The slot machine nearest to her stops at two halved watermelons and a lemon. She’s been here for three months and doesn’t know what this means—it’s as though if she refuses to learn the language of this place, then it can’t claim her. She thinks about how real fruit is bruised, never as good as it looks. Or when it is, she can’t think past the fact that ripeness is only something close to death, a few days, or sometimes hours, away from rot. The baby must have known this, too. Must have known to reject all these images that the world hands you, the ones that are meant to tell us we are safe, that we’re all okay. Just sign on the dotted line for this mortgage rate. Just wear Ann Taylor and eat your free-range eggs and drive your Toyota and wash your clothes with Tide. But then your life can split open, your body, too. After the birth her husband reported to her how there had been so much blood. She didn’t know whether that was true, but the sound of excitement in his voice confirmed what she had suspected—her mortality was thrilling to him. What we’re most afraid of gives us a little jolt of joy, when we brush up against it, when it hovers too close.

She thinks that’s what all these gamblers must be trying to hide from, here in these dark caverns, pulling on levers and spinning their savings away: mortality. No clocks anywhere in sight. Gamblers are the only people she knows who believe the future isn’t the past. Sure, she remembers the statistics: One probability is not dependent on the other. A heads on the last flip of a coin doesn’t increase the odds of tails on the next. A loss could yield to a win on the next spin. But what about here, where the odds are rigged? The odds are always rigged. She hates this place, but here, her thoughts come back to her, her memory feels like a room that’s been tidied up. That thing about the coins, probability—she’d never have remembered that with the baby screaming through the night. Motherhood was nothing like what she had imagined, running her hand over her belly all those months, thumbing through paint swatches for the nursery. She thought there would be softness, joy. Instead there was this new soul who, with all her screaming, insisted she not forget how scary, how terrible it could be to be alive. She started to think about what she could do to silence her. A pillow. A few hard shakes, and she could believe in the illusion of safety again.