David and Rob dragged a fifty-pound bag full of quarters, pennies, nickels, and dimes into the Safeway. Some New Zealand dollars and British pounds had also snuck in there, as well as a few brassy American dollars with the caricature of Pocahantas. At the generic Coinstar machine, these two gorgeous, brilliant, successful men fed the money in slowly to avoid jamming the sorter: it would be just their luck to break it somehow and lose the year’s worth of accumulated change.

Just then, three young boys appeared out of nowhere! Enthralled with the number of coins, they watched the counter tick ever upwards. “I’ve never seen that much money in my life!” the biggest of them exclaimed, his eyes alight with joy or greed. “Please, sir, may I have a quarter?”

David, his generous soul shining like the floodlamps at a football stadium, or perhaps a baseball stadium (both of these are brighter than the sun, and it really doesn’t matter which), handed him a quarter. The boy vanished for a moment and reappeared with a can of soda. David’s generous soul, unaware that its contribution would be wasted on fizzy black poison, contemplated destroying the boy on the spot, using its natural radiation to reduce him to his component molecules or make his face peel off like Mr. Spock’s in The Wrath of Kahn when he saved the ship from the Genesis effect.

Further conflict arose when the coin machine rejected the foreign money and David distributed it amongst the children. Delightful cries of “He got two dollars and I only got ten cents!” filled David’s ears. Rob looked handsome and unperturbed as he redeemed the coin receipt at the management office for cold, hard cash. Actually, the coins were colder and harder than the cash ever was, but we shall proceed with the metaphor as there was no barrelhead present.

Two hundred eighty dollars.

Clutching their fortune, the two gorgeous, brilliant, successful men went to the store and bought designer sheets. The little boys were never heard from again.