Short Story: The Boy's Coin

Editor's Note: This is the 100th post of this blog.  I dedicate it to those of my friends and family who read this.  This is a fictional story I wrote last week.  To see other pieces of writing you can click the label "writing" and the other posts will show.  Enjoy and comment with feedback, suggestions, send me edited copies, etc. whatever you feel like. :D -Jared  Second Note:  Apparently this was the 100th draft, but not published post, instead it was the 93rd.  Shucks. haha

Scarlet looked over her 1971 half-dollar, wondering about the fingers that’d worn its sharpness smooth. Scarlet was a woman, and her hair was shoulder length and scarlet red; she thought it ironic.

The chair in which she sat was deceptively uncomfortable in the way that it only lets you sit upright. And when you turned or leaned, leaving the confines of the depression left by the thousands of eager and bored behinds, you entered the realm of, “fucking arm rests in my side.”

She suffered through this predicament without ever knowing, without ever entering that kingdom of, “God dammit.” She never turned, or even moved. Except for her hands, they turned the coin over and over again.

The coin in her hand she’d just rescued from anonymity on the subway cart.

Scarlet liked the way it looked and thought about the way JFK’s hair was parted on the left side, and if that’s how he really did it.

She thought about the man she’d left behind. Just now. He was nice, honest, kind, passionate, handsome: worth it.

Still, here she was focusing on the coin, again. She stared straight ahead. She didn’t watch the two boys crawling underneath the arm rests, across chairs, or the older one reading his book. She toyed with the coin. She didn’t hear the announcement for boarding group two as people took hold of what they could bring.

She tried not to think of him, but, like a child told not to speak, her heart piped in.

Why should she say no to the man who wanted her, that she wanted?

The coin had a ring of copper around the edge marked by nicks demarcating the assured trials and tribulations in the life of a coin.

How often it must’ve been pried from hands that loved it, greedy hands most likely. I’m not being greedy she assured herself.

But greed had very little to do with it. Her’s was a decision that might’ve been born of fear, or perhaps guilt. She wasn’t quite sure of her decision, but she’d made it.

Scarlet let the little boy -he must’ve been twelve, maybe thirteen- hold her 1971 half-dollar while they gained altitude. He, being the oldest, sat in the aisle chair across from his frazzled mother. She was incessantly shh-ing the two other boys to her left, in between bouts of rubbing her face and combing her dry brown hair with her fingers. The two boys were younger, perhaps twins.

Scarlet had to tell her it was okay: He could hold the coin.

She woke up in the land of “there’s no where to put my head and my chair won’t lean back.” Her neck hurt, stiff. She’d woken with her chin on her chest and the boy’s head in her lap. She reach over to the window visor that was blocking the… darkness? She’d been asleep for a while, she wasn’t sure how long. The boy’s head faced away and she could feel a wetness on the top of her thigh, and she smiled.

The boy’s mother’s head rested atop her arms on the tray and her back rose and fell with her breaths. Only one young boy was asleep. The other wasn’t there but on safari in the aisle, lion, hippo, elephant and giraffe tromping around him.

“Rawr,” he would growl anytime the lion would move, but no sound came out when the giraffe would wander for food, and air blown out his nose when the elephant would dip his trunk for water in the cup, and ominous grunts and growls from the hippo when the lion strayed to near his animal cracker.

She smiled again and thought of her coin, still in the clutches of this boy in her lap.

Before she left, she had told him love begins when a moment of chance-luck joins with a moment of weakness. She told him it’s two people grasping, needing some recompense, drawing strength from each other. She told him it’s the end of individuality and the beginning of two as one. She told him she must discover herself first, before giving it all up.

She made it all up. But she felt the pressing need of her fear, the possibility of possibilities in the future. And she felt the scrape of the lie as it went down her throat, and she, too, almost believed it all.

He nodded his head, slowly, and smiled. When she’d left him, their hug was strong and lingered, and she felt him swallow hard; it must’ve been the lie going down.

She wondered if he’d sat there, if he’d thought of her after she’d gone. If he’d found is own coin. She wanted to know: Had he thought it was ironic she was seeking herself to find a man of the ilk she’d just flown away from.

Probably not, she figured.

When she exited the plane, by way of stairs descending to the tarmac, she realized she had nothing but the clothes on her back. She thought about her bag she’d left underneath that seat amidst raucous children and PA system announcements, continuing to walk away from the plane. She accepted she’d left it, come what may.

She’d let the boy sleep till the bitter end of their time together. She told him to keep the coin, the mother too, twice. The mother had woken to find she only had two children. Her third, apparently the youngest (and most adventuresome) had been adopted by the flight attendants, his stomach lined with free chocolate.

She thought about him again, and actually smiled, glad they met. She told herself to hope. She told herself they were out there, the good ones.

Just then she really hoped he’d found his own coin. And she swallowed, easily this time.