Lottery Ticket: A Short Story

By Simone Qwunta

Two women, one ticket, and a lifetime of dreams all hanging in the balance of a lottery ticket.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indelible Inscriptions
• Release date: Jan 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393771203

Simone Qwunta

Simone Qwunta is a novelist, screenwriter, and poet who lives, loves, and writes in Chicago.

Book preview

1

Tyler

Every day for six years, I have stood in front of this liquor store and begged for change. People mocked me, kicked me, cursed me, prayed for me, and some even blessed me. I have been called out of my name more times than I can count. The name that bothers me the most is crackhead. I am not a crackhead. I have never used drugs and only recently started giving blow jobs to earn enough money to eat. I feel like the universe has played a huge trick on me. I never thought that my life would consist of being homeless.

I sleep on Lower Wacker Drive. There is an unknown community down there. Rich people know about us and see us and sometimes accept the offer of a ten-dollar blow job, but they do nothing to help us. We are invisible to them unless they need us to fulfill a desire or they think that we are going to harm them. I watch them scurry along, looking out of the sides of their eyes while clenching their phones and briefcases. People have a way of making you understand your place without speaking a word.

Eight years ago, I had a home, a husband, a daughter who was proud of me and who I am proud of, and a dog. I also had a good job working as an admissions manager for a college. I’d worked there for twelve years. I could bore you with the details, but basically, my husband was having an affair with a younger woman, my daughter went about her life and moved to Nevada for her dream job, and I was caught up in a scandal that cost me everything. I used my savings to pay a divorce attorney who didn’t help me, and as a result, I lost my home, my car, and my dog to my cheating husband.

When the school I worked for lost its ability to receive Title IV funding, a.k.a. financial aid, the doors closed on our students and my twelve-year career. No other employer would touch me.

Once they saw the school’s name on my resume, everyone looked the other way, not just other schools, but other businesses, period. The school was part of one of the biggest financial aid scandals in the United States. How do you erase a twelve-year career from your resume? Though no one ever said it, I knew that the assumption was that I would bring unethical practices with me to their business if they hired me. If only the employees got to tell their side. If only we got to explain that we had nothing to do with the practices of the school. We are not financial aid experts, and we followed the admissions rules laid out for us in black and white, knowing nothing of the grey areas. Yes, some of the things were questionable, and I questioned them. If I was not clear on the expectations, I did not hand the directive down to my team.

The college wasn’t just here in Chicago. No. It was one of those for-profits that you see commercials for, and when the shit hit the fan, it spread all across the nation. People who graduated from the programs sued, people who didn’t graduate sued, banks were taking back loan money, and the government allowed all of it to go down. In the meantime, we kept showing up for work until one day we showed up, and the doors were locked with notices pinned to them letting us know that the school was no more and that we could contact Human Resources with any questions.

There were no severance packages, no unemployment packages, and no truthful explanations. All the information we received came from television and newspapers. I tried to contact the local news to give my version, but no one wanted to hear it. For-profit schools had faced many scrutinies, and it was easier to go with the story coming from the Department of Education no matter how one-sided it was.

I tried negotiating with my cheating husband, but the truth of the matter was that he had a better lawyer, and as a result, he got to keep his