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Among rocks jutting

Out to never, sometimes there

May even be crabs

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A haiku for Hakan Akkaya:

severed ties to black

sheep, offal to bag, miles to

go before i sweep

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“She was completely limp. She felt like a bag of unhappy laundry.”

“Everything You Want Right Here” by Delaney Nolan, recommended by Electric Literature

Issue No. 195

AN INTRODUCTION BY HALIMAH MARCUS

In my life, I have spent two nights in a casino. Both filled me with existential dread. The first was with a group of friends whom I barely speak to now, and our falling out seems somehow a result of that evening. As if those needless fourth, fifth, and sixth drinks, those people movers and badly carpeted corridors, those mazes of machines, those over-priced buffets, and that hangover that was more like a moral reckoning, had poisoned our friendships. It’s magical thinking, I know, that the casino was to blame. But on the other hand, how could it not be?

That’s the anxiety I bring to Delaney Nolan’s excellent short story, “Everything You Want Right Here,” about a married couple living for the foreseeable future in a casino called Les Sables. Outside there is desert and more desert, filled with endless sinkholes or possibly one giant sinkhole, threatening to swallow them with its granular, open maw. Inside is an adult playground, hermetically sealed and filled with confections. The Les Sables Casino is like the world’s largest cruise ship if it never docked; every you need is indeed right here, if what you need is a fountain of cane sugar and never fresh fruits or vegetables.

Our couple, Natalie and her husband, are among the lucky ones, winning big in the first act. (A jackpot at the slot machine gets you a rare tomato plant.) But the casino life may be poisoning them too, and Nolan writes their lives playfully and imaginatively, with the occasional gut-punch of insight. “I felt a twist in my stomach,” thinks Natalie’s husband. “I could see that she was lonely and that she wouldn’t tell me about her loneliness. This is a terrible thing to know about your wife.”

Natalie’s loneliness might also be called longing, not for her tomato plant or to be outdoors, exactly, but for there to be an out of doors to begin with—a place she might go to find something she doesn’t have, should she ever need it.

The second night I spent in a casino, I was practically a pro. When claustrophobia threatened to set in, I located the exits. I mapped the floors and learned my way around. I alternated alcoholic beverages with fizzy water. Like Natalie’s husband, I developed a system. He explains, “At some point around last year I started holding on to leftover bits from meals, just to remind myself: time is passing, time is passing. This is your life. It really is.” I wasn’t carrying around leftover foot in my pockets, but I had reached a state of acceptance. When it came time to check out, I was ready, but I also could have handled another night.

Halimah Marcus Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading

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Everything You Want Right Here

by Delaney Nolan

Original Fiction

Recommended by Electric Literature

Natalie was pulling the slot machine lever, dropping in coins from a little yellow purse she held in her lap. I was drinking my fourth daiquiri, which was also yellow.

“This honestly tastes like real bananas,” I said.

Natalie said, “I think you must be bad luck today.” She held the lever until I took two big steps back. Then I took a third step back. Then she finally let go of the knob and the slots display spun its crazy numbers. You’d think that would’ve shown on her face, but we were all in the same romantic forever twilight of the casino, and in the reflection on the plastic she looked bored, like an angel. Her hair was big, full of that funky-smelling hairspray: shiny, flammable, rough to touch.

We were standing near the one window in Game Room Twelve, which was tinted dark but still showed the red desert going on outside, the same for miles, thousands of miles, I guess. Jermy, who works janitorial on our floor, told me once that the desert led to a massive sinkhole, that magnificent quantities of sand were pouring into the sinkhole day after day, and that eventually we would pour in, too, all of us, the casino and the games and the residents and everything. But that is ridiculous. There might be one sinkhole. But we can’t be surrounded by sinkholes, not in every direction. Statistically, we’re going to turn out fine, in the long run.

Then there was a bright ding! and Natalie whooped because she’d won: out of its mouth the machine spilled a waterfall of shiny tokens, each one small enough to fit in her palm. She said, “I’ve never played this game before,” and applauded a bit, folding her one free hand over and clapping her own fingers, before adding, “not in this room, anyway—not this machine, at least.”

“Do you want some breakfast?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

I peeked over her head toward the lobby. “Did you see the fountain of cane sugar today? It’s really going.” I put my hand flat against her shoulder. “It’s got to be this high.”

Natalie kissed the tips of my fingers and looked at my face and put another coin in. “This is the one,” she said, rubbing her hands. And she was right: suddenly all the lights started blinking at once, and the machine started singing a kind of psycho song. People from the next stool over and the next stool over after that stood up and came to see what was going on. “Twenty bucks says she just won the grand prize,” said a man in golf shorts.

“You’re on,” said a woman next to him. She whipped out her wallet and then started juggling it back and forth.

“I got four cherries,” Natalie sang, and a single, big, fat, golden coin rolled into the dispensing tray. She picked it up with both her hands and kissed it and then asked, “What did I win?”

Which is how we got the tomato plant.

Natalie had called all our neighbors, our friends, and the front desk receptionist by the time we got to the cash-in counter. We were still examining the coin when a man in a white suit walked over, slapped me on the back and said, “Sir, you star, you MVP, you’ve struck gold, you champ; congratulations, sir!” Behind him was another man with a curl of earpiece wire running along his neck, and sunglasses, which struck me as funny—I couldn’t remember the last time I saw sunglasses.

I told him I hadn’t done anything. I pointed to Natalie. The man in the suit introduced himself as the floor manager and spoke into a walkie-talkie; after a few minutes some lugs with a cart wheeled over the tomato plant.

It was just a thin stalk with a few scraggly leaves moving shyly upwards, dwarfed by the cart itself. There was a real crowd by then. Natalie moved toward the plant, but the floor manager got to it first, picked it up and handed it to her while everyone clapped. One girl started to cry, in a hiccupping, cheerful way, fanning herself with a scorecard.

“There’s nothing that makes me happier,” the guy in the suit said, “than seeing our residents win.”

Afterward, he escorted us upstairs, chatting happily about how we deserved everything we got. At the door to our home he had his assistant take pictures of the three of us, everybody giving each other firm, friendly handshakes. He wished us luck, and left us alone.

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