Free Fireworks in the Rain by Steven Brust

 
    Ren had gone back to Phoenix for her sugar spoon, leaving me nothing to do except play poker or change the world. I got out of my sadly empty bed, put the coffee on, and stepped into the shower. Usually, it would be an easy choice: The World Series of Poker was going, and the money I made playing the side-games was a truly appalling percentage of my yearly income. But, in the first place, I’d done really well so far, and, in the second, I’d played eight to twelve hour sessions every day for the last eleven days. Even if you’ve been playing poker since the game was invented, which I have, you need breaks from time to time to stay at your best.
    Besides, Ren had made a pretty good argument before she left.
    So I had to change the world. Trouble was, I didn’t know how. I mean, I knew, in the most general terms, what I wanted to do; but how to go about it stumped me.
    Last night, Ren and I stared out our front window at “foreclosure” and “sheriff sale” signs in front of nearly half the houses on my block, sort of like politicians campaign signs in reverse: “Shouldn’t have voted for me !”
    “You know,” I said, “I told Jimmy a year ago that I wanted to do something about those.”
    “Then do it,” she said. “I’m gone for a couple of weeks, and you’ve hardly done any meddlework since we’ve been together.”
    I shook my head. “Do what, though? How? We tried to do something when the bail-out happened, and got nowhere. We wanted the money to go to—”
    “Too big,” she said.
    I sighed. “Yeah. I could probably pick one of them, and—”
    “Too small,” she said.
    “I was about to say that. So, Goldilocks, too big, too small; what’s just right?”
    “I already had that conversation with Jimmy,” she said, and kissed me. “You’ll think of something. It’s what you do.”
    And that was that, and now I was alone in the house, tempted to say “fuck it” and just play more poker. I imagined the conversation when she came back. “What did you come up with about the foreclosures?” “Nothing, but I flopped top set and check-raised a guy with a flush draw.” Yeah, not so much.
    I dried myself off, missing Ren and my bathrobe, hoping they were happy together. She’d taken it with her, leaving a note that said, “Dear Phil, I want to feel you all around me. See you in a couple of weeks. Love, R.” Sweet as hell, don’t you think? I should really get a spare.
    Bathrobe, I mean. Not lover.
    I drank coffee, sitting at my lonely breakfast bar.
    She’d taken our Finnish Spitz, Susi, with her too. It’s funny how, after decades of being alone, a year of company can make loneliness suck again.
    I opened my laptop and scanned some headlines, vaguely hoping for inspiration. Locally, a drunk driver pled guilty in a kid’s death, an escaped convict was captured, they were closing the North Las Vegas jail, and some teenagers had been arrested for—I kid you not—drowning kittens. The national news had a great deal about the Higgs-Boson Particle and the death of Andy Griffith, and rest was mostly Syria: a lot of sabre-rattling and demonizing and I had no idea what to do about any of it. Same with the Arizona Immigration law; we ought to be able to do something, but what? I wished I could figure something out; if there’s anything I hate more than injustice, it’s self-righteous injustice. Yeah, I know; social evils always pass themselves off as social goods; but sometimes it’s just so blatant it sets my teeth on edge.
    Good work, Phil. You’ve not only failed to figure out what to do about the foreclosures, but you’ve come up with more problems you can’t fix, and now you’ve gotten yourself so pissed off that your fore-brain isn’t working.
    Zero plus one is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight.
    If you’re going to play poker for a living, you need to have a way to engage your cerebral cortex at times when your