Domingo laid on the Italian leather couch in his parents split level home, his feet propped up on the armrest.
Reaching into his jeans he pulled a black Velcro wallet from his front pocket. His thoughts rushed clear as he unfolded it with a rip.
Sometimes when he was bored, he would sort the contents of his wallet. He believed in efficiency, not clinging to everything that had some obscure amount of value. His wallet showed this about him.
What it didn’t show was his dashed hopes and dreams of an insular future. One where he could work out his passions into a dream-like experience. One where he had money, power, freedom.
There were no cards brandishing his name in slightly raised fine print on a milky white background or any other color. There was nothing to show for his entrepreneurial spirit. Just a few singles, a bank card, and a license to drive. Depressing, yet reassuring as only a wallet could be.
Pulling one of the bills from their linty resting place, he fumbled with it, rubbing the folded paper against itself between his thumb and forefinger noting the softness of its texture. Thinking for a second about where it must have been before it came into his possession. It was an artifact of immense curiosity.
Accompanied by cryptic symbolism that only a nation’s founding fathers would think of – the bill was both light and heavy at the same time. He thought back to the fervor that arrived in his life one morning when some catastrophic attack on his country struck the very city where he attended school. The twin towers, the agony of watching his fellow man suffer and die for unexplained reasons.
And so it was fitting that such an unsurreptitious and tragic event should also include it’s fair share of lore and mystery – symbology that seemed to transcend the chain-like phenomenon known as time and decimate the philosophical relationship known as cause and effect.
He considered it a parlor trick yet he wasn’t actually prepared to dismiss it either. By folding a dollar bill at first lengthwise and then twice again in equal lengths near the center at ninety degree angles one could make out the depiction of nothing other than what appeared to be a flaming set of towers with smoke billowing angrily upwards – a scene far too reminiscent of reality to be ignored.
Sitting up for a minute he analysed the scene contemplating the potential for such a coincidence to take place. It seemed highly unlikely that there was any rationality to the trick. Surely, there could be no way of planning such a thing as the events took place hundreds of years apart…
He thought for a second and realized that he wasn’t exactly sure when the images on the dollar bill he was holding, legally tender, nationally approved, had been designed but he was pretty sure that it didn’t go all the way back to the nation’s founding.
Either way, he deemed the potential for some kind of connection between the two things to be highly unrealistic. Yet, as he rotated the bill front to back he couldn’t help but note just how unrealistic the imagery was. It was like something out of a science fiction novel – a pyramid with a single outward looking eye. Nothing in real life resembles such an oddity. He contemplated some of the words etched in fine print – e plurbus unum. It meant nothing to him as he never had the chance to learn Latin.
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