Casino   I hit the jackpot the night I met you. Hell, what did I know from jackpots? The game, the hard, hungry art of losing — I knew that much. If I was driven by the same neon dream as every other moth, what of it? Who doesn’t want to win? In my trance of limitless blind desire and the love of oblivion, I heard the gods of chance murmuring maybe next time, maybe next time, maybe next time — numbers hardly mattered. And then they did. I should have expected the savage, flashing red lights, the pratfalls of victory, klaxons and bells, fat men in shades and ill-fitting suits too tight in the collar who came to me — a gaunt, furtive escapee, caught in the spotlight glare of getting everything I wanted.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont June 2013