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excerpts from
"Notes Toward a Definition of Luck"
by Jac Jemc
When I was sixteen, my dad came home from a softball game holding four scratch-off lotto tickets, one for each of us. He fanned them out in his hand and let us make our choice. My mom took a Lucky Sevens; my sister took a Horseshoe. I took the ticket with the leprechaun because it looked the most complicated. I liked the complicated tickets because they drew out the suspense. My dad was left with “Star Spangled Cash.”
I scratched off each designated area, not expecting much. I uncovered two pots of gold but didn’t hold my breath. This was the shtick of scratch-offs. They made you think you got really close, made you think you’d almost won when, really, you were as far off as someone who had six different symbols on their ticket.
I kept scratching as my mom declared her loss. My sister won a dollar — enough to repay the price of her ticket. My dad flipped his losing ticket over to my sister to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and as I scratched off the last square of my ticket, my heart quickened. It was a third pot of gold. I reread the instructions, trying not to celebrate a false win, but there it was, three pots of gold meant I’d won $10,000. I looked up at my family who had already started chattering about something else.
Chelsey flipped her car three times without a scratch. A bullet missed CJ by an inch. Selena took a bullet in the liver and lived. Joanna was short on her tuition and then received two-year-old overdue back-pay for the exact amount. Ali got arrested for having sex on the beach in Mexico when she wasn’t doing anything of the sort, but then she was let go without reason. When the hotel repairman showed up, Erin instinctively locked herself in the bathroom, and a month later that repairman was convicted of murder.
Every single one of these events could be seen as unlucky, but each person chose to see it the other way around. I call that perspective.
When I was 26, I worked in a small feminist bookstore in Chicago. Every day the mail arrived and we threw away most of it without even opening it. A small stack would be put aside for the owner or the office manager. Envelopes with handwritten addresses got stuffed in the boss’s mailbox and envelopes with plastic windows, the indication of a payment due, got stacked on the office manager’s desk.
One Monday morning, a poster tube arrived with the regular mail. The poster advertised a travel memoir of sorts: a woman who taught English in Bangkok had written about how she’d fallen in love with the city and decided to stay. The 8-1/2" by 11" promo flyer packaged with the poster indicated that if you made a display promoting the book and Thai travel, then took pictures of the display and sent them in to the publisher, your entry would have a chance of winning a trip to Bangkok to meet the author. I threw it in the trash immediately. “Yeah, right,” I thought.
All February, Hobart will update every weekday with new bonus material --
photo essays, deleted scenes, interviews, extra short-shorts, movies, excerpts, and other Hobart 13: LUCK.