The Fortune Machine

In the last cavernous summer before miracles were 

allowed, I pushed every penny I earned past a mouth 

in the woods. In return I got nothing but water. If you 

catch the machine on a good day, it will tell you good 

things. Or so the story goes. I used to live in the

middle of nowhere. This is another way of saying that 

there was a street through the country with other 

streets coming off it & not much else. I grew up in the 

space of not much else. Time yawned. The only 

machines for miles did nothing but hum & cut grass. 

This was music in a land without instruments. It can 

be funny sometimes, how quickly you get used to 

silence. The fortune machine was easy to find if you 

looked. It sat like the elderly. Too tired to get up. It 

waited for you in a hole in the ground. If you swung a 

torch back & forth you would see it, glinting like glass 

beads on a windchime. It shone like a shot in a game 

bird. Like a coin in a cake. Like the luckiest man in 

the world would, if he walked through a storm so 

heavy whole houses gave way. The fortune machine 

knew what you needed. It spat out promises of time & 

money, wealth expanding into valleys

of life. It promised love like cinema. It promised God & 

PhD funding. It promised a phone call from those in the 

ground. I spent a whole summer like this, making my way 

down into the dark. A young pilgrim. A grave robber. A 

curator who saw nothing in beauty but ornaments & how 

to place them. I excavated whole ribbons of possible 

lives. Strung them up in the trees. The birds became 

confused & every compass for 50 miles swung wildly. 

Too much fortune makes it hard to live in the present. 

Everything becomes a lonely road towards an eventual 

blossoming. It made me mad. I talked only at night & by 

the light of day forgot even the sound of language. I 

would walk as I slept. Mournful walks. The kind where 

you don’t know where you are going to end up until you 

stop, suddenly weeping at the realisation. 

At last it rained. The first time in weeks. 

The shock of the water split me in two. 

I decided I would leave in the autumn. 

I hoped to come back different. Those first 

few months in the city were a paradise. 

Like seeing the sky after a life underground. 

By December the whole of August felt like a 

dream, or a nightmare that allowed pain into 

waking. One evening I broke & got curious.

Crept out of my bed in the gape of night. It 

didn’t matter. Frost had hidden the fortune 

machine away & ice had sealed the slot shut.