“Life is a crap shoot
that can turn out crap,”
old Snake Eyes once told me.
“The only guarantee
is there are no guarantees.”
He scratched his scarred temple,
“Pot shots,” he said, “pot shots—
you never know when the black bullet
strays your way.
Ricochet is the route
of cause and effect.”
Like the spore from South America
that needled through the only hole
of my screened shelter house,
a killer bee that bored its venom
into my painter’s hand, swelling
it to the size of a boxing glove,
like at the emergency room
and the injection
into the hip,
the healing white magic of medicine
that turned black,
sending me into blackness…
I was lying upon my back
on the tiled floor in high school
below my locker, number 448,
below my classmates—
Trudy, Dennis, Dave, Becky—
hunched over, arms extended.
They had been dead for years.
Hunched over me was a doctor,
his finger pressed to the pulse of my neck,
a malevolent smile of a deity
upon his face, the countenance of one
who delivers life.
“What are the odds of that?”
I heard a nurse cry.
The ricochet had
ricocheted.
Robert E. Petras is a graduate of West Liberty University and a resident of Toronto, Ohio. His poems and short fiction have appeared in more than 60 publications, often writing about personal experiences such as the trauma that occurred in “The Ricochet” and his fight against kidney cancer and is now a 5 1/2-year survivor.
