The Wheel and the Glass
A bit of micro-fiction
A few years ago during a writing dry spell, I tried to keep in practice by writing some very short micro-fiction (a few hundred words) from prompts. Most of them were just that, practice, but a handful of them pleased me enough to type out. I didn’t even try to stick to a particular genre or style with most of them, just to have fun if I could. Here’s one that was even a little more overtly for-fun than the others—it came from the prompt, “myrmidon, roulette, opera-glass used as a weapon.”
The croupier’s face was slick with sweat. No player was supposed to win this much, and yet the lady in black, with a gentle, remote smile on her face, had won five times running. Someone had tampered with the mechanism of the wheel, and for the first time in months it was spinning free of any direction but Providence.
The croupier could feel the Duchess’ eyes on the back of his neck. She was moving forward now from her station beside the marble pillar, about to descend on him. But she was moving past the roulette table; her eyes were fixed not upon the rigid croupier but upon the lady in black, who had just gathered her winnings and glided from the room as if she had timed it perfectly to disappear just before the Duchess reached her. And now the Duchess was quickening her step, disappearing through the dark arched doorway herself, her rich skirts sweeping the flagstones; and the croupier had something else to divide his attention from his delicate job. She was going upon the errand herself instead of sending one of her myrmidons as she usually did—for the Duchess did not like to make public her connection with the gambling-salon that she ruled with a slender iron hand.
They found her lying senseless upon the garden path later, a gash in her white brow and a broken opera-glass lying beside her. The Duchess never spoke of what had happened after she had recovered. But her employees whispered that for once she had been outwitted by a woman even cleverer than herself, for the lady in black had escaped the salon with ten thousand pounds that the Duchess would never have willingly permitted anyone to win.
Stranger still, the man who was first upon the scene in the garden saw that the opera-glass, which had certainly not been in the Duchess’ hand when she left the salon, and which no one recalled having seen her carry before, was engraved with the Duchess’ own family crest.
I’m running a flash sale on a couple of my ebooks this week! Through Monday the 14th, The Parting Glass (Mrs. Meade Mysteries #2) and Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories are discounted to $0.99 and $1.99 respectively.
If you enjoy The Second Sentence and you’d like to show appreciation without committing to a paid subscription, you could buy me a coffee or buy a book.