SUPERSTITION

 

     For all he knew his shirt said BATHHEADHORSEHATE and his hat said FOOT, but it was all in Japanese. Something about the way it looked, though, he didn’t know, but he liked it. A nippy breeze jostled his bushy brown side burns so that the hairs tickled the insides of his ears as he stooped to pick up a heads-down penny.

     He didn’t believe in superstition, in that jazz with all its astrology and signs! Hocus. Pocus. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. All that gibberish, hogwash and buffoonery!

     He didn’t believe in fate, only coincidence, thought it was the driving factor, a force of its own, never acknowledging that the dirt under the nail went so far, that luck or deja-vu in a crosswalk were all mixed up in the same ball of yarn.

     Life’s quirks were all isolated to him. They were balls of lightning dancing around in the yard after a storm, spinning away into darkness. But, he either refused to note the connection of static charges between the terra and the heavens, and the faint smoke rising from frazzled, slightly charred chunks of ground, the remnants, the afterthoughts hanging onto moments already past, or he was blind to them totally, his DNA not equipped with the radar.

     He was a child of the Quanta, the packages of time arriving each instant into the future, not realizing before or after, always trying to get a bearing on the here and now. The penny was shiny, it’d caught his eye and he’d nicked it, given it a home in his pocket alongside the lint and his keys, some other free agent change. He jingled as he walked.