right place - part 2

right place - part 2

fiction
edward w pritchard

Bill the manager over at the market grille had leukemia and was dieing. Home alone, he painfully made his way through his house and outside onto his deck and was looking up at the stars at about midnight. He was imagining and planning where his self might go after his body died in a few days. Bill had been a medic in the army and knew by the look of death he saw in his eyes, that death would soon take his body.

Bill was not educated in science or cosmology but had got very motivated to find a star or maybe a planet where his undieing part might go. He desperately was looking for the right place to be after the destruction of his body. Looking at the calm bright night sky it was reassuring to Bill to think there was a right place for him to be soon after his tired sick body ceased to be.

one spin of the slot machine

one spin of the slot machine

fiction
edward w pritchard

I was just a baby and I didn't understand that I had only one spin of the slot machine. It didn't really matter anyway because I could only bet with what others who lived before me accumulated and were my relatives had passed on to me. I didn't grasp well yet, as a child and since I had enough, at least for me, I didn't push and shove and take to get to the front of the line to prepare to place my bet so that later I could be envied appreciated and maybe known and remembered for a few years.

The stars are vast and it is inconceivable to me that anyone can jot a few arcane equations down on paper or a computer and then declare that they know and understand and proclaim God is dead, never existed, and the Universe is expanding in a predictable manner; that is unless there are multiple universes, in which case we exist in a million or trillion places and times at once. However it works, everyone knows that 70 or 80 earth years are all that matter at least in our time and place to us. Of course we are top of the food chain, that's that they say.

In a single spin of the slot machine anything can happen it's true. Who programmed the slot machine and who built the casino and what other parts are there to the gambling areas that I haven't been to I don't know. Probabilities are in the hundreds of millions and I am one of six billion. I am not able to maintain the thought process beyond my next meal enough to see what that means to me.

i can hear the slot machine buzzing as it waits to finish my spin, then what? What does that mean for me?