The Drifter Who Gambled With a Star

by Sam McAlister

Chapter 1

He stepped to the bar where the prospectors are, with boots that were covered in dust,
And a grin on his lip that was starting to slip from a life he could no longer trust.
Nobody knew of the name that he grew, he carried it close like a sin,
But he sat at the felt where the fortunes are dealt, just looking to gamble and win.
The saloon lights did dim as a stranger so grim sat down with a shimmering stride,
In a coat like a glare of the hot desert air where a burning white center did hide.
It wasn’t a man but a sun from a pan of the galaxy folding its shape,
A literal star that had come from afar, with a mask and a traveler’s cape.

Then out rolled a coin where the dimensions join, that glowed like a bruise on the dark,
A piece of a sun that was recently done, pulsating a violet spark.
“I’ll wager a claim to a heavenly name,” the stellar thing whispered so low,
“If you lose the last card to this cosmic white shard, your soul is a debt that you’ll owe.”
They played their cards slow while the shadows did grow, and the room leaned a fraction to see
The jukebox went dead and the ceiling turned red as the universe slipped from its key.
And out through the pane of the glass in the rain, the constellations shifted their tracks,
They rearranged lines in the shape of the pines, like eyes looking into our backs.

By a whisper of grace or a trick in the place, the drifter had won the last throw;
He reached for the prize under the ancient star-eyes, and the walls were beginning to go.
He walked out the door to the wild evermore, where the dust tasted electric and raw,
Absorbed by the height of the static night, he vanished from all that we saw.
By morning they found on the frostbitten ground just his stetson still humming a tune,
And a trail of dark cards like crystalline shards beneath a pale, fracturing moon.
Each card held a line of stellar design, and they blinked with a cosmic new spark,
For the man who had won from the solar and sun was now mapped as a star in the dark.