Good Luck

Benny sat alone by the door in a recently opened Asian restaurant. The laminated menu offered Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese dishes, with each written in its native language and alphabet. He had to flip it over for the English version on the back.

He was taking his therapist's advice, "throwing caution to the wind" and "letting the chips fall where they may." A sex therapist branching out to grief counseling, she was all about the clichés.

Several months earlier, she suggested he get out more. Try new things. "Socialize! Experiment! eXult!" she quoted the tag line on her business card.

The "exult" line made him laugh, but he had to agree with the "get out more often" part. It had been a year and a half since the accident, and he was becoming a hermit.

Now, he was reconnecting with the world, getting out and going to restaurants with indecipherable menus. When the fortune cookie arrived, he cracked it open. One side of the paper displayed his lucky numbers. The other side said, "You will be a great leader someday."

"Ha!" he said to no one. "Who writes these things, my therapist?" A young woman at a nearby table looked up, realized he was talking to himself, and looked away.

Once home, his cat Flaky curled up at the other end of the couch as Benny sat and watched television. The winning lottery numbers scrolled across the screen, and