The crocodile on the ticket looks amiable, generous even. It was raining cats when I stepped through QuikTrip’s doors and spotted the pleasantly-designed cartoon marshland portrayed on the ticket. I imagined my world of burnt coffee and rained-soaked shoes merged with one of day-glo swamp-buggies and poker-playing aquatic reptiles. I bought in expecting the croc to be fair—wishing me luck, even. If my tickets’ numbers weren’t fated, I reckoned he looked like the kind of beast that’d at least include a high prize to show me what I might have won. Scratch, scratch, scratch: nothing—no free chance, no pot over fifty.

The fucking croc is a cheat and I’d stab him in the head with a cartoon Bowie knife if I woke one day to discover myself metamorphed into a cartoon, with a Bowie knife. Similarly, if I woke one day to find the croc sitting at the foot of my bed, transformed from cell-shaded buffoon into to scale-encrusted kill-beast, if on such an unusual and frightening day I turned toward my bedside table, which normally supports only one lamp, a wind-up alarm clock, and my old cell-phone charger, if by chance a real-life Bowie knife lay mysteriously on my bedside table on that day, I would not question where it came from, not even for a second, instead I would slide the Bowie knife from its supple leather sheath, acrobatically leap toward the miserly crocodile, and shatter its swindling, greedy, no-goodnick skull with a stainless-steel blade and my immeasurable hate.