The woman across from me on the train sits hunched over the scratch-off lottery ticket, carefully picking and choosing which spaces to uncover.
The card has been designed to tap into the ancient part of our brain that loves to scrabble at the earth to reveal buried food, the part of our nervous system that doles out a small dopamine rush every time we accomplish something, even if that task is essentially random and almost certainly pointless.
I turn away to push some buttons on my phone.
When I look back, we’re crossing the bridge, the ticket is crumpled up in her hand, and she’s looking pensively out the window at the cold blue sky, the city looming into view, the river rolling beneath us, or maybe nothing at all.
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