keyword: abyss, title: lucky me in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Just about any Denny’s, there’s generally a claw machine game somewhere near the front of the house. You know, you put in a quarter, these days as much as a dollar and get twenty seconds to position the claw in hopes of retrieving some brightly-hued stuffed animal or another. Maybe to impress a girlfriend, maybe wanting to quiet the kids, maybe just trying to fill in a few awkward moments waiting for the rest of your party to show. The prize you’d win might sell for ten bucks at Wal-Mart, in parts probably just forty cents worth of rayon and cotton-fill wholesale, though profit margin is hardly the point. You pay your money try and prove to someone, maybe just yourself, that you’ve still enough skill to get one over on the Arcade-Industrial-Complex.

I’m terrible at them. I don’t think three-dimensionally, I don’t think in pictures or images, I think mostly in words. My brother Dan’s a genius at them. If the machine’s not particularly rigged, if there’s any chance at all of extracting the bauble in two turns, he will win, and it’ll go to his wife or into the mouth of one of his crazy-ass dogs. I don’t have the spatial sense he does but I know his strategy, how he wins more often than most:

You can’t choose what you want to win. They pack all the real cool stuff deep down tight, never to be extracted regardless of your skill or analysis. The prizes mostly just friction-lock each other into inaccessibility, like the Three Stooges all trying to walk through the same doorway at once. Over time, though, the other rubes’ fumbling for gems can eventually shift something for you to actually grab. The mascot of a basketball team you don’t root for, a tie-in to a children’s movie that bombs. Everyone digging away for the impossible dreams will occasionally loosen a lesser chestnut up from the abyss for the taking.

Waiting on my friend Frank there in the Hollywood Denny’s, and knowing my brother’s secret, I eyed up the loosest item in the machine, a tertiary Spongebob character and put in my dollar to take my chance. The assessment perfect, my aim true but when the claw set down, I discovered that the gripping strength of the pincers wouldn’t have been able to coax a fart out the ass of a mayfly, let alone a two-ounce toy from a sea of synthetics. The fix was in no matter how well you played. I thought about my life years ago, back when I lived there, trying to make it in the movies and how, in any gamble, the house nearly always wins. If it wasn’t almost always rigged, the house wouldn’t stay the house for long yet how if the longshot didn’t pay off every once in a while, no one would make stupid chances in the first place.

Still, Frank was nowhere yet to be seen. One more dollar, I thought. Maybe I’ll get lucky.