The Minnow and the Trout--Updated

Peter sat. The bench had lost its initial comfort, and he intermittently shifted his weight to accommodate the impartial slats beneath him. Peter waited. The sun moved--shadows developed and morphed into the October twilight of almost night. Peter waited.

The cold air did not agree with Peter. He hunched over in an attempt to preserve heat, the length of his forgetful hair obscuring his equally forgetful face. A passerby might have thought him a vagrant (the hunch of his shoulders belying his young form) waiting to be towed from the street--another hour or so and he would be.

C'mon, he thought. C'mon. The wind teased--finding each isolated pocket of warmth and snuffing it away with the last of the season's burnt leaves. The overly excited tumble of their frisk past his feet suppressed the silence, and his cold ears strained to hear the expectant limp and stick.

Peter sat. Peter waited.

Peter sat to count the minutes. Seven, four, two. Peter started. At last, footsteps--a long heavy, followed by the quick step and stick sounded the gait. Peter straightened...

As he sits straight up in bed Peter realizes that he had been sleeping, it was only a dream.

The windowless room is dark and muggy with only the light from his monitor to let him check his surroundings. Peter glances around the room, but everything appears to be in order. Everything, except that noise.

Peter closes his eyes and listens closely. It doesn't take him long to realize that the sound is growing closer.

But that suddenly becomes unimportant when he notices the dull pain slowly working its way from his hind end Peter opens his eyes and looks down only to see that he is sitting on the bench again.

"Maybe the acid was a bad idea" Peter thinks to himself as he readjusts on the hard wooden bench and looks around to see where that noise is coming from.

Ah yes, the sound of approaching steps walking briskly in the autumn chill. A rhythmic clicking with each step announced the gender of her curious gait. Peter raised his nodding head, awakened by an effervescent curiosity that grew more urgent from the perfumed scent wafting in the breeze before her. Questions flooded his brain, immediately cleansed from all previous thought, as his wonderment commanded further analysis. Who was this sprightly coiffed co-ed with an independent air that seemed to say, “Eyes to yourself, you somnambulistic nerd. You deserve not a single glance from these emerald sirens that would only haunt you for the rest of your bewildered life.”

Questions! Time froze as his life passed before him, a panorama of memories, hopes and dreams flooded his brain. Was this the epiphany that fate had promised him? Was this that crucial moment in time that exacts winners from losers, and calls men forth from the disparagement of failed hopes to a new beginning? Peter somehow knew this moment would change his life forever if he could only summon the courage to seize it.

Then in an instant, as fate would have it she tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and went down to her knees as her purse fell open scattering the contents—a paper lined with numbers fluttered in the breeze and landed in a pile of leaves beyond her gaze. In an instant and without thinking, Peter jumped up and quickly offered her his hand noticing her bruised knee. Awkwardly, she took his hand and tried to compose herself, withdrawing it to brush the fractured leaves from her torso. “Are you OK” Peter queried as he gathered the scattered items and returned them to her purse. “Yes, I’m fine” she protested, as she quickly thanked him and with an embarrassed look gingerly continued on her way…

It happened so fast, Peter thought. I didn’t even get her name. Who was this creature and why did fate call forth this unlikely event? Peter analyzed the past few moments over and over as he began to walk across the fading grass strewn with wine colored fragments of passing summer’s glory. Then he saw it! Almost by accident as he brushed through a pile of leaves hiding the paper he now remembered. Curiously he picked it up, wondering if it would somehow restore his failed attempt to triumph over his own self effacing passiveness. Five lines of six numbers each were printed above a barcode. It was a “Lottery Ticket” without any doubt and on the back a phone number scribbled in pencil.

Peter paused with measured thought. Perhaps he would call the number after this night's drawing---Perhaps another day would help him think more clearly. Who knows whether fate would share its millions with him, with her or with them both…?