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The day comes every year; Geoff doesn’t know why he’s still surprised, still horrified. He dresses quickly, sharp and fervent with shaking hands. Misbuttons his shirt and has to start all over again. It’s still dark outside. If he squints, Geoff can just make out the breaking rays of dawn outside his kitchen window. He shields his eyes to the glow, despite how slight it is. Every cell in his body is on edge today, every sense is heightened.
He checks the clock, sitting above the sink. It’s blinking, stuck at 2:57. Dead. Geoff tries not to take that to heart.
The door to his house opens at the softest touch. It creaks in the wind, foreboding. It gives way, and he is met with a pair of piercing blue eyes. He jumps back with a start.
“Shit, Ant, you scared me!”
Anthony laughs, wild and loud, color in a desolate landscape. “Oh, c’mon, man, it’s Lottery day! Smile a little!”
“That’s the problem,” Geoff replies, deadpan and morose.
“Oh, please. We’ll be fine! Nothin’ to even worry about.” Anthony ruffles Geoff’s hair affectionately.
Geoff smirks despite himself. “I have loved an optimist.” It sounds like a quote. He doesn’t know where from.
—
They walk down the beaten dirt path, hand in hand. Dust splashes against their pant legs in the morning breeze. They can see the low-rising village buildings silhouetted against the rising sun. They pass Anthony’s house as they enter town. He left there, even earlier than this, to pick up Geoff at his home, on the outskirts. He tries not to think about that too hard. Tries not to think about being something someone loves.
Anthony threads his fingers through Geoff’s, gives a calming squeeze. Geoff musters up a small smile in return.
He was young when he signed up for the Lottery; young and angry. Now sinking into the comforts of middle age, with Anthony by his side, he’s never regretted anything more. That’s how they get you, he muses. They get you when you think you don’t have anything better to live for, when you think it will never get better. Treacherous, conniving, politic bastards.
Anthony was young too when he put his name in; Geoff doesn’t know more than that, and he knows better than to ask. “We’re the unlucky ones,” Anthony had whispered that night, the night they told each other their names were both in the Lottery. Geoff had snorted then and said, “Everybody puts their name in, we’re all unlucky.” He’s only just now learning that’s not true, that not everyone else craved sacrifice as desperately as he had, once. As he does, no longer.
The town square is about half-full, Geoff thinks, as they near it. People are walking in from all directions, heads down and shrouded in the half-light, looking for all the world like mourners at a preemptive funeral, flocking together.
Anthony and Geoff settle into their place in the crowd, hands still fervently grasped. They don’t speak to, don’t even look at, anyone else. No one speaks to them. A murder of crows flies over, strange and ironic.
All Geoff can hear is the sound of Anthony’s breathing and the beating of his own heart, thumping against the pale, thin skin of his wrist. The shuffling of bodies as the square slowly fills up. Geoff recalls once reading a statistic that the entire world’s population could fit in the state of Texas, so long as they stood shoulder to shoulder, squeezing the space and the life out of each other. Geoff feels like one of those eight billion people, squished and suffocated as the crowd thrums around him. Just because the whole world could fit in Texas doesn’t mean it should.
Just because a thousand bodies waiting for death could fit in a single square 30 yards wide, doesn’t mean Geoff’s heart beats any slower.
“It’s okay,” Anthony whispers. “Look at all the people here. It won’t be us.” Sometimes, Geoff swears he can read minds. He only nods and gulps.
It’s like two years and two seconds all at once before the microphone turns on, ready to announce the winners. Two every year. Without preamble, it begins to read the first name. Geoff can’t hear it over the harsh buzzing in his ears, but judging by the soft, comforting squeeze of Anthony’s hand, he knows it wasn’t either of them.
And indeed, the winner, a stout woman somewhere in her mid-thirties, bids a tearful but proud goodbye to her husband and steps toward the stage. Geoff can’t see what she does next, too blinded and choked by the people all around him, but he knows that she joins the voice on the stage, standing still and tall.
The buzzing in his brain gets louder. He doesn’t hear the next name either; he barely even notices Anthony’s grip slip from his. It takes a few seconds for his mind to catch up, and when it does, Anthony is already at the foot of the stage, so impossibly far.
Geoff doesn’t say anything. He can’t. There’s bile in his throat, and there’s bile in his veins, rising up and filling him like a bottle about to spill, a volcano about to erupt.
He starts to cry, “NO!”, but the words die out in his throat, soft and threaded with cracks. His hands are shaking now, worse than they ever have. He reaches out for Anthony’s hand, subconsciously, but finds nothing but empty air, and he feels the shock and grief all over again. That’s what the Lottery is, he thinks with a bitter, wry chuckle. A series of preemptive funerals, all for the same two people. Or person, in Geoff’s case. He feels bad about it, but he can’t bear to care about the fate of the poor woman when Anthony hangs in the balance.
Like they can feel his anguish, the crowd parts around Geoff. He feels as if he is Moses and they are the Red Sea, but with a lot less love for whatever god. Now he can see the stage more clearly. The bodiless voice of the announcer now has autonomy, but they are shrouded in a dark cloak. The woman stands on their left, auburn-haired, with tears shining in her eyes. Geoff spares her no more than a cursory glance, though, because on the announcer’s right is Anthony.
Geoff doesn’t have words to describe the way he looks in this moment, and even if he did, he wouldn’t want to. This was just for him.
As the announcer drones on about glory and honor, Geoff locks eyes with Anthony one last time.
“I love you,” Anthony mouths, or maybe shouts. It’s hard to tell with the distance between them, growing larger and larger, as if they’re on opposite ends of a lengthening, roaring wind tunnel. Geoff’s vision swims. Anthony’s face becomes double, then quadruple, then nothing at all.
He can hardly tell what’s real anymore, what’s actually there, but Geoff swears he sees Anthony’s mouth move one more time.
It looks like he says, “We’re the unlucky ones.” It looks like he says, “But I won’t let it take you, too.”