The Speakeasy #137 ~ COINS

COINS

The lights dim and the white screen comes to life. You mute your cell and settle back with your bag of buttered popcorn. The only day of the year you go to the movies. It has become a tradition now. Oh, plenty of friends invite you over… some feel sorry, some want to fix you up with their girlfriends, and then there’s her folks. You politely decline.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel sorry for myself, I just like to be alone, and watch the latest holiday movie about fictional families doing what real families do, just maybe a little more outrageously. I’ll go home and have a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce later, I picked one up at Katz’s Delicatessen yesterday.”

You had both been in a pretty bad place when you met. The church basement at Seventh and Pine was a comforting place, you started sitting together. You were told it wasn’t a good idea to form relationships within the group, you thought it was helping.

“I remember when I got my ninety day coin. She got her two month. We celebrated at Katz’s with coffee, pastrami sandwiches, and cheesecake. We kept collecting coins and fell in love.”

You watch the film and cringe when the drinking starts. You still don’t know what made her think she could have just one, and after three years sober. You never saw her again after that Thanksgiving. Everyone was at a loss. Occasionally you hear that someone has caught sight of her.

“Maybe I’ll go tonight. I go to my meetings at the YMCA now, I just couldn’t go back to 7th and Pine. From that day forward, every time I drove past that street corner, I thought of her.”

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THE SPEAKEASY… Check out the other writers… Write something yourself!

Here are the Editor’s instructions: This week our sentence prompt, provided by last week’s winner Courtney at IASoupMama, must be used as the LAST line in your piece. And in honour of the coming holiday, our media prompt this week is a video, which you will find below.  As with all our media prompts, your post shouldn’t be about the video, but you must make some sort of reference to it in your submission.

“From that day forward, every time I drove past that street corner, I thought of her.”