Buffalo Nickel

Mona asks us to use the word "change" as the word of the week. And I'm just a boy who cain't say no. This is fiction, by the way, not a confession.


This kinda crazy but basically pretty nice girl named Juliet who I was science partners with for a semester - kinda crazy because she actually thought she could mentally communicate with spiders, kinda crazy because she went out with guys who were way older, like out of school and with jobs already - anyway, she had stole some communion wine from the the Catholic school down the street, and we were in the cemetery drinking it, sitting against a headstone, passing the bottle back and forth. And Juliet told me this story about how one time she put a buffalo nickel on one of the graves. She liked the name on the gravestone, she said. She said she felt like she knew the guy, and so gave him the nickel, as a sort of present. She hopped the fence, went home, came back the next night.

"You can't tell anyone this next part," she said.

"Okay."

Promise," she said.

"I promise."

"There were five pennies there, on the grave," she said. "The next night. Instead of the nickel." She paused dramatically. "The dead gave me those pennies. Like, you know, ghosts or something."

I wanted to ask her if she really thought the dead had made change for her. If she really thought that was in the job description of a dead person, handing out change like the clerk down at the 7-11. But I didn't want to hurt her feelings. Plus, I guess I was sorta trying to get laid.

I didn't get laid. But we spent alotta nights out there, leaning against the tombstones, talking about whatever, passing the bottle, when we could find a bottle. And I kept my promise. I never told anyone about the nickel and the five pennies. About how the dead had made change for her.

Until now, of course.