Adventitious (adjective): accidental, nonessential

There was once a man that could stack his luck.

For most people, good fortune was nothing but the work of destiny, a stroke of fate to bless a person’s everyday. But for this ordinary, blue-collar worker, luck was like his third arm—he could sense it, control it; he could keep it at bay for weeks, then unleash all of it at the right moment. It was no longer a matter of chance, but a measure of what he wanted and how patient he was to store luck for it.

And he was a very, very patient man.

Ten years. That’s how long he’d been waiting. For ten whole years, the man had lived without a single auspicious moment, religiously letting the bad fortunes batter him away and saving each day’s luck as if depositing money into a bank account. He had vowed, on the first day of his abstinence, to make it worth.

He was on his way to the lottery. The biggest sum their city had ever seen was dangling like a tantalizing apple before his eyes, chanting quietly for him to claim it, claim it. His heart paced faster and faster, and an invisible shiver snaked down his legs for every step he took.

Until he saw the dying old man.

Time slowed. Shouting blurred. He vaguely heard someone yell that the grandpa had been in cardiac arrest for too long. Something about CPR, but the medical terms he could not understand. The distant screams and cries of a girl—probably his granddaughter—as they told her his chances of survival were one in ten.

Chances. Ten.

He didn’t even realize that he’d moved his invisible third arm of luck.