The lights are vibrating in my teeth. She’s talking but I can only hear the buzzing blanket of screams buried underground. She’s smiling so I smile as my eyes widen to watch her lips manipulate flesh into the sounds of a song I thought I knew. There’s a Japanese cat figurine in the other room. I can see it through the hallway where the lights are off but the living light from this room still casts. I’m being pulled through the hallway through my eyes. My teeth latch onto the wall to stay here while she continues to talk. I’m trying to listen but the lights are getting louder. It’s too loud now and everything is vibrating into booms. Is that my heartbeat or the screams? I can’t see her, or anyone; they’ve melted into the walls of my brain as I’m dragged underground. Focus on the cat. You’re here. Lucky to be here. So lucky.

Amelia walked into the casino with one thought in mind. This time I’ll win. Amelia has always considered herself unlucky. Rain coming everyday she wanted to go to the park, being late the one day her boss is urgently waiting, and only speeding when there happens to be a cop nearby. Today, however, was going to be different. After all, it was Friday the 13th. Maybe this day was made for her. She would be lucky on a day that’s meant to be unlucky, or maybe she’ll be even more unlucky. She walks up to the slot machine in front of her, puts her money in and pulls the lever. Nothing. She tries again, and again she fails. She feels like an idiot for thinking today would be different, after all it’s just some stupid date, it’s not like this day is different than any other day. She stands up to leave. As she walks out the door, the slot machine starts to shake. It shakes so hard it’s about to burst. People have started to take notice. All of a sudden the machine explodes. Money starts to rain down around the people in the casino. Some start to grab it, and others stand in awe, but Amelia does neither of those things. She gets in her car and drives home without knowing about the mysterious slot machine that was trying to break her curse of bad luck.

Time passes and things change, but my grandfather will always tell the story about how he courted and wooed Luck the same way.

“It was difficult to catch her,” he’d say, “She has a tricky way about her, a tendency to land when you least need her and disappear when you are in your most dire straits.”

The secret was to appeal to her ego. She may seem aloof and uncaring when it comes to the plight of mortal men, but really she craves the attention.

Every time you cry out, “My lucky day!” or “What good luck” she gets a quiet satisfaction, knowing that the impacts of her flights and fancies are well felt amongst us humble earth dwellers.

He really had to piss her off to get her to notice him. He started embroiling himself in every misfortune he could of. Losing his job, leaving his home and heading off to unknown roads. He let himself get beat and bruised by street gangs, spat at by spoilt children on the street.

“I was testing her,” said my grandfather, “I was testing her compassion... and perhaps her arrogance too.”

It was only on the worst day of all, when my grandfather found himself shivering with pneumonia by a street lamp, drenched in rain and losing his senses, that Lady Luck finally showed herself.

She emerged through the rain droplets, a golden and shimmering entity, with beautiful silken robes and long lustrous hair. Her eyes were shiny and black, unnerving and alluring at the same time.

My grandfather was frozen in awe when she leaned towards him.

“You win, boy,” she said, in a voice that was like all the women he had ever known and none of them, “You’ve got my attention. You’ve got me.”

Mustering every inch of his faculties, my grandfather said through trembling lips, “Who are you?”

She leaned even closer, so her silken robes razed against my grandfather’s heaving chest. She smelt like uncanny opportunity and unexpected beginnings. “Luck,” she said, and somehow, my grandfather instinctively knew, deep in his soul that was she was telling the truth. “Now that I’m here,” she said, “Please, please, please don’t fuck it up.”

At this point in the story all the younger kids will start cracking up at grandfather’s use of vulgarity, and my parents and aunts and uncles will grimace in annoyance. They’ve heard the story too many times and are too resigned to disapprove in any meaningful way. I always look at grandfather in the eyes here, knowing the best part of the story is the end.

“And just like that, Lady Luck disappeared. In her place was a young nurse, trained in the war, with warm eyes and a stern jaw. She looked at me with concern and offered to take me to the hospital. That day I met your grandmother and became the Luckiest Man Alive.”

It’s been ten years since grandmother passed away, but grandfather still tells the story the same way.