The toss of the coin (by Heather)

You've just had one of the most grueling days of your life when you stumble upon a wishing well. While you don't typically believe in such things, you need a pick-me-up. So you toss a penny down the well and make a wish. Lo and behold, it comes true.

The door slammed fiercely enough that the picture on the wall listed to the left.

Scott, sitting white-faced behind his desk, picked up his pen and made a few doodles for appearances sake. He knew that everyone in the nearby workstations would be looking through the glass windows into his office to check him out and speculate about what had happened.

It was the last retrenchment of the day. There’d been three of them, victims of the GFC rather than of any incompetence, and Scott was scraped so raw that he could barely hold the pen, never mind keep up appearances. The first one, early this afternoon with Janine, he’d botched pathetically, resorting to a “this hurts me more than it hurts you” approach which was transparent bullshit. The second one, an hour a half later, he’d handled slightly better – a straighter conversation that left its victim Max with at least a little dignity. And this final one – well, the tilted picture (a beloved photograph of a remote Chinese village that he’d brought from home) spoke for the success of that.

A few minutes later, Barney stuck his head into the office saying, “I’m just going for a coffee, boss. Want the usual?” The office grapevine was a highly polished part of the machine, and there was obviously some sympathy for him from the survivors. Scott nodded numbly, fished a couple of $2 coins out of his pocket and tossed them to Barney.

His pen doodled a bit of mountain, with a tortuous winding path leading up toward it. He adjusted his backpack and pushed more strongly into the fierce Nepalese climb. There was a stiff breeze pressing his hair off his forehead and his walking stick clipped against the loose pebbles. He stayed firmly on the rocky track until Barney arrived with his coffee and Scott was forced to return to reality.

The day was obviously beyond repair and it was near enough to 5:00 that Scott decided to drop the pretense of working and head for home. He grabbed his jacket and walked through the office trying to look matter-of-fact. His team, eyeing him warily, chorused their goodbyes and he headed for the train station.

A half hour later, when the train pulled into Wollstonecraft station, Scott decided to take the longer walk home through Smiley Park ravine. The ravine was always soothing, a great place for a walk at the end of the day. You’d never know you were in the heart of a large city. The traffic noise remained at higher altitudes; down here in the thick foliage, birds, insects and reptiles abounded. At the foot of the ravine, Scott paused beside the whimsical little circular stone well casually built by someone to catch a bit of the stream. It always contained a few coins tossed in by superstitious passers-by. He walked on, paused, returned and fished in his pocket to find a coin, finding a nice big 50 cent piece. With a quick check to make sure there was no one around, he tossed it into the little well. “I wish I would never again have a day like this one,” he muttered. He shook his head ruefully at himself and walked on.

Half way up the other side of the ravine a little stone bench nestled under a gum tree’s low spreading branches. Scott stopped, sat down, and dropped his head into his hands. Reduced to throwing coins into wishing wells, he thought? Perhaps it was time to take stock of himself, his dreams, the routine of his day-to-day existence.

All right, he mumbled to himself, there’s two ways I can go with this. It was an easy wish – on one hand, he clearly was never going to have another day exactly like this in his life. The old wish genie could head off to a harder job because this one was already handled.

He could accomplish the wish just by putting one foot in front of the other. Tomorrow would be different.

But would it be meaningfully different? Would it invigorate his life?

There was another way to make tomorrow different. He could quit work, say goodbye to a job and a team that he liked but knew inside out – and head out into the world to travel, to see new things, to sample some of the vast array of the world’s offerings. He could throw his bicycle onto the roof-rack of his car, head north, fly out to China from Darwin…

He felt in his pocket for a coin. There was only one left. “Heads I stay, tails I go,” he said and tossed the coin onto the ground at his feet.

The coin came up heads. It took three more tosses before he got it to come up tails.

“Well, that’s it, then!” he said, walking home with a brand new stride in his step.