by Kenovay
They weren't very well-made, little blocks of wood, messily painted and clumsily marked, but he knew every little imperfection minutely. He'd made the blue one, and he knew the slight roughness of one of the corners, where he'd become bored with sanding and had stopped trying to make it smooth, and the splash of paint which made four pips look like five.
Bill had made the red one. It'd been his idea, in fact. Proper dice were too expensive for three dirt-poor boys in London, and to his way of thinking, they would never win any money if they didn't have their own dice. His was the roughest, and Jack was glad that he hadn't had a mother to interfere in the making of his own. It had been an illegal enterprise to Bill, one that had to be carried out in private, but to Jack it had just been something to do with his hands, something to keep them nimble and swift. He hadn't had the heart to tell Bill that he'd had his own set of dice since he was eight, and besides, these dice would be theirs.
And as for the white one... It was the most carefully made, meticulous in every detail. The boy-as-was who had made it had spent a long time on it, you could tell. You could also tell it had rarely been used - the paint wasn't shiny with the patina of human grime and sweat, but dull and chipped. Jamie had never been one for gambling.
