Fiction from NER 32.3.
When his back went out there was nothing left to do but lie on the couch and gamble at Internet casinos. WebVan brought his groceries, pizza boxes piled up, he’d roll painfully onto his side and pee into a jar. Evangeline’s outcall sent women over. At the casino he figured out the rules and played poker with strangers; everybody’s got a perfect poker face on the Internet. Then he figured out how betting on football worked. The only loser’s game he allowed himself was roulette: who can resist the bright wheel, spinning?
From the couch, he shouted into the cell phone: “I made $300 yesterday!”
Scott Southwick invented one of the earliest web search engines, Liszt.com. More recently, he invented cicada ice cream. In between, his short fiction appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review, and Glimmer Train Stories.