Jailed Fortune
I wallow in a jail cell, my punishment far outweighing what I still refuse to call my crime. It's been almost a decade since my incarceration. The time has flown by, as if someone had their unaware heel on the fast-forward button of a carelessly dropped remote that just happened to be pointed at the TV.
That's what my whole life has felt like, to be honest: one long, static-barred fast-forward on a TV screen, one that I barely knew I owned, with a heel always pushing down on me. The solid steel door opens. The guards in their riot armor have their guns trained on me against their shoulders, each crab-stepping to opposite sides of the doorway, faces invisible behind black plastic curves.
Am I really that dangerous?
Between them, walks in the priest. Some things never change, it seems. I hold out a palm at him, fingers spread. He nods sadly and turns away. I don't need his last rites. I close my eyes and focus. I don't want to be conscious for my execution as they pick me up under my armpits and drag me out the door and down the industrial-green corridor to where I know the killing machine waits, squat and purposeful, in the room at the end of the hall. I find peace. My mind goes back:
This feels more real: It's nine years earlier. I wake up in a bed. My eyes snap open at a sharp, cracking sound and the ceiling is on fire with swirls of violet and yellow light. I'm grabbed under the armpits again and dragged toward a door I cannot understand the physical reality of.
At this point in my scrawlings, I'm gonna let you off the hook and write down what I am and what led me to this outcome. Because I have to leave soon. Never mind my name, call me Joe, if that helps. If you are reading this, you found it behind the air-conditioning grate of this awful room. If you're a cleaner, get some of the dust caked in there out, please, for the sake of humanity! It's an inch thick!
Here I go, then: The first time it happened, I was eight years old. I woke up just knowing that my little sister, Deirdre, was going to stub her toe on the corner of the stove, and start squealing. So, I saved her. I was there to pull her away right before the moment when it would have happened. How did I know my dream was real? Well, in it, I'd seen her wobble into the kitchen and pick up speed, then she turned. Her plump little fingers of one hand, outstretched at the edge of balance, had clipped the hindquarters of "Chief", our tabby, who had jumped right off the chair he'd been on, onto the breakfast table, spilling dad's cereal bowl. Dad had sworn a bad word. Mum had looked over cross at him, then'd stood and gone for a sponge. As she'd raced around the table, one of her hands on the edge on the tablecloth at one corner had slipped, and she'd clutched the cloth and dragged everything down on top of her as she went down on her butt with an 'OOMPH!". So, I woke up, raced down the staircase, not having seen myself in the dream; I wasn't destined to be there. I guess I was still supposed to be dozing upstairs. And that's how I managed to pull my sister away from the fate of a painful stubbed toe. Nobody noticed my heroism, of course, what with dad helping mum up from the floor, both of them laughing, mum's hair full of cornflakes and milk, tablecloth still draped off one shoulder, Chief long gone out the cat flap. My parents hugging far above, me hugging little Deirdre while she struggled in my much larger grasp, trying to bite my face.
I really have to leave soon, but I'll keep writing, because why the fuck didn't I get to see Deirdre die in a car crash ten years later? All I'd been able to do was cheat on a few answers on some tests in middle school and predict the number Mr. Hill wrote on the board when I wasn't supposed to be paying attention. Seeing that number nine, or whatever, in the dream didn't even help, because the dream warned me to pay attention anyway. What a useless gift! I'm so sorry, sis.
FUCK! Then, up through high school, there were quite a few, admittedly explosive, dreams that taught me a bit about the proper finger work needed in the backseats of cars with girls, each girl's bits needing different strokes. I guess that was what you'd call the hot streak of my physic career? I peaked at wet dreams?!
And, I really need to stop writing this shit. But there's still a bit of midnight coffee left in the cup, and I really want to try to tell someone, even if it's just a cleaner who throws these papers away in the trash at a glance, what it's like to have a superpower that only shows you trivial crap.
Here's a brief list of people I've 'saved':
Some guy who was about to pay a dodgy mechanic five-hundred bucks for putting in a faulty transmission. Told him he was being ripped off. He got it down to a hundred bucks for consultation fees. Not like I even saw he'd die in a car crash later, so fucking sorry, sis, down the line or anything. Just ended up saving the guy four-hundred.
I once pushed a lady to the side who was about to walk into an opening door. Got a punch in the face myself for that one. Crossed the country for that.
Paul (the dream had provided a glimpse of his passport as he'd boarded the plane for Thailand). He was one of the very few out of inconsequential hundreds that I knew the name of. Can't complain that much, really, though. I would have never gone to Thailand otherwise, and the food was amazing. Paul still caught a very minor STD anyway, just a different one from a different boy.
So, yeah, there's actually another really good one that I even went to Iceland for, but time is running short, I'm about to be put to death, but yeah, that was me, the globetrotting superhero, saving folk from the only minor accidents my powers allow me to see. Why did I even bother? Because I could, all right? I was the only one who could! Shut up!
The reason for my upcoming execution was just another case of many:
Yeah, I call these things "cases"; I even have a corkboard on my wall back home in my superhero-styled "b'what?-cave" room with various colored yarn connecting pins stabbed in sketches and notes. It's all I have to justify this compulsion every time I wake up from one of these fucking dreams. Anyway, this one was a guy in Florida who was gonna burn his toast beyond redemption five days from then. He didn't have another slice of bread in the house, and would have gone to work hungry. YES, these are the exact kind of EMERGENCIES my superpower warms me of constantly. I was in Paris at the time, saving a kid from getting splashed from a puddle by a passing car. But, yeah, I made it there to Florida on a maze of connecting flights, two days ahead of time. Now, I'm a professional by now, as you can imagine, so it was a simple task to just buy an extra loaf of bread from his local 7-11, lockpick my way into his house while he was away, and plant the bread in his cupboard next to the one that would run out two days later. I'm SO DONE by now with talking to people face-to-face. Got that broken nose that time from doing that.
When I stood trial for 'time-crimes', after being dragged and ripped through the horizontally swirling violet-and-yellow tornado at the foot of my bed by black-armor clad, plastic-visored brutes, in this very motel room, the prosecution started out with some legal babble about how psychics were some anomaly that science and the law didn't fully understand yet, but were some kind of world-destroying paradox. The evidence stacked up against me in the case of the guy whose toast I'd prevented burning going on his way to work fifteen minutes later, stomach satisfied. Because of this, the scar-faced lawyer, burns having seemed to have melted half a cheek halfway downward, spoke out his closing statement:
"The accused is obviously guilty. By allowing the zero-subject, Person A, to leave his house a quarter of an hour later with a full stomach, this caused the traffic accident at the intersection of Helm and Justin to occur. Person B, a child passenger in the afflicted car, was killed. Person B would have grown up to become a serial killer, killing Persons C, D, and E through M, as you can see on the monitor chart-web. Person J, here...," and the prosecutor waved his VirtuaWand at the screen, drawing circles around the relevant boxes of the web of names, "...now lived, instead of dying, going on to found a bakery that produced a bad hotdog, here, that caused Person O to get sick and take a day off work, which made his Secret Service brother, Person P, lose concentration in a Presidential briefing. The momentary fact he missed was a minor point, just a peanut allergy, of Person Q, here, but Q died at a politically funded event down the timeline, here, from eating a Thai shish kabab that was supposed to be only miso-coated. Because of his death, Person R, his wife made a speech at his funeral that annoyed Person S, the deceased's sister who went home with a headache instead of stopping at Home Depot and buying the faulty electric stove that would later, instead, be shipped to Person T, a gas station attendant who had to put out a housefire instead of manning the pumps, which caused Person U to have to wait and not attend the vital talks that would allow a rat infestation bill to be passed in Congress. Two decades later, Person X, the President of the United States, eyes bloodshot, mouth foaming with rabies, would launch nuclear strikes on a whim and that's why we, People Z, are living in this unintended radioactive wasteland. ALL BECAUSE OF THIS ONE MAN!" and he stabbed a finger over at me.
Thankfully, finally, my lame superpower had found its back foot on the starting block for a running head start. The dream I'd woken up with, the one I fast-forwarded through like a heel on a remote in the middle of the night, made me pen this, and yeah, years of experience and meticulous scribbling made me a stickler for detail.
I know I still have time to stash these papers in the air-conditioning grate and go on the run before the violet-and-yellow portal opens at the foot of the shitty motel bed I was supposed to be asleep in when they'll arrive to take me.
Wish me luck. I love whoever you are. There's a tip enclosed
Spoiler
I wallow in a jail cell, my punishment far outweighing what I still refuse to call my crime. It's been almost a decade since my incarceration. The time has flown by, as if someone had their unaware heel on the fast-forward button of a carelessly dropped remote that just happened to be pointed at the TV.
That's what my whole life has felt like, to be honest: one long, static-barred fast-forward on a TV screen, one that I barely knew I owned, with a heel always pushing down on me. The solid steel door opens. The guards in their riot armor have their guns trained on me against their shoulders, each crab-stepping to opposite sides of the doorway, faces invisible behind black plastic curves.
Am I really that dangerous?
Between them, walks in the priest. Some things never change, it seems. I hold out a palm at him, fingers spread. He nods sadly and turns away. I don't need his last rites. I close my eyes and focus. I don't want to be conscious for my execution as they pick me up under my armpits and drag me out the door and down the industrial-green corridor to where I know the killing machine waits, squat and purposeful, in the room at the end of the hall. I find peace. My mind goes back:
This feels more real: It's nine years earlier. I wake up in a bed. My eyes snap open at a sharp, cracking sound and the ceiling is on fire with swirls of violet and yellow light. I'm grabbed under the armpits again and dragged toward a door I cannot understand the physical reality of.
At this point in my scrawlings, I'm gonna let you off the hook and write down what I am and what led me to this outcome. Because I have to leave soon. Never mind my name, call me Joe, if that helps. If you are reading this, you found it behind the air-conditioning grate of this awful room. If you're a cleaner, get some of the dust caked in there out, please, for the sake of humanity! It's an inch thick!
Here I go, then: The first time it happened, I was eight years old. I woke up just knowing that my little sister, Deirdre, was going to stub her toe on the corner of the stove, and start squealing. So, I saved her. I was there to pull her away right before the moment when it would have happened. How did I know my dream was real? Well, in it, I'd seen her wobble into the kitchen and pick up speed, then she turned. Her plump little fingers of one hand, outstretched at the edge of balance, had clipped the hindquarters of "Chief", our tabby, who had jumped right off the chair he'd been on, onto the breakfast table, spilling dad's cereal bowl. Dad had sworn a bad word. Mum had looked over cross at him, then'd stood and gone for a sponge. As she'd raced around the table, one of her hands on the edge on the tablecloth at one corner had slipped, and she'd clutched the cloth and dragged everything down on top of her as she went down on her butt with an 'OOMPH!". So, I woke up, raced down the staircase, not having seen myself in the dream; I wasn't destined to be there. I guess I was still supposed to be dozing upstairs. And that's how I managed to pull my sister away from the fate of a painful stubbed toe. Nobody noticed my heroism, of course, what with dad helping mum up from the floor, both of them laughing, mum's hair full of cornflakes and milk, tablecloth still draped off one shoulder, Chief long gone out the cat flap. My parents hugging far above, me hugging little Deirdre while she struggled in my much larger grasp, trying to bite my face.
I really have to leave soon, but I'll keep writing, because why the fuck didn't I get to see Deirdre die in a car crash ten years later? All I'd been able to do was cheat on a few answers on some tests in middle school and predict the number Mr. Hill wrote on the board when I wasn't supposed to be paying attention. Seeing that number nine, or whatever, in the dream didn't even help, because the dream warned me to pay attention anyway. What a useless gift! I'm so sorry, sis.
FUCK! Then, up through high school, there were quite a few, admittedly explosive, dreams that taught me a bit about the proper finger work needed in the backseats of cars with girls, each girl's bits needing different strokes. I guess that was what you'd call the hot streak of my physic career? I peaked at wet dreams?!
And, I really need to stop writing this shit. But there's still a bit of midnight coffee left in the cup, and I really want to try to tell someone, even if it's just a cleaner who throws these papers away in the trash at a glance, what it's like to have a superpower that only shows you trivial crap.
Here's a brief list of people I've 'saved':
Some guy who was about to pay a dodgy mechanic five-hundred bucks for putting in a faulty transmission. Told him he was being ripped off. He got it down to a hundred bucks for consultation fees. Not like I even saw he'd die in a car crash later, so fucking sorry, sis, down the line or anything. Just ended up saving the guy four-hundred.
I once pushed a lady to the side who was about to walk into an opening door. Got a punch in the face myself for that one. Crossed the country for that.
Paul (the dream had provided a glimpse of his passport as he'd boarded the plane for Thailand). He was one of the very few out of inconsequential hundreds that I knew the name of. Can't complain that much, really, though. I would have never gone to Thailand otherwise, and the food was amazing. Paul still caught a very minor STD anyway, just a different one from a different boy.
So, yeah, there's actually another really good one that I even went to Iceland for, but time is running short, I'm about to be put to death, but yeah, that was me, the globetrotting superhero, saving folk from the only minor accidents my powers allow me to see. Why did I even bother? Because I could, all right? I was the only one who could! Shut up!
The reason for my upcoming execution was just another case of many:
Yeah, I call these things "cases"; I even have a corkboard on my wall back home in my superhero-styled "b'what?-cave" room with various colored yarn connecting pins stabbed in sketches and notes. It's all I have to justify this compulsion every time I wake up from one of these fucking dreams. Anyway, this one was a guy in Florida who was gonna burn his toast beyond redemption five days from then. He didn't have another slice of bread in the house, and would have gone to work hungry. YES, these are the exact kind of EMERGENCIES my superpower warms me of constantly. I was in Paris at the time, saving a kid from getting splashed from a puddle by a passing car. But, yeah, I made it there to Florida on a maze of connecting flights, two days ahead of time. Now, I'm a professional by now, as you can imagine, so it was a simple task to just buy an extra loaf of bread from his local 7-11, lockpick my way into his house while he was away, and plant the bread in his cupboard next to the one that would run out two days later. I'm SO DONE by now with talking to people face-to-face. Got that broken nose that time from doing that.
When I stood trial for 'time-crimes', after being dragged and ripped through the horizontally swirling violet-and-yellow tornado at the foot of my bed by black-armor clad, plastic-visored brutes, in this very motel room, the prosecution started out with some legal babble about how psychics were some anomaly that science and the law didn't fully understand yet, but were some kind of world-destroying paradox. The evidence stacked up against me in the case of the guy whose toast I'd prevented burning going on his way to work fifteen minutes later, stomach satisfied. Because of this, the scar-faced lawyer, burns having seemed to have melted half a cheek halfway downward, spoke out his closing statement:
"The accused is obviously guilty. By allowing the zero-subject, Person A, to leave his house a quarter of an hour later with a full stomach, this caused the traffic accident at the intersection of Helm and Justin to occur. Person B, a child passenger in the afflicted car, was killed. Person B would have grown up to become a serial killer, killing Persons C, D, and E through M, as you can see on the monitor chart-web. Person J, here...," and the prosecutor waved his VirtuaWand at the screen, drawing circles around the relevant boxes of the web of names, "...now lived, instead of dying, going on to found a bakery that produced a bad hotdog, here, that caused Person O to get sick and take a day off work, which made his Secret Service brother, Person P, lose concentration in a Presidential briefing. The momentary fact he missed was a minor point, just a peanut allergy, of Person Q, here, but Q died at a politically funded event down the timeline, here, from eating a Thai shish kabab that was supposed to be only miso-coated. Because of his death, Person R, his wife made a speech at his funeral that annoyed Person S, the deceased's sister who went home with a headache instead of stopping at Home Depot and buying the faulty electric stove that would later, instead, be shipped to Person T, a gas station attendant who had to put out a housefire instead of manning the pumps, which caused Person U to have to wait and not attend the vital talks that would allow a rat infestation bill to be passed in Congress. Two decades later, Person X, the President of the United States, eyes bloodshot, mouth foaming with rabies, would launch nuclear strikes on a whim and that's why we, People Z, are living in this unintended radioactive wasteland. ALL BECAUSE OF THIS ONE MAN!" and he stabbed a finger over at me.
Thankfully, finally, my lame superpower had found its back foot on the starting block for a running head start. The dream I'd woken up with, the one I fast-forwarded through like a heel on a remote in the middle of the night, made me pen this, and yeah, years of experience and meticulous scribbling made me a stickler for detail.
I know I still have time to stash these papers in the air-conditioning grate and go on the run before the violet-and-yellow portal opens at the foot of the shitty motel bed I was supposed to be asleep in when they'll arrive to take me.
Wish me luck. I love whoever you are. There's a tip enclosed
[close]
