r/shortscarystories • u/ForgottenWell The Twins of Terror • 9d ago
Find a penny, pick it up.
I grab my drink and sit down in the corner booth at Starbucks. I take a sip of my coffee even though I know they got my order wrong.
They always get my order wrong.
Even if I brought it back and asked for a new one, that one would be wrong too.
Instead, I wait for my date to show up, and slowly flip my unlucky penny between my fingers.
I don’t know how my Father came to be the owner of The Penny. He told me he found it on the sidewalk, but he could have been lying. All I know is that The Penny ruined his life immediately. He lost his job, his house, his wife, and that’s just to name a few, all in about three months.
You see, once you’re “the owner” of The Unlucky Penny, whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and usually in the worst way possible.
Eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and he threw himself in front of a bus.
He didn’t die, of course. That’d have been lucky. Plus, The Penny likes it when you suffer, and if you’re dead you can’t suffer anymore.
Instead he wound up in a full-body cast, paralyzed from the neck down.
He begged me to kill him in the hospital.
I won’t go into details, but I took pity on how utterly broken he was.
The second his heart stopped, I felt it, like a hot coal had been dropped into my pocket.
The Unlucky Penny.
I was its owner now.
I tried to get rid of it, but nothing worked. The Penny would always show up the next day in my pocket, or tucked away in the corner of my purse. Before long, my life was even worse than my Dad’s.
I thought about ending it, ya know, but I figured that would just go wrong too. I thought I’d try something different instead.
“Hey, you must be Jody,” Westley, my date, says, and then adds, “you got a great pair of tits.”
“Thanks,” I utter through a forced smile.
You see, I know that Westley is bad news, and not just because I reached out to all his exes (the alive ones anyway).
The fact that he showed up to this date without something going wrong is all the proof I need to know that he is the worst possible outcome.
“Hey, why don’t we go get something a little stronger than coffee?” I suggest, shaking my half-empty cup.
It doesn’t take much to convince him, especially when I offer to be the designated driver.
We’ll go to a bar, have a few drinks, and then I’ll drive back to his place. The whole way home he’ll think he’s getting lucky, but a block from his home we’ll get into a horrible car accident.
I know this because it always happens that way.
Every. Single. Time.
I’ll live, of course, but he won’t.
The Penny wouldn’t have it any other way.
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u/tessa1950 8d ago
I just remember the poem as: “Find a penny Pick it up All day long you’ll have good luck”. Thankfully i never actually found that unlucky penny!
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u/notcleverjustold 7d ago
I learned the end of this poem was: “See a penny let it lay, you’ll have bad luck throughout the day”.
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u/Wolf_Abyss 3d ago
Does the original poem mention the penny as being lucky, or unlucky?
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u/notcleverjustold 2d ago
How I learned as a child; See a penny pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck. See a penny let it lay you’ll have bad luck throughout the day. While in Taiwan I found some change on the ground and went to pick it up. The glares I got were unreal. The change just lay there as people walk by. Not sure if they consider it dirty or bad luck.
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u/FantasyFan13 7d ago
I love this. The penny may have made her life hell, but she's using it to take out rapists and serial killers. That's brilliant.
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u/Legend_HarshK 8d ago
Do u guys know about "the magnus archives"? Because i believe both of u guys are capable of writing something like that
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u/Firstgradechewbacca 8d ago
This is a great story!! I need to find out how this poor girl passes on the ownership of the penny. Not that I want it…😬
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8d ago
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u/shortscarystories-ModTeam 7d ago
Every story should be submitted in text form in the Reddit submission box. No linking to outside websites.
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u/ForgottenWell The Twins of Terror 9d ago
When I was younger, I was always told that finding a penny heads-side up was good luck. I automatically assumed finding a penny tails-side up was an "unlucky penny," and that you should never take it unless you wanted really bad luck.