The Roll Of The Dice

*** This is unfinished, so there are major gaps and also rushed bits from when i tried to finish it... but i figured i needed to put something new up, and also put a story up because that is what i prefer to write rather than poetry ***




The Roll of the Dice

Pressed up against the wall, white against the black stone. The jagged surface is cold against his hot cheek. His eyes search for a way out, but there is none. Trapped.
The boy wakes, shivering, as though his skin is still being forced against the icy wall. He breathes heavily, his head pounding. His ribs heave up and down as he grips the rumpled sheets at his sides. The relief of waking from the dream that feels so real, the dream he so often has, overcomes him. The boy stands and wanders away from his bed - and his dream - to find the old man.
The old man can see the boy coming up the hallway, shining from through the darkness. The boy seems bigger than everything he faces in life. The walls of the hallway are no match for his spirit. In his waking life, he is constricted by nothing. But Destiny will soon bring him down to size.
There are only three things in this life: Chance, Luck, and Destiny. The first two are simply slaves of the last. The old man knows this. To the boy, life is a roll of the dice. To the old man, Destiny has already decided where those dice will land. The young boy has gambling eyes. Chance, for him, is a name. Luck, for him, is a talent. And Destiny (though he doesn't know it yet) is Doom. The boy has never encountered Destiny. He knows it is simply a result of Luck and Chance. Destiny can be altered, Destiny can be won. There is no such thing as Doom.
The old man sees him coming down the hallway. He is still in the threadbare armchair where the boy left him the previous night, as though he has not slept, as though his world starts and ends as the boy comes and goes. The boy looks so large as he strides toward him. The entire house shrinks around him, too small to contain his spirit. He grins widely at the old man, taking a seat on the sofa.
And they sit across from each other; the old man with nothing to lose, the young boy with everything to gain: The wisdom versus the passion. Somehow it doesn't seem fair.
The morning light shines through the blinds, causing thick bars of shadow across the boy's face, so dark they look solid. A shining boy in a shadow prison. He lifts a deck of cards from the coffee table between them and fans them out in front of him. His gambling eyes glance up at the old man. A blue gaze from red rims, seeing it's reflection in the old man's eyes.
The silence between them is broken.
"Which one are you?" the boy asks, holding the pack out to the old man. The old man looks at him. The shining boy who uses a pack of old casino cards to decide his own fate. The gambling eyes who will learn too soon that Luck does not overpower Destiny.
"I'm the joker," the boy tells him.
The joker in the pack. With the wild gambling eyes, and the manic grin. He was the joker, for now.
"What about you?"
"The four of clubs," the old man replies. Nothing special, slightly less than ordinary. You can play many games omitting the four of clubs. Definitely it would never win you anything.
The boy's brow furrows. "Wouldn't you rather be something better?"
"What we'd rather is most often not what we get."
"I think you're a king," the boy says with a grin. With the joker's grin, wide and white, staring at the old man like his gambling eyes.


"What are you scared of?" the boy asks him.
The old man looks at him again. The shining boy with gambling eyes and nothing to fear. He knows what he is scared of. He is scared of the day when the boy will no longer shine. When he will be dwarfed by the world around him, and his joker's grin will be hidden behind the thin line that comes from knowing too much about how the world works. The day when his gambling eyes will lose all grasp of luck. And hope.
"I'm scared of the wall," the boy tells him. "The wall I dream about, that I can't get away from."
"I'm scared of your fear," the old man says. The boy looks at him, setting his gambling eyes over every inch of the old man's body.


The boy dreams the same dream again that night. The old man, too, has dreamt it before, back when he was a boy with gambling eyes and a joker's grin. He knows what it is, knows the trapped feeling and the relief of waking. The relief he no longer has, for he cannot wake up from this. The old man stands silhouetted in the doorway, silent, focusing intently as the shining young boy, with his gambling eyes shut and his joker's grin a grimace, - who will soon face this same battle in the real world - attempts to overcome his first encounter with Doom.