I think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead –
the opening scene, where Rosencrantz or Guildenstern
(we don’t know who’s who, just yet)
flips a coin, over and over and over,
and it comes up the same each time.
Heads. Heads. Heads.
It carries one message of the play –
the absurdity of chance.

I try this exercise at home,
my quarter comes up heads three times.
Not remarkable.
But then the string continues,
just like in the play.
Heads. Heads. Heads.

After twenty times, I begin to wonder,
what influence might this have on my world?
I remember what I learned in statistics class:
The odds of a long string of consecutive heads
are infinitesimal, but the odds of heads on each
individual flip are always fifty-fifty.

After fifty heads in a row, things begin to happen:
my next-door neighbor has quadruplets;
my sister comes home from the casino
with a bucket of quarters. “I only put one
in the machine,” she says.

After one hundred heads, I’m struck by lightning
and I hit the lottery.

When I get to a thousand heads,
trees begin to talk,
protesting their own demise.
There’s a penguin in the White House.

When I reach ten-thousand heads,
the sun goes nova, but it doesn’t matter,
because we’re all magnetically encoded,
and shot off to Beta Centauri.
I continue to flip a coin binarily,
with zeroes and ones.

By the millionth head in a row,
the universe has folded in on itself,
and men finally understand women.

Finally, after another thousand or so,
my coin rings up the very first tail.
Everything seems to snap back to normal
like a cosmic rubber band.

I pocket the coin, a Michael Jackson quarter,
and use it to buy a paper on my way to work,
just before second sunrise.

08/14/2002

Author's Note: [First published as a slightly-revised flash fiction piece, in A Flasher's Dozen #1, Fall 2005.]

Posted on 08/14/2002
Copyright © 2025 Bruce W Niedt