I will at least try, though.
***
Indeed, the next day, after feeding the ducks at Shinooginah Pond (of all activities), Stewart and Anthony went back to the Stop N Go for refreshments—chili dogs, this time—and a friendly pull of the claw. The store employee was the same as the day before, and the MagiClaw sat exactly the same, although the baseball was gone.
Anthony dropped fifty cents into the
machine, managed to claw a watch, but lost it before it reached the
trapdoor. He shrugged it off, and let
his big brother try.
Stewart put quarter after quarter in
the machine, but he kept coming up empty.
Once, the claw came up out of the covered space, a tattered comic book
in its grasp. It was a Superman comic,
with the superhero holding a green automobile over his head. Before it slipped from the claw’s grasp,
Stewart saw the words ‘Action Comics’ at the top. Then it was gone.
“Holy crap!” Anthony exclaimed
beside him.
“I know, right. I can’t catch a friggin break.”
“No, no, that book—that comic—that was
the first Superman. It’s, like, worth a
zillion dollars or something!”
“Yeah, right,” Stewart chided, but
he did remember hearing on the news that an old Batman issue went for a
thousand bucks or something in an auction recently. It might even have been more, but Stewart
hadn’t really been paying attention.
Stewart fed two more quarters into
the machine—his last two. This time, he
won!
A pack of gum, he won. It was a pack of grape Bubblicious, and he
cursed under his breath. “All that for a
pack of gum.”
“I like grape. That’s really good gum,” Anthony offered.
“I’ve spent, like, six dollars—it better never lose its flavor.”
He couldn’t let it go at that. He went to the clerk to break more bills into
quarters. “You know, you’ve spent a lot
on that machine,” observed the employee.
“Yeah?” Stewart retorted, almost
surly. He wasn’t angry at the cashier so
much as the damned MagiClaw. It taunted
him, teased him, kept pulling its goodies away from his grasp, like a drunk
girl at an after-prom party. Anthony had
gotten bored of the game after a while, and had been talking to the guy
(Adrian, his name was).
“I’m just sayin.”
“He said the machine is cursed,”
Anthony told him.
Stewart looked at the man. “What?”
Adrian leaned a bit over the counter,
coming closer to tell them a secret. “Nobody
knows where the machine came from. The
boss ordered an ATM, and that came on the same truck, but not from the
distributor. And even though I’ve never
seen anyone come into to stock it . . . it’s always full of prizes.”
Stewart blinked. “No joke?”
The clerk cracked a smile. “Sure, it’s a joke. I only work three to eleven, so whoever
stocks it comes in before I get here.”
“But, it is magical, right?” Anthony asked him.
The clerk shrugged. “That’s just its name.”
“He told me before that a kid won a
pickup truck with the game,” Anthony tattled.
“It’s true,” the clerk said, his
face serious again. “The claw pulled a
Chevy Tahoe out of that thing. It was
amazing.”
Both brothers stared at the clerk
with growing awe. “Really?” Anthony
whispered.
“No.
Of course not. How would that
even be possible?”
“You’re not very funny,” Anthony
growled. Stewart couldn’t have said it
better himself.
“Fine. But there was a guy here, like, two hours
after you left yesterday, who got really excited when he was playing it.”
Stewart too had gotten really
excited, only afterward. “Why?”
“He said he got a certificate out of
it that said he’d get full custody of his kids.”
“What does that mean?” Anthony
asked.
“It means he got the kids in his
divorce,” the clerk explained.
“No, what does ‘certificate’
mean?” And Stewart couldn’t tell if the
boy was joking or not. If he was, he
decided he didn’t know his little brother well enough, even after seven years.
Word Count: 673
Word Total: 3770
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