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Victor Anderson Network Solutions | ||||
| 4102 13th Ave Apt D6 | ||||
| Brooklyn, NY 11219-1333 | ||||
| Click here to end further messaging. |
The last second of Cassie Maclay?s life was cold, but filled with wonder. The sky was gorgeous, painted in the hues of the residual sunset that hadn?t heard the news that the sun had already imploded, or vanished, or whatever had happened, and she held her baby brother?s forearm with a sort of anxious delight. It was inevitable, as inevitable as the movements of the stars. What was there to be done? She barely understood how the sun works, much less how she could get it to pop back into existence. Astronomy was beautiful, sure, but utterly incomprehensible. Even then, she looked up at the stars with a sorrowed bemusement. It?d been a rough eleven years, but it had been what it was and nothing more. Humans could so rarely even begin to understand the inevitable, but Cassie had much practice. Her little brother giggled at a nearby firefly just before their blood instantly froze over and their veins split with the new volume, and it was such a miraculous sound. All around the world, if she tried, she could hear the giggling children, and the fighting, and the crying. Maybe it was a natural end for the Earth. At least it would be over in an instant.
A minute before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay had taken her little brother into the garage so they could grab the folding chairs that their parents used to tailgate sometimes. Her brother was only four, so he drowned in the chair when he was done setting it up, bunching his legs up to sit cross-legged while his ham-hands closed around the apple juice she?d snuck from the fridge. If the world would have kept going, she would have gotten yelled out when they found out about it. When she was younger, and her range was still on Earth, Cassie had been overwhelmed by the amount of hunger that people expressed, every moment of every day, and she?d tried to take food from her own fridge to find them and feed them, so she wouldn?t hear them anymore. Her parents hadn?t believed her-- they never believed her. She propped her own chair next to her brothers and sat down to look at the stars.
Two minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay snuck into her little brother?s room, where he?d already been put to sleep even though it was only seven. His room was decorated with all the old vestiges of hers-- all the old stuffed animals and toy trucks her mother had decided she was too old for when her brother was born. Just because Cassie had heard the conversation her mother had had with her father a week earlier didn?t mean she wasn?t sad when her toys were all rounded up in a trash bag for the new baby. She woke her brother up quietly, and told him she had something to show him but they had to be quiet. They crept downstairs together, walking near the walls and furniture on their way to the garage. Despite the best efforts of their parents, Cassie?d always been close to her little brother, who loved the way she could catch anything he threw into the air.
Three minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay quickly texted her old friends. They hadn?t really been her friends as much as the children of her mother?s friends. Cassie?s power, congenital and aggressive, was to have an inherent knowledge of everything that would happen or was happening, give or take about ten minutes into the future. She hadn?t been able to keep up a conversation since she was aware of what everyone would say a few minutes in advance and she was always so horribly distracted by the thoughts swirling around the world and the distant echoes of a million asteroids crashing into one another and into more and more distant planets. Cassie texted them anyway, just to tell them that she?d heard it was supposed to be a beautiful sunset today.
Four and five minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay had frantically been searching ?What happens when the sun dies? on her mother?s iPad, borrowed from the living room with no intention of returning it. Leading experts estimated that, in the event the sun miraculously disappeared or turned off somehow, it would take a week for the Earth to cool off to zero degrees fahrenheit. That estimate, according to Cassie?s visions swarming her head, was incorrect. She kept checking anyway, even though she knew nothing would change. Nothing ever changed from the way she saw it in her head, even if what she saw made no scientific sense. The internet told her nothing useful, like she knew it wouldn?t. She knew that, whether she liked it or not, whether it was scientifically proven or not, in five and then four minutes, Earth would finally feel the effects of the sun going out all at once. It wouldn?t be a painful death, although their frozen corpses with their burst veins and crystal eyes would be gross to behold. Cassie related it to how bees weren?t supposed to fly according to physics, and yet they did anyway. Sometimes the inexplicable happened, even to physics.
Six minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay did a short version of the breathing exercises that a well-meaning school psychologist had taught her in the fourth grade, believing her explanation of being able to hear and see everything that was presentantly happening or that would soon happen in the universe to be a delusion of grandeur brought on by anxiety. Cassie thought about the psychologist fondly-- the breathing exercises really did help. It was so hard, sometimes, to only concentrate on the present she was experiencing and not hear the snores of the elderly in Thailand and the squeaking of a newborn seal in Antarctica and the electric storms of the Northern pole of Saturn. The worked this time, too, helping her gather her presence into what she was actively experiencing, and once she?d done that, helping her see ahead to the next six minutes. The world was ending whether she liked it or not, so where would she like to be? She decided on her backyard, with her brother. It would be nice to die instantly with somebody who loved her, Cassie thought.
Seven minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay?s mother yelled at her for audibly crying. Cassie didn?t bother to try and explain-- nobody ever believed her anyway. She?d spent the next couple trying to figure out exactly when the end would be; she?d seen the sun turn off a minute ago in real time, but her foresight was a little harder to pinpoint. There was still so much she wanted to do, but the future was inevitable, and for the first time in Cassie?s life, she couldn?t see anything beyond the next seven minutes, no matter how hard she tried.
Eight minutes before the end of the world, Cassie Maclay watched in real-time and horror as the sun disappeared from the solar system, leaving nothing behind but the blank emptiness of space. It vanished at the precise same instant that Cassie?s little brother twitched his foot in his sleep, and her old school psychologist cracked her knuckles from the last time and the girl who?d invited her to her third grade birthday sleepover out of obligation put on a lipstick that was aggressively pink and an asteroid passed far too close to Rasalhague in the Ophiuchus constellation for its own good and for a second, like every second of Cassie Maclay?s life, she was so aware of time and space and how how everyone on the planet was connected in ways they never imagined or understood. She lay back on her bed, in her town, in her state, in her country, and let our star?s legacy die like the Earth soon would, and tried, for a second, to ignore the inevitable and be as ignorant to the future as everyone in her town and state and country and you are doing right now.
I know when I?ll die. When I was ten, a drunk man handed me a bit of paper. I know what you?re thinking. I was thinking the same thing. I was never one to be rude to strangers though and to and the piece of paper he handed me was beautiful. Some things have an air of importance. The letter I was given was one of them. It looked hundreds of years old that day and was written in the most incredible calligraphy.
It told me five things; the date of my first seizure, the day I?d meet my wife, the day I?d go into a coma, the day I?d wake up and the day I?ll die.
For four years after receiving the weird fortune letter from the drunk it was just an odd thing I had framed on my wall. Yes, I know that?s weird, but my friends thought it was cool as well.
Then when I was fourteen and watching television with my best friend, Stargate SG1 if you must know, I had my first seizure. As it turns out it was the same day the letter had predicted. Something about a group of American soldiers finding a dormant alien colony ship was too much was too much for my brain during puberty. Don?t read anything into that, I really like sci-fi, but not that much.
My friend had to untangle me from the wire for my CD player. Yes, I?m that old. My dad took him home while I went to hospital in an ambulance with my mum, not that important now.
When I got home from the hospital having had a blood sample taken, I hate needles, I looked at the bit of paper on the wall and realised the first prediction had come true. That should have been scary, especially since the next entries in the prophecy of drunk Nostradamus were life changing wife meeting, coma, recovery and death, but no
It was oddly reassuring to have it in writing that I would recover, meet a nice girl and live a long life. Did I mention that I?m going to live to ninety-seven years old? For my family particularly that is doing well.
The night of the second prediction there was a house party with a load of people at my high school. The letter said I would meet my wife. I think there was fine print written in invisible ink.
Everyone was drinking apart from the girl who showed up already unconscious from drinking before the party, is there always one of those? One girl sat on my lap in a dark room asking me what shampoo I used and playing with my hair. I felt awkward both because the girl?s boyfriend was outside the door having a weirdly non-intrusive meltdown and because until I moved out of my parent?s house, I was still using the same baby shampoo my mum had been buying since it was age appropriate.
It was at that party I found out the girls who knew me from primary school called me Rock Boy because I had collected gemstones, not cool. I saw a girl asleep on a couch wake up, throw up and then fall asleep in it again. It might be safe to say that no one left that party with their dignity.
After one of the girls returned from a detour with a boy denying anything happened despite her top being inside out, I tried to outdrink some older kids despite being a small bottle of vodka ahead of them. I half remember being sent home from the party after projectile vomiting.
I?m not tea total but I?ve never had vodka since. I think alcohol played the part of villain for almost everyone that went to that party. I?m single, unmarried and hoping my future wife neither took part in nor witnessed anything to do with vomit that night.
It?s safe to say my stock in dignity went up after high school. Art school was my place. Finally drawing on the furniture was not only acceptable but expected. I had gone hoping to become a world-famous painter. It turned out I was not amenable to the task of painting collections of plants and fruit in baskets. I?d done that in high school, boring.
When I was told not to join painting because I painted the still life collection exploding as the backdrop was invaded by jungle, I was told painting probably wasn?t for me. There were of course other little things. Artistic license was supposed to be used at the discretion of the first-year tutors. They laughed when I drew a Greek city in the background of one nude model instead of the rest of the class. They didn?t laugh as much during the next nude drawing session when I was running out of time after finishing the sketch of the model and decided to have her sitting at the bus stop outside instead.
I met a girl at a club, woke up at her place the next morning and spent the next three years in a very unstable relationship. During that time, I was studying photography instead of painting, layering images over each other for a haunting but easy to achieve aesthetic.
I graduated from art school and the three-year relationship, two loving relationships over.
After starting a terrible job cleaning hotel rooms, I was invited to a reunion of old friends organised by the same friend who saved me from a rogue CD player cable years before. As always, he had a girlfriend. As always, I was the awkward one.
It?s hard to underdress for a party held in a barn but I managed it. Everyone else looked like a fashion advert, not me. People remembered Rock Boy despite my insistence that I don?t collect fossils and geodes anymore. I beat a few people at beer pong because I?m competitive instead being social.
I should probably explain that the people who owned the barn ran a stable for racehorses and had a lot of money. The barn had a better sound system than most night clubs. I was in a lot of reunion photos doing my classic pose which I like to call ?rabbit in the headlights.?
Some of the building materials from the most recent remodelling had been piled up in the car park. After drinks everyone decided those boards and planks would look better on fire. I agreed It was also our opinion, as drunks, that jumping through the flames was a good idea.
It was all fine until it wasn?t. We were jumping through the flames without issues for two hours as the wood burnt low. Naturally as the wooden boards transitioned into ash they moved, spreading out. During that transition us drunken idiots were growing in confidence. We?d made several successful jumps each. It had to be me to end the winning streak.
Nails are a commonly used component in building and some of the planks from the fire still had theirs. After many successful leaps I stood on one. It went straight through the sole of my white trainers.
I know what you?re thinking now, why white trainers? The answer is I thought they?d look good with the blood pouring out of the sole of my foot. I wasn?t wrong.
The white trainers are still the most expensive footwear I have ever owned, limited edition skateboarding shoes with a colourful graffiti design, and blood.
The young woman who tended my wounds has known me since I was proudly Rock Boy, and she was the girl who pulled out her hair in chunks to impress her friends. She applied antiseptic to my wound and laughed at my pain. Despite her old party trick, she has a full head of long silky hair. Despite my stupidity I did not get tetanus.
Thanks to my injury we spent the rest of the night together. She said she had to look after me. I didn?t correct her.
She had gone into teaching which surprised me because of the terrible woman who?d overseen our first school together. When someone is so awful people only refer to them by their initials, they should fail the teacher exam. With her out there to balance the scales I?m sure the children of Scotland stand a far better chance of a decent education.
She already knew about the piece of paper which had predicted my death. She was at the party years before with the girl who wanted to know about my shampoo but had to take her little sister home after reminding everyone about my Rock Boy nickname, for which I?m still grateful.
Our first date was going to see Green Lantern in the cinema. We bonded over how terrible it was.
I suppose fate works with what it gets I?ve always had a bad memory. If I?d remembered the date, I was supposed to end up in a coma I would never have stood in the middle of the pavement asking to be hit by a car.
The poor old man roped in by fate to knock me down apparently didn?t stop to see if I was alright after jerking over from the other side of the road and hitting me in front of my new girlfriend.
I woke up on the day the drunk?s prophecy predicted. I must now wait decades for the fulfilment of the final prediction.
I?m not married yet but I?m still in a relationship with my nail in the foot nurse. I?m planning to propose, hopefully I nail, sorry I had to. Sadly, the prophecy didn?t tell me how I would pull off the perfect proposal. I?m going for the traditional ring given from one knee kind of thing. I?m thirty-one now, I don?t want to get married in seventy-six years so wish me luck.
I don?t know what?s coming in the meantime, but I have plenty of time to get there, best of luck to you too. I know when I'll die, but not how I'll live.
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