"Bright Coins in Never-Ending Stream" (1976/1978)

“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me.”

In September of 1976, Lafferty finished “Bright Coins in Never-Ending Flow,” a short story about a man named Matthew Quoin who may or may not have made a deal with the devil. I’ve been thinking about it because of the role the U.S. penny plays in Quoin’s life. The story builds up to the consequences for Quoin after the penny ceased to be minted. Set in the future, reality caught up with the story this week when on November 12, 2025, the United States Mint officially ended the 232-year production of the circulating one-cent coin. There was a ceremonial final strike at its Philadelphia facility. Americans were told the decision was based on economic factors, with the Treasury saying that the cost to manufacture a single penny being 3.69 cents. For now the penny is legal tender (in Lafferty’s story a timeline is set for this end). What can one do with about 300 billion pennies out there? For the nostalgic and the collector, the Mint says it will produce numismatic versions of the penny.

In “Bright Coins in Never-Ending Flow,” Lafferty gives the reader a version of the deal-with-the-devil story, though he keeps the deal with the devil offstage and in the past, and he is careful to leave it an open question whether the deal was made with the devil or not. When the story starts, Matthew Quoin is an old man. He is "that tedious old shuffler" who exasperates everyone with the slowness of his transactions. But our narrator corrects this, saying that the perception that Quoin is slow isn't quite right; his fingers can move lightning-like, but paying for anything requires an impossibly large number of coins. Quoin is a creature of habit and pride, boring others with stories of a magnificent past where he was the cock of the walk. We learn that he possesses a magical pocketbook with a never-ending stream of coins that he received from an old and dubious transaction made long ago, a pact he still believes was a good bargain.

The terms of the bargain are that Quoin will experience eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and he would live until he himself grew death-weary of it. Not unexpectedly, the deal comes with a sadistic joke. With each passing eon, the coin's denomination diminished and at the same time the U.S. experiences monetary inflation. So Quoin’s golden days of twenty-dollar gold pieces pass into his era of being the celebrated Silver Dollar Kid, then pass into the humiliating years of the Dime-a-Time Man, when his pride begins to feel a little stung. By the time the nickel and penny years arrive, Quoin’s rheumatism has turned his once nimble hands into "slow lightning.” At the same time, Quoin deceives himself that he has made a good bargain, his monologues being inflicted on animals when people cease to listen to him.

The final column goes beyond date of composition.

Then the real disaster strikes. The government decrees the penny will no longer be minted, and will soon cease to be legal tender. This forces Quoin into truly terrible circumstances. He now sleeps in a storm sewer and spends his days in a grueling cycle of penny-fishing. With bleeding and scabbed-over fingers, he pulls out thousands of his pure copper pennies one by one to sell them as scrap metal for enough money to buy a single hamburger. He begins to suspect that the smirking fellow he made the deal with so long ago has gotten the best of him.

Just as he is about to give up, Quoin finds some hope. A coin dealer tells him that his old, pure copper pennies will eventually become valuable collector's items. This becomes a second sun coming up in the morning, giving him a reason to endure. The story closes with Quoin, hungry and humbled, talking to a robin about endurance and asking it in the park if he might have "the other half of that worm" to survive the day.

This is light Lafferty. I like how the story builds itself around Matthew Quoin styling himself as the cock of the walk and then depicts him brought so low that he begs from a common robin. It’s about the prideful crashing out, and my favorite part is the conversation with the animals. It begins with a series of one-sided monologues that reflect Quoin’s stubborn, self-insistent pride and his obliviousness to his own social isolation. In the early stages of his fall, he talks to pigeons, squirrels, and grackles as though they were a passive, nonjudgmental audience for his familiar bragging about past glories. Washed up and in denial, he can’t help propping up his own ego. One almost feels sorry for the animal stand-ins for the impatient human listeners he has already lost. He is a boorish St. Francis, preaching the gospel of Matthew Quoin and touting his role as the cock of the walk, completely in denial. He talks at the world, using nature as a silent mirror for his fading personhood.

Everything shifts in the final scene with the robin. For once, there isn’t a monologue but a dialogue. For the first time in the story, Quoin hears something that isn’t himself. He is no longer performing; he has become a fellow, struggling creature. For the first time, Quoin begins to experience redemptive suffering. He asks the robin empathetic questions about its own hardship, and the robin answers, “Fight on, I say.” Quoin agrees—and eats the worm.

The ending is ambiguous: is Quoin merely a fool doubling down yet again, or is he at the threshold of wisdom? This ambiguity leads to another thing I like about the story: the way Lafferty draws on the conventions of the deal-with-the-devil tale and then leaves it to the reader to decide whether the figure involved is actually a devil. One can make a case either way. The devil reading is fairly obvious, so I won’t spell it out, but consider another possibility, that the widow’s cruse allusion to the Old Testament isn’t simple irony. What if the tricky fellow who made the deal was angelic? The Elijah connection is particularly intriguing because, of course, Elijah was fed by the birds.

In the Book of 1 Kings, Elijah is sent by God to the town of Zarephath during a severe famine. He meets a poor widow gathering sticks to make a last meal for herself and her son, after which they expect to die. Elijah then does something shocking: he asks her for the last of her food. She explains that she has only a handful of flour and a little oil in a jar—the widow’s cruse. In an extreme test of faith, Elijah tells her to make him a small cake first, promising that God will ensure her supplies never run out. The widow obeys, and the miracle occurs: her cruse of oil and her jar of flour never become empty, replenishing themselves each day.

In the traditional devil’s-bargain pattern, one escapes by tricking the devil or goes down for one’s foolish choice. Lafferty does something more subtle: he leaves open the possibility that the cursed purse that brings Quoin low might be a miracle, something that burns through his pride and eventually leads to second-order virtue. On the matter of mercy, Lafferty could be astonishingly open-minded, so I’ll close with something he wrote to Sheryl Smith on March 19, 1976. I think about it often because of how challenging it is for me to take seriously, and how important it is for understanding his take on soteriology.

There was a medieval belief (probably true) that after the general judgment, every person will know all about every other person who ever lived, each thought and act, however hidden, which in its totality will redound to the glory of all those saved and to the shame of all those damned. And then there is a corollary (probably true also) that there are either seven or nine exceptions to this case, that there are either seven or nine persons of such strong passions and agonizing involvement that their details may not be revealed ever, not even after the last judgment, but must remain under the seal and known only to God and the seven or nine passionate persons. Not only will we not know the details of them but we will never know whether they are saved or damned. A couple of hard cases are on this latter list, Lucifer himself and Judas.

Four days later, Lafferty completed "Bright Coins in Never Ending Flow."