By Vivian Walman-Randall
I visit the casino every weekend, but I don’t gamble. I stand at the corner of the bar in my pink satin dress and sip a vodka cranberry. I always ask for a maraschino cherry so I can swirl it on my tongue while I watch the poker table. I’m waiting for someone to show up. For weeks I wait, vodka cranberry after vodka cranberry, my eyeliner permanently smudged on my lower lid, making me look unsettled.
And then, there she is, an older woman with a real mink shawl, its small paws draped elegantly around her back, clinging to her shoulder blade. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t smoke, just shuffles her chips, click, click, click. Slides her cards across the table, lifts them by their edges, eyes turned down. She bets sparingly, wins stingily. She folds more than she sees, sees more than she raises.
At midnight, she trades her modest stack of winnings for a few chips and takes them to cash out, folding the bills and putting them neatly in her snakeskin purse. I follow her to the curb where she waits for a taxi, reapplying her berry purple lipstick. I stand beside her.
“Teach me to play.” I whisper to her.
Her eyes stay fixed on the street. “And why would I do that?”
“I need to sit with men and be untraceable. I need to know how to feel safe enough to risk something.”
She replaces the cap of her lipstick with a click. “You don’t learn these things from watching. You learn them by fucking and biting and betting and cheating. There’s no easy way up.”
“Please.”
She looks at me for the first time, squints her gray eyes. “Sit down at the table. Then fold and fold and fold.”
Vivian Walman-Randall is a writer and scholar from Southern California. In her work, she’s interested in exploring themes of environment, feminism, climate change, and cyclicity. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative writing emphasis at Oklahoma State University in Fall 2025. She is a Co-Founder and the Prose Editor of Fork Apple Press. Her prose and poetry can be read in Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Apricity Magazine. Vivian currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her partner and their standard poodle, Clover.
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