Six people, and they have arranged themselves so that their hands touch.
I want you to understand what this means to me. Where I come from, if you reached out your hand and traveled at the speed of the fastest thing there is, you would wait years, whole years, before your fingertip found anything at all to touch, and then it would likely be a stone, cold, or a fire so far off it is only a rumor of a fire. That is the ordinary distance. That is my whole biography.
But here. Here they sit close enough that their knees knock the table leg. Their palms are warm and slightly damp and pressed flat against palms. There is a candle, which is to say there is an entire small sun, contained, on a plate, throwing heat onto their faces at no cost.
The air is thick with breath that has already been inside someone else and is now going inside another. Three smells at once, wax and wine and the perfume of the one on the left. Six hearts, all beating, all inside the same little box of a room, close enough to hear if the room would only hold still.
And they have closed their eyes. And they are calling out into the dark for someone who is gone, someone far away, someone they cannot reach.
I do not understand this part. They are already touching. Every one of them is a hand's width from another warm and breathing thing. They ache toward the empty places and I want to tell them, from inside the emptiest place: turn the other way. Open your eyes.
You are all in the jackpot.
You are sitting in the middle of the win.