The Gambler

The three rolling wheels came to a stop, proudly displaying their symbols.

“7 7 7”

They held for somewhere around 5 seconds as the recorded sound of tokens spilling onto the floor played from within the machine, and then started rolling once again. A few noisy moments passed, and for a second time, they came to a stop.

“7 7 7”

They held, and the machine played its noise, and then the cycle started anew. Corinth took two steps, inspecting the side of the row of slots. All down the line, the machines were still. Some of them simply sat with their lights off, while others fizzed and popped as open wires hung through broken screens or collapsed panes. They were all dead- all except the one.

Corinth walked back to the slot’s front, watching as the panes spun, and landed on the three “7”s once again. She smirked. The thing was busted, damaged, non-functional- a hundred adjectives could be used to describe how fucked it was- but Corinth only had one, and let the word bring a sense of pride to her chest as she stared at the now-rolling panes.

It was alive.

She spied the lever, long and silver, with a red plastic sphere adorning the end. She reached, grabbing hold in one jet-black gauntlet, and pulled. It came down, with little effort required on her part. She watched as the already-spinning wheels kept their course, going on for longer than they had previously. She waited several seconds. They still kept their course. After a dozen seconds or so, Corinth had grown impatient.

“Come on, what-”

The glass pane in front of the wheel exploded outwards, as the machine’s sounds blurred into a cacophony of distortion. Corinth was narrowly spared from the blast, watching as glass blew out beside her to cover the slot’s seat and the floor behind it. One of the three wheels spilled forward, out of the machine and onto the seat, then falling on the floor, tilting sideways as it came to rest on Cor’s boot. The other two fell to lean on each other in the machine, several wires spilling out past them and onto the pane, like a tongue hanging out of an animal’s mouth, sparks replacing saliva.

A dead animal.

Cor sighed. There goes my metaphor, she thought as she leaned against the side of the machine. She inspected herself once over, seeing if anything in her or on her now had glass lodged in it. Nope. As far as she could tell, she’d escaped intact- likely due to the