Ball 71 · 1971

loto: a kitchen in Kyiv on a winter evening

The device here: nickname. Your caller: Kelly.

Ball 71. Frost on the window, tea in tall glasses, and a cloth bag of little wooden barrels on the kitchen table. A grandmother pulled out one barrel at a time and read the number painted on its end.

Kelly was squeezed in between the cousins. “Watch her,” Kelly said. “She has a name for every barrel.” The grandmother looked at a barrel, smiled, and said a nickname, and the cousins slid a button onto their cards.

“The names are part of the family,” she told Ama. “My grandmother called them that, and now you will.” She let Ama draw the next barrel.

Where this comes from: The year is just the ball’s number. Loto is a living family game in Ukraine; no single written source, and the nicknames are our own.

Kelly’s nicknames

7 — “the axe for the firewood”
11 — “two drumsticks”
18 — “a spoon beside a pretzel”
25 — “a quarter of a hundred”
31 — “the last day of winter’s first month”
40 — “a flag and a doughnut”
36 — “a bird and a snail”
80 — “a snowman and a snowball”
90 — “the very last barrel”

✍️ Write your own nickname calls Next stop: tambola →