HURRICANE LIL
On Saturdays her father took her to the track, and he would buy a lemonade for her and a beer for him, and a racing form for each of them, and they would climb to the top of the bleachers and sip their drinks and study their forms, and around them the night was blue-black and the track was a bowl of light, and she marveled at the horses' spindly legs, and how, when they ran, they transformed their jockeys into blurs of color, and she was proud to be the only little girl in this world of men, and when her father leaned over and pointed at her form, saying he liked number three in the fourth, or she should watch that jockey because he could thread a horse through the eye of a needle, she nodded solemnly as her heart swelled; and so she studied the odds to please him, and learned the jockeys' names, and she also learned how to tell when her father was losing, to notice how tightly he rolled his form or how thoroughly he tore up his tickets-and that night his form was no fatter than a piece of sidewalk chalk and his tickets were pieces of confetti, and the way he ruffled her hair before the last race, calling her Lucky Lil, frightened her, and when, minutes later, she heard him put ten dollars on six to win-only one bet!-she checked her form and saw that six was Hurricane Lil, and a fierce responsibility ripped through her, and so, when the announcer crooned Anndd theeeyyy're oofff! and the gates clanged open and the horses surged forward, she rolled her form up tight as a cigar and beat it against her damp palm, roaring C-c-c-ome on, L-l-lil! C-c-c-come on number s-s-six!
©Stephanie Harrison, first published in Gulf Coast
Updated 09/02/10
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