“The number twenty-seven had always been lucky for him. It had been his number when he played football in high school, and though he hadn’t been a star on the gridiron, he’d never been seriously injured, so he counted that as a win. He was twenty-seven when he got his job at Valiant Industries, which he still loved. Twenty-seven had once been the first number on the back of a fortune cookie fortune, so he’d used the entire sequence of numbers and won three hundred dollars. That was a fortune for him at a time when his shared rent was eighty bucks a month, and even that had been hard to scrape together sometimes.
On this Monday, he wasn’t looking at much of anything as he held the subway strap. Then his gaze lighted on the bare arm of a girl several people ahead of him and the tattoo just above her elbow: Happy 27.
He couldn’t see any part of her but her arm, and he attempted to stay focused on that when the doors slid open and people jostled him as they moved out en masse. Once on the platform, he tried to find her in the crowd. His sense of destiny would not be denied.”
I take photos. I write. My volunteer job is taking photos of rescued dogs and cats transported by the rescue group whose records I manage. Since working and volunteering don’t leave me a lot of time to write, I’m spending 2017 borrowing from what these dogs and cats are writing. They said it’s okay.