The Double Doubler

On money, hope, and the small rituals we mistake for luck.

The bodega on Myrtle had a scratched plexiglass counter that caught the fluorescent light in ugly angles. I stopped there every night and handed over a single dollar for a Double Doubler. I told people it was a harmless habit, something to close the day with, but that was never the truth. I needed something tiny to stretch further than it ever should. I needed the illusion that my luck, or our luck, might still decide to split open.

Money was tight and everything else was tighter. Those little tickets were the only part of the day where the math didn’t feel predetermined. I scratched for both of us, though I would have died before admitting it. I kept trying to turn one dollar into a sign that things might ease up, that we might catch a break, that we weren’t always going to be one bad week from disappearing through the floorboards. Hope felt safer when it didn’t look like hope.

Excerpt from a personal essay currently under submission.