Under the glass at the register the tickets lay in rows, held down by their own gloss, each one a rectangle of foil-bright ink promising a truck, a cabin, a number with a lot of zeros behind it. The glass over them was scratched cloudy from years of coins and keys and elbows, so you read the jackpots through a haze, which felt about right.
Everything else in the store could do a job. The oil could go in an engine. The bread could be eaten. The tape could hold a thing together for a season. The tickets did nothing. That was their whole nature. They were the one item on the premises priced entirely on wanting, a dollar or two or five laid against odds nobody in the building could have written down honestly.
The man ahead of me bought three. He knew which. He pointed through the glass without reading, the way you point at a thing you’ve pointed at before, and the clerk tore them off a coil that fed up through a slot from somewhere below the counter. A whole spool of hope down there, unwinding a foot at a time, all week.
He scratched one at the counter with a nickel he seemed to keep for it. The gray latex curled off in little worms and gathered by the mat. Not a winner. He did not change expression. He folded the other two into his shirt pocket, behind the cigarettes, for later, for the truck, for the road.
The scratched-off flakes lay on the counter where he left them, gray and slightly greasy, a small drift of covering that had hidden nothing worth hiding. The clerk did not sweep them yet. They were still there when I paid.