The dice felt cool against my sweaty palms. I’d found them tucked away in my hidden treasures as I was preparing to move, nestled amongst faded journal pages and hopeful dreams. They carried old, heavy saddness, and whispered stories of forgotten love and whispered secrets. Tonight, they represented everything.
As I stood on the precipice. My life feeling like the last of it was on the brink of collapse. Needing a house, new owners were hounding me to get moving, and the once-bustling house needed to be packed up, but it was now eerily quiet and doing it alone was a struggle I'd poured my heart, soul, and every last bit of energy into the last three years but the universe, it seemed, wasn't going to ease up just yet.
I thought about my grandmother, not my real grandmother but my spare adopted grandma. She was a woman whose wisdom was as potent as her afternoon sandwiches with ice cream, and she had always said, "Sometimes, you just have to roll the dice. The universe loves a little risk." I had scoffed then, just a kid, preferring my ideas over hers. But now, with nothing left to lose, I clutched the dice, a desperate plea forming in my mind.
“If I roll a seventeen or higher,” I whispered to the indifferent night sky, “I’ll find a way. I’ll find a solution.”
It was absurd, I knew. Relying on a dice roll to save me was the height of folly. But desperation had a way of making the absurd seem almost reasonable. I shook the dice in my cupped hands, thinking about the energy behind them, the faint rattle echoing the frantic beat of my heart. Taking a deep breath, I threw them.
They tumbled across the wooden dining table, bouncing once, twice… and landed. A thirteen and a five. Eighteen.
I stared at the dice, my breath catching in my throat. Eighteen. I’d done it. A wave of disbelief washed over me, quickly followed by a surge of… something. Not hope, exactly, but a strange sense of calm. As if the universe had winked and said, “Alright, my fair maiden. Let’s see what you’ve got.”