Lucky Day

Murphy adored the lamplights on the West Side. More than anything, he loved that moment of ignition. Every eve, at five o’clock, those gothic bulbs sprung to life, cool and hazy in the dimming vespers. That negative interference of tungsten and twilight always betrayed his familiarity. For a brief little wondrous moment each night on his stroll home from the studio, he felt as if lost in a foreign city amidst a romance of cigarette smoke and neon. The East Side where he worked wasn’t half as enchanting—those modern LED’s and industrial street lights were suffocating, really. No, that colonnade of glittering jewels in the West Side, hanging up in the misty evening air—it made each day worthwhile. That was home.

It is March the third, and Murphy is sauntering home like he does on any ordinary eve, the early spring air perfuming his exposed nape. He’s just crossed over Serendipity Street, that thoroughfare that divides East Side from West Side, and now passes by the roasted nuts vendor. Those stands, popping up each winter, always reminded him of childhood—that alluring smell which decorated every street corner, mingling with the scent of Christmas trees and motor oil. When he was young, they were owned by the Lumiere Nuts Company—those red and white umbrellas adorned with light bulb logos. In the last few years, though, a foods conglomerate from Hong Kong looking to gain a foothold in the lucrative American nut stand market bought them all up—the English name was Lucky Foods, Inc. The product, thankfully, hasn’t changed at all. Nor has that alluring scent.

Murphy, carried away by his fancy and by thoughts of the evening ahead, turns a corner onto Austin Street, and is wrenched from his reverie by the ignition of the West Side lamplights. Like clockwork, they all flicker to life precisely as the clock strikes five. A frisson overtakes him—that evening air, the symphony of birds and car horns, the hazy glow now ten feet off the ground, it is pure enchantment and—

What’s this? One of the lamplights, on the corner of Serendipity and Diana Road, has refused to light! One pesky outlier—a black hole in a sea of radiance. Just sticking out, defiant and ugly.

Murphy puzzles over this. It had never occurred to him how dead those black, metal frames looked without the light. But also, how intricate and textured the metalwork was. It is oddly beautiful in its deviation.

He swings his backpack off his shoulders, opens it, and produces a black leather notebook and a pencil. The notebook—worn and supple in his hands—has accompanied him wherever he’s gone over the past few years. It is filled with errant thoughts, poems, song lyrics, sketches, unsent love letters to J. It’s become an extension of himself.

He rifles through the yellowed pages to the latest fresh sheet, and begins to scribble in pencil. This anomaly must be preserved somehow, he muses. This moment must be captured. He jots down some fractured attempt at verse, and sketches a quick drawing, shading carefully and—

The notebook slips from his grasp under the strained weight of the pencil, and splashes into the street gutter.

“Shit,” he mumbles, as he bends down to pick it up. He grabs the book, shakes off some rotten leaves, and wipes it off, still on one knee, when—what’s this? There, out of the corner of his eye. An envelope, perched on the sidewalk, not yet sullied in the gutter.

He pauses a half second, reaches down, and picks up the strangely clean envelope. Murphy turns it over in his hand and reads the front: “For Penelope, my love.” A half smile overtakes his face, as he kneads the paper in his fingers. It is thick, layered. Penelope, he mouths without speaking. What a strange little artifact.

He turns it over again, nimbly in his slender fingers, and sees that it is not sealed. Well, a little peek never hurt anybody, now did it?

He slips a finger inside, and then slowly another one, and produces its contents. Money. Lots of money. Hundred dollar bills.

Murphy’s eyes widen. It can’t be. He looks around, sees that the intersection—unusually—is near bereft of other life, and begins to count. He spends several minutes, taking each bill one at a time. Thirty three, thirty four. He’s barely made a dent. There must be thousands here. One hundred and one, one hundred and two. He cannot believe what he is seeing, what he is feeling. One hundred ninety nine, two hundred. Twenty thousand dollars cash! He can’t believe it. He glances around—nobody has even seemed to notice the young man kneeling on the sidewalk, counting bills. The world seems to have slowed down around him.

Should he report it? He muses for a few seconds, pangs of guilt accosting him. But anybody could claim it, really. And would anybody else even think of reporting it, if they were standing in his Chelsea boots? Of course not. There’s no information, save this Penelope etched on the front. And how many Penelope's could there be in this city. Potentially dozens. Hell, hundreds. And it is cash. There’s no way to trace it or verify its owner...

No, somebody up there is smiling down upon him. His eyes dance wildly, focusing on the money, now his hands, now his notebook, dancing in wild, blue-grey saccades. It’s my lucky day, he thinks. He can’t wait to show J.

“It’s my lucky day,” he actually says out loud. “It really is my lucky day.” His fortune is changing. This could give him time—could buy him time.

He could quit his job for a bit, finish that novel. Or take that trip with J.

Hell, he could afford to marry J.

Murphy holds the money and the notebook at arm’s length, looking at them, still unbelieving. He takes in the scene like some errant fantasy. His hands are shaking from excitement. What fantastic luck. It’s my lucky day. All because of that damned broken lamplight. Incredible, what luck.

The lucky soul, it seems, doesn’t see the man in the denim jacket bursting in from his periphery, hurtling up the sidewalk. He only sees a pair of hands extending, prehensile and precise, as they snatch, in one fluid motion, the contents from his own trembling hands.

Murphy stares for what seems like an eternity, shocked, confused, before recognition smacks him in the face.

He turns to his left, and finds the man in denim sprinting away, never looking back. After a moment of sharp cognizance, a caterwauling Murphy begins to sprint after him.

“Stop him! Thief! He stole my—,” the victim hollers after the man, and a crowd of heads turns in his direction. He points ahead to the man parting the crowd. “Thief, thief! Help!”

The purloiner turns a corner right, and Murphy follows, dodging in and out of constellated pedestrians, all trancelike on their walks home.

He gauges his distance by the number of lamp posts separating them. At first it was three. Now four. Each one ten to fifteen feet apart, he reckons.

“Thief,” he yells again desperately, his legs screaming . “Thief, stop him! Thief!” His voice breaks on this last word.

The man in the denim jacket is getting away. He slaloms wildly in and out of lamp posts, and brushes by alarmed passersby, each more aghast than the last. He turns a corner left and darts across the street. Murphy, huffing and puffing, bellowing ‘thief’ or ‘help’ between each labored breath, is forty five feet behind. He also swerves left, and gallops across the street, never pausing to look out for the cars which honk wildly at this idiot pedestrian.

“He’s got my notebook! All my work is in there! He took my envelope!” He gasps and yelps, but his stride doesn’t break as he pleads his case. It is all adrenaline now.

A right turn. Crenshaw Street. And now a left down McGarrity Lane. Around a Lucky Foods nut stand, and through a magazine vendor’s shelves. There is no pattern to it, a series of random twists and turns, a desperate escape.

Now on Main Street, a long straightaway ahead. Murphy, finally, is gaining ground on the man out in front. He is only fixated on the denim jacket in the throng of business suits, illuminated against the darkening sky by each pass of another lamp post.

The thief crosses another avenue haphazardly, and is nearly flattened by a madly honking Toyota Celica, which Murphy avoids as he continues in hot pursuit.

The two approach the intersection of Flaherty and Main, where another lamplight stands broken and dark, its silhouette tumescent in the growing eveningtide.

How strange, Murphy opines as his lungs continue to scream, and his feet continue to canter. Two in one night. What a bizarre evening.

The denim jacket, obscured by a crowd, darts left, and heads down Flaherty.

“Gotcha,” Murphy gasps. For you see, Flaherty street has no exit, and inevitably horseshoes back around to Main. Murphy can simply jog the next block, and cut the thief off when he necessarily circles back to Main Street. He can tackle him, seize back his stolen possessions, and walk away the hero and the victor. The thief is a fool. The lucky day can be salvaged. His fortune is still coming up, bubbling to the surface.

Murphy continues to run towards the intersection, watching the thief zoom down Flaherty Lane. He hasn’t yet looked back.

“Thief,” Murphy calls once more, for good measure. “Help! Get him!” He smiles, and turns to continue down Main.

Strange, he again thinks, approaching the corner, and fixating on the unlit lamp. Two in one night. Never even seen one before. The city is plunging into darkness, it seems.

A tangerine lurks in the shadows, lying half-rotten on the curb. On a normal night, underneath the auspicious glow of those lovely, latticed West Side lamplights, perhaps Murphy would have seen it. But it is not a normal night. It is the night of his lucky day. And so he doesn’t see it. Can’t.

Like a silent movie star, he steps directly onto the fruit and hurtles feet over head, tumbling wildly onto the cracked pavement of the intersection, and landing with a smack against the uneven asphalt.

Woozy and cursing under his breath, he pulls himself up to his feet and looks at his hands—each covered in blood, bashed unrecognizable, like Pollock paintings on his palms. He can’t even begin to imagine what his face must look like, screaming in pain and dripping with sweat, blood, and dirt. J’s going to kill him—they have dinner plans for their anniversary the next day. And he’ll look a mess.

“Unbelievable.” He mutters. But the time is short, and the thief is getting away with his notebook and his money. He must—yes, he must—preserve his lucky day.

Murphy takes a few steps, still looking at his hands, and begins to accelerate to chasing pace, again.

He doesn’t hear the horn blaring to his left.

He sniffs the cool evening air, and finds the mingling of blood, garbage, motor oil, verbena, fertilizer, cigarette smoke, and roasting nuts. Home, sweet home.

And though he smells it coming as well, he doesn’t see that semi-truck barreling through the intersection, straining unsuccessfully to brake, its trailer marked in garish red foreign script.

It shaves the hair off his head as it whizzes by, just barely missing the poor sap.

Murphy manages to catch the translation on the trailer, scrawled below in nondescript black letters: Lucky Foods, Inc.

“Jesus Christ,” he says aloud, shaking. “Watch where you’re going, for Christ’s sake.”

Composing himself and brushing his jacket clean of dirt, he jogs over to the next intersection, waiting in ambush to accost the vile thief. But he never emerges.

“Goddamned truck,” Murphy mutters softly.