called Alan. ‘You only really won because you got the big prize from the lottery.’

‘So, am I a lucky person now?’ mused James.

‘I think you are very lucky, in fact you won against odds of 28.76 million to one. But, to prove your luck has changed, why don’t you toss a coin and see if you can call it right?’

James found a penny from his pocket and tossed it in the air, ‘Heads,’ he cried confidently. The coin bounced off the chair and landed on the floor - on its edge.