Gambling Addiction - A Picture in Words
By E.K.

The morning after.The steel echoes in my head reverberated incessantly haunting me like disembodied souls jostling for the last serving mortality as I threw myself in the couch.You may want to sympathize with me but I do not want that sympathy because I know am a fool - a fool again.Keira had left for her parent?s and from the look of things she would never return coz she had taken little Daniel with her.

The absence from the display cabinet of the photograph her favorite I mean "our" favorite seemed to confirm it. It was her in a golden frame taken in her sophomore year at college, a splitting image of her youthful sunny smile and eager eyes the very salient features that had attracted me to her that?s why the photo was also my favorite.

This photo's absence was something to shake the head for -desperate. I indeed shook my head in a desperate attempt to decant from my head the voices but their pitch seethed with each movement. The ecstatic shrieks and screams of the two women merged into a numb teasing with acrid sharpness.

I could readily identify each of the voices in that detestable cerebral cantata.

The heavier one was Susan?s. She had been ecstatic the previous night screaming like a drunken Demon raving in a moonlit cemetery breeze bath. Yolanda had the heavier tune that undulated discordantly forming a jagged edge along which my senses skidded and wrenched. The voices of the two women I had last night wreaking havoc on my conscience.

Behind the two girlish voices was the dull dingy one, the voice of beer hitting the leather of my temples with each heartbeat reviving a numb headache that creeped in a distance like a slow stealth but seriously venomous cobra. To complete the cantata was the whizzing of the "one armed bandit" call him the slot machine if you like. All these brewed into an immiscible concoction of irritation.It had started the previous night infact let me say it had continued the previous night for this was not the first month end it had happened. This time the damage was irreparable .

The Demon of Las Vegas had once again coiled on my mind and took me to the Casino with Susan and Yolanda and the paycheck sunk again like the sun on a fun filled day.I overdid it, drink and gamble and lady friends -I lost. My wife, I can't blame her for she had endured and couldn't take it any longer.

I am a loser, a real loser. I lost my family, to "the one armed bandit?, to the two ladies sucking bottles under the guise of donating to me company. "Where are they today when Big Brother Benjamin has left and their company is now much needed?" I could only question myself and the empty house perhaps. No answer. They always disappear with Uncle Ben these ladies.

I am a real loser because winners know when to stop. I felt like Judas the traitor the morning after betraying Jesus. I had betrayed my wife and myself.

One armed bandit whizzing and blinking mad figures and dollar signs a deceiver a short time friend.

Damn it.

That was the morning after.

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