The one-armed man was standing in front of a slot machine and he was down to his last quarter. Eight quarters at the slots was his daily evening routine for the last year, since they had released him from the Veteran’s Administration hospital. In the last month of the rehab, they had tried to outfit him with a prosthetic arm, a state-of-the-art gizmo with articulated fingers and a bending elbow. He tried it on, only to feel like he was cheating, or maybe like he didn’t deserve it. He’d much rather walk around with a hook, he had told them, so they gave up and released him with a stump. The stump ended just below the shoulder, short enough to fold his left T-Shirt sleeve over it with a safety pin.
The man dropped the quarter in the slot, pulled the arm on the machine and walked away before the wheels stopped spinning. He would always do that on his last coin and he had never heard any winnings drop into the tray as he was walking away. Tonight was no different.
The Vegas night hit his face with a pleasant September chill. He put his windbreaker on and walked toward the gas station. It was on his way home, and his daily routine also included a stop for a pint of rye, which he paid for with food stamps, as the owner didn’t care one way or the other.
He liked Vegas and its suburbs, the flat and open landscape with soft hills rolling across the horizon, all around, like a rim of a vast crater. It reminded him of the landscape on his monitors at the Air Force base, where he had worked for three years as a remote drone operator. He must have flown millions of miles in that hangar, piloting the drones with a head-mounted display, in his gamer’s chair with no harness. From day one, the desert moons of his missions resembled Nevada, except for the roads. There were almost no roads, just thin solitary lines in the dust going forever with no intersections. But there were people down there who looked like pegs and he could never see their faces even if he tried. They would never look up. Except this one time, when he zoomed in with his joystick just as one of the pegs lifted its head to see what was coming, and it was a woman in a hijab, with a face, with pixels for eyes, and with a mouth that has just begun to open as the image went bright.
He was nearing home now. He noticed the headlights of an approaching car. It was a pick-up, like the one that he had crashed into with his motorcycle last year, but not a Dodge, and much older.
The crash had been his fault and he paid for it with his left arm. The Air Force discharged him with full honors, but he didn’t qualify for the extra insurance as the accident was not combat-related.
***
I liked it.
I'd like to now what will hapend next.
To be continued... I hope.
Whoa, you gotta keep going with this!