Reid About It

I was at the grocery store, and I saw a man walking towards me pushing his buggy. He was short, paunchy, dirty, wearing a soiled tank top. His arms were covered with poorly-drawn tattoos, the faded greys making him look even filthier. He appeared to be in his late twenties and already balding, with a bad haircut that drew attention to it.

His wife was with him, a startlingly unattractive woman who could have been slightly Hispanic, or possibly just very dirty. Trailing behind them was their ten-year-old child, a hyperactive, rickets-infested noise machine. He was picking up foodstuffs, looking at the pictures, and then dropping them to the floor below and laughing. He paused at a display of sodas, climbed up on them and pretended to take a poop on them to impress his parents.

As I walked past them, I noticed that among his tattoos was something written in blurry block letters on the back of his neck. He passed me, and I focused on the faded ink to see what he could possibly have believed in strongly enough to mark in such a prominent location.

It spelled out "L-U-C-K-Y".