¡Novela Fantástica! #8

 

¡Novela Fantástica! #8

The Lucky Soda Can

Chuy knew he was a loser. He didn’t need the cold, judgemental stare of the Toronto sky, grey as a dead fish, to tell him that. He didn’t need the way his boss at the newsstand, a man whose face resembled a clenched fist, counted out his meager pay. He knew it every time he looked at his wife, Imelda, and saw the exhausted disappointment in her eyes, a look she tried to hide but which hung in the air between them like the smell of yesterday’s cooking.

His only rebellion, his only small, personal slice of heaven, was the cigar. Not just any cigar. A Cuban. Every day, like a priest his wafer, he would walk the six blocks to the little tobacconist on Queen Street. He’d hand over his carefully folded bills, take the dark, oily cylinder, and feel, for a moment, like a man of substance. He wasn’t Chuy the loser, the newsstand attendant. He was Don Jesús, a man with taste, a man connected to a lost world of rhythm and revolution.

But last night, Imelda had dropped the bomb. She stood by the stove, stirring a pot of frijoles, her back to him.

“Chuy, we need to talk. The cigar. It’s almost eight dollars now. Eight dollars. We can’t.” She turned, her face set in that familiar mask of practicality. “It’s a luxury we can’t afford.”

He felt a familiar shame bloom in his chest. “M’ija, it’s the only thing…”

“I know,” she said, her voice softening just a fraction. “So, a deal. I bring home cans from the restaurant, the deposit ones. You take them back, get the ten cents each. The money you get… that’s your cigar money. The cans pay for the cigar.”

It was a transaction. A pathetic, nickel-and-dime transaction that defined his worth. He was a man whose daily pleasure was now contingent on the recycling habits of Toronto's diners. But he agreed. What else could he do?

So began his new routine. Every morning, after Imelda left for her shift at the diner, he’d wheel their sad little grocery cart the two blocks to their rented garage—a single-car space crammed with broken dreams and, now, a growing mountain of empty beer bottles and soda cans. He’d load them up, take them to the Beer Store, and feed them, one by ten-cent one, into the humming, hungry machine.

This particular Tuesday, he was loading the cart and noticed one can had rolled away, hiding behind a dusty box of Christmas decorations. It was a tall, slender can, with a vibrant, almost gaudy label. Señorial Sabores. A Mexican soda. The obscure kind they sold in a few Latin tiendas. He made a mental note to grab it on his way back. He was a man of order.

As he wheeled the cart down the cracked sidewalk, his phone buzzed. It was a video call from his sister, Sonia, in Puebla. He let it ring. He didn’t want her to see him like this, a beast of burden hauling other people's trash.

Later, he returned to the garage to get the forgotten can. As he approached, he could hear Imelda’s voice, muffled but clear through the thin garage door. She was on the phone.

“…no, Sonia, ya no puedo. I can’t. He comes home every day with a cart of empty cans, like a pepenador, a garbage picker. For a cigar! I have to pretend. I kiss him goodbye, I tell him I love him, and inside I’m just… empty. I want a divorce.”

Chuy froze, his hand on the cold metal latch. The words hit him like a physical blow. He stood there, a ghost at his own funeral. Then, the click of the phone hanging up. He heard her footsteps. He scrambled, pretending to have just arrived, and pulled the door open.

Imelda was there, a smile already painted on her face. “Ay, Chuy, you forgot one.” She pointed to the Señorial can.

“Sí, I’m going now,” he mumbled, unable to meet her eyes. He picked up the can. It felt heavier than it should.

He walked to the Beer Store in a daze, the betrayal a cold stone in his gut. He fed the Señorial can into the machine. Clink. Ten cents. He collected his ticket, got his loonies and dimes. Cigar money.

He walked to the newsstand, his mind a blank wall of pain. He fumbled in his pocket for his keys. They weren't there. He’d left them at home. With a sigh that came from his very marrow, he trudged back.

He opened the garage door to get his keys. And then he just stood there.

The garage, which he had emptied just an hour ago, was full. Overflowing. Mountains of blue bags, stuffed to bursting with cans. They rose in gleaming, aluminum peaks, a glittering mountain range of deposit refunds. There were hundreds. Thousands. The sight was so absurd, so impossible, that his brain refused to process it. He thought he was hallucinating from the shock of Imelda’s words.

He stumbled forward, and there, right on top of the nearest pile, winking at him under the bare bulb, was a single can. Señorial Sabores. The Mexican soda.

He felt a cold dread, mixed with a strange, fizzing hope. He loaded the cart, again and again, making five trips to the Beer Store. The machine hummed and clinked for hours. Finally, the last can was fed through. The machine spit out his final ticket. He took it to the counter.

The cashier, a bored-looking kid with a nose ring, counted out the money. "Six hundred and sixty-six dollars," he said, sliding the bills across the counter.

Chuy stared at the money. 666. The number of the beast. He felt the hair on his arms stand up. He looked in his cart. There, in the bottom, was the Señorial can. He could have sworn he’d fed it into the machine first.

That night, he didn’t buy a cigar. He went home, a place now filled with a silent, toxic tension. He didn't look at Imelda. He just waited.

The next morning, after she left, he went to the garage. It was full again. An identical mountain. And on top, the same Señorial can.

He fell to his knees. “Dios mío,” he whispered, crossing himself. “What is this? A miracle? A curse?”

He spent the day repeating the process. He hauled cans until his arms ached. This time, he made a point of saving the Señorial can for last. He put it in the machine, heard the final clink, and got his ticket. 666 dollars. Exactly.

He walked home in a trance, the bills burning a hole in his pocket. He didn’t open the garage. He didn’t need to. He knew what he would find.

He went inside. Imelda was already home, her face a mask of feigned sweetness. "Did you have a good day, mi amor?"

He just stared at her. "The garage," he said, his voice hoarse. "Don't go in there."

Later that night, under the cover of darkness, he crept out. He opened the garage door a crack and peeked inside. The soft glow of the streetlight illuminated a fresh, glistening mountain of cans. And there, standing upright and alone in the very center of the pile, bathed in a sliver of light, was the Señorial can.

Chuy closed the door, leaned his forehead against the cold wood, and let out a slow, trembling breath. He wasn't a loser anymore. He was the custodian of a miracle. Or a deal with the devil. He looked at the dark, silent house where his wife was pretending to love him. He didn't know which one it was. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that his life had just become a lot more interesting.

The garage became his temple. Chuy quit the newsstand the following week, walking out on the fist-faced boss without a word. He had a new vocation. He was no longer a loser, a pepenador. He was a businessman managing a miracle. Every morning, after Imelda left for the diner, he would open the garage door and greet the gleaming, aluminum congregation that had appeared overnight. And every time, perched on top like a tiny, gaudy king, was the Señorial can.

He’d work all day, feeding the beast. The machine at the Beer Store knew him by sight. The clerks had stopped asking questions. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars a day, seven days a week. The math was intoxicating. He calculated it on a napkin one night, his hands trembling with a joy he hadn’t felt since he was a boy.

$666 x 365 = $243,090 a year. A million dollars in a little over four years.

He was forty-seven. He could be a millionaire by fifty-one.

Imelda, of course, was a problem. At first, her sabotage was subtle. She’d “accidentally” throw out a bag of cans he’d left by the door. She’d hide his grocery cart. She’d sigh heavily when he came home smelling of stale beer and aluminum, his clothes dusty, his eyes avoiding hers.

“Still at it, Chuy? Haciéndote rico con la basura?” she’d sneer, her earlier performance of wifely concern replaced by a weary contempt she no longer bothered to hide.

He’d just grunt, counting his stacks of bills in his head. He was getting tired of her. Tired of her act, her lies, her plan to leave him. The money was a purer, more loyal companion. It didn’t pretend.

The day his bank balance hit a million dollars, he went to a real jeweler, not the pawn shop on the corner. He bought a thick gold chain with a pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He wore it home, the weight of it a comfort against his chest. His family and friends began to notice. At his niece’s quinceañera, he paid for the mariachi band. His brother, Beto, pulled him aside. “¿Qué onda, Chuy? You win the lottery?”

Chuy just smiled, a slow, enigmatic smile. “Something like that, carnal. Something like that.”

By the time he hit his second million, he was a different man. He set up a trust fund for his daughter, Marisol, in a single afternoon at a fancy downtown law office. For her birthday, he threw a party that was the talk of Little Mexico for a month. A bouncy castle, a taco truck, a piñata the size of a small car, and a marimba band that played until the neighbors called the police. He watched Marisol’s face, lit by the sparklers on her cake, and felt a pang of something he’d almost forgotten. Love? Or just the satisfaction of a job well done?

For Imelda, he booked a second honeymoon. A week in Cancún, all-inclusive, at a resort with swim-up bars and white sand beaches. He handed her the tickets in a leather folder.

Her jaw dropped. Her eyes, for the first time in years, looked at him not with contempt, but with wonder. With love. “Ay, Chuy,” she breathed, throwing her arms around him. “Mi rey! I’m sorry for everything. I was so… so blind.”

He held her, patting her back mechanically. Yeah, he thought. You were.

Now, Imelda loved him. She brought him coffee in bed. She stopped asking about the garage. She started hinting about a new house, a new car. And Chuy, basking in this unfamiliar warmth, began to give. A down payment on a BMW. A kitchen renovation. Her love was a drug, and he was an addict. But it was expensive.

His obsession, however, was no longer just with the cans. The cans were the engine, the steady, miraculous flow. His new passion was the numbers. He spent his nights on a laptop, squinting at stock charts and investment forums. He calculated how long to make ten million, twenty million. He devised plans, intricate pyramids of reinvestment, ways to leverage his daily $666 into a billion-dollar empire.

He’d be at the kitchen table, a half-eaten plate of chilaquiles growing cold beside him, muttering to himself. “If I put seventy percent into index funds, and use the rest for high-risk options… the exponential growth by year five…”

Imelda would find him like that, his eyes glassy, a faint smile on his lips. “Chuy? ¿Estás bien?” she’d ask, her newly-rekindled love tinged with a fresh, different kind of worry.

He’d wave her away. “Estoy ocupado, mujer. This is important.”

It got worse. He started missing dinners. He’d forget to pick up Marisol from school. One night, she found him in the garage at 3 a.m., not hauling cans, but sitting on an overturned bucket, staring at a single Señorial can he’d placed on a shelf, talking to it in a low, urgent voice.

“The NASDAQ is volatile, but the dividends, mi rey, think of the dividends…”

That was when Imelda, terrified, tried to have him committed. She called his brother, a priest, even a sobador who specialized in cleansing the soul of evil spirits. Chuy came home from the Beer Store to find them all in his living room, looking at him with pity and fear.

He didn’t get angry. He got smart. He bought Imelda a diamond tennis bracelet. He bought Beto a new set of tools. He made a generous donation to the priest’s church. The intervention dissolved into a grateful, tearful hug-fest.

“See?” he said, patting Imelda’s cheek. “I’m fine. Just… thinking about our future.”

But their future was costing him. The bracelet, the tools, the donation—it was all money that should have been working for him, compounding, growing. He was robbing Peter to pay Paul, eating into his seed capital to buy the silence and love of the people around him.

He finally celebrated his first real victory in the stock market. A small biotech company he’d gambled on doubled overnight. It was only a fifty-thousand-dollar profit, a pittance compared to what the cans brought in. But it was proof. It was alchemy. It meant his can money wasn't just sitting in a savings account, it was breeding. It was working for him. The seed was becoming a tree.

He sat in his garage that night, the single Señorial can glowing on its shelf, a testament to his fortune. He took out a new napkin, licked the tip of his pencil, and began to write, his eyes gleaming with a fervent, religious light.

Billionaire by sixty… if I can just stop her from needing so much.

For a few blessed days, Chuy’s new life was a well-oiled machine. Wake, haul, cash, count, plan. The garage remained his temple, the Señorial can his silent, gaudy god. Imelda, pacified by a new SUV and a designer handbag, had stopped asking questions. She’d even started humming again. It was almost perfect.

Then, on a Thursday morning, the world ended.

Chuy slid open the garage door, expecting the usual gleaming mountain range. Instead, he was met with a dull, concrete wasteland. The garage was empty. Not a single blue bag. Not a single can. The space felt cavernous, cold, and profoundly, horribly ordinary.

A sound escaped his throat, a small, dry croak. He stumbled inside, his feet echoing in the silence. He checked behind the tool counter. He kicked the dusty Christmas decorations. Nothing.

He ran back into the house, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. “¡Imelda!” he roared, his voice cracking.

She was in the kitchen, buttering toast, looking radiant in her new silk robe. “¿Mande?”

“The cans!” he gasped, his eyes wild. “Where are the cans?”

She took a bite of her toast, chewing slowly. “What cans, Chuy?”

“The cans! In the garage! The mountains of cans!”

She gave him a look of pure, uncomprehending innocence. “Ay, Chuy, there are no cans. There’s just the lawnmower and your junk. You’ve been working too hard. Come, sit down.”

The calmness in her voice was a red rag to a bull. A horrible, chilling certainty washed over him. She knew. She’d done something. She’d broken the machine. She’d killed the golden goose. His mind, already fractured by obsession, splintered into a thousand pieces.

His face contorted, the veins in his neck bulging. His hand shot out and clamped around her wrist. “¡Mentirosa! Liar! What did you do with them?”

Imelda’s toast fell to the floor. Her eyes widened in genuine terror. “Chuy, you’re hurting me! Let go!”

But he was gone. He was no longer her husband. He was a man possessed, a prophet whose miracle had been stolen. He dragged her from the kitchen, through the living room, and out the back door toward the garage, his grip like iron.

“You threw them away!” he screamed, his voice a raw, ragged tear in the morning air. “You threw away my future! MY MONEY!”

He shoved her through the garage door. She stumbled, falling hard against the lawnmower. He loomed over her, his eyes not seeing her, but seeing the empty space where his fortune should have been. He raised his hand, ready to strike, his face a mask of insane fury.

Imelda, fueled by pure animal instinct, scrambled backward. Her hand, searching for anything, any kind of weapon, closed around the pull cord of the old lawnmower. As Chuy lunged for her, she yanked it with all her might.

The engine coughed, sputtered, and roared to life with a deafening VROOOOM.

Chuy, mid-lunge, his center of gravity thrown off by the sudden noise, pitched forward. His foot caught on a loose brick. He stumbled, flailing, his head dropping directly into the gaping maw of the lawnmower’s grass catcher.

There was a horrible, wet, grinding noise. A sound like nothing on earth. Then, silence, broken only by the sputtering death rattle of the engine.

Imelda lay frozen, her hand still on the cord, her face and silk robe sprayed with a fine, crimson mist. She stared at the lawnmower, at the still form of her husband crumpled beside it. Then, she began to scream.

---

The investigation took several weeks. The police were thorough. They interviewed neighbors who had heard Chuy’s screams. They noted the bruises on Imelda’s wrist. They listened to her story, told through heaving sobs in a mix of English and Spanish, about his obsession, his crazed eyes, his attack. The lack of any cans in the garage, which his own brother confirmed was strange, worked in her favor. It painted a picture of a man unhinged by delusions.

The prosecutor, a pragmatic man, saw a clear case of self-defense. A grieving widow, attacked by her suddenly violent husband, who accidentally falls into a running lawnmower. It was tragic, gruesome, but not a crime. The case was closed. Imelda was cleared.

---

A month later. The first real chill of autumn hung in the air. Imelda, dressed in old jeans and one of Chuy’s forgotten work shirts, was finally tackling the garage. It was time. Time to clear out the ghosts.

She swept the concrete floor where Chuy had fallen. She organized the tools on the pegboard. She was about to call it a day when she knelt down to retrieve a stray socket that had rolled away.

There, tucked far under the old wooden tool counter, almost invisible in the shadows, was a single can. It was dusty, but its colors were still vibrant, its label still gaudy. Señorial Sabores.

Imelda’s breath caught in her throat. She stared at it for a long moment, her heart beating a slow, heavy rhythm against her ribs. A strange mix of grief, terror, and something else—a flicker of old greed—passed through her.

She reached out and picked it up. It was light. Ordinary. Just a can.

She looked at the empty space where the lawnmower had stood. She thought of Chuy’s wild eyes. She thought of the new house she now owned outright. She thought of the life insurance policy.

She weighed the can in her hand. Ten cents. It was worth ten cents.

With a decisive shrug, she dropped it into an old canvas tote bag. She was heading to the diner soon; the Beer Store was on the way. No sense in letting it go to waste.

She slung the bag over her shoulder, pulled the garage door shut with a heavy clang, and walked toward her new SUV, the lucky soda can clinking softly against her keys with every step.

ATILA