TILL DEATH DO US PART | JENLISA

THREE

JENNIE

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What Life Is Made Of

Unknown, 2030

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Delving into things like fate and death, while sexy because of their mystique, isn’t something I ever did. That was Lisa’s thing, not mine. I have always been rational, logical, matter-of-fact. She was the spiritual one between us. Lisa concerned herself with a higher purpose, while I focused on the mundane. It was why we worked so well together. She lifted and I anchored. We were two people creating life through the counter points of reality and fantasy.

But I tried to pay attention to it. Even when it was oppressive and seemingly out of place, I tried to listen. Her words somehow prepared me for what greets me when I open my eyes to a vortex of swirling darkness, and the memories come. They solidify out of the void around me, clouds firming into the interior of a car.

“They look like paths,” she says quietly from the passenger’s seat as we glide past snow swept fields and barren trees.

“What does?” I glance to the pensive look on her face. Reflecting against the gray, twilight-brushed world beyond the window, Lisa’s eyes are almost black.

“The trees.”

I slow the car a little, looking for the access road that leads to our vacation house in upstate New York. I really wish we would have gotten out of the city sooner and missed the snowfall. It’s more appealing to imagine being at our cabin building a fire and watching the trickle of powder cover the car than trying to find a four foot wide road in the middle of this weather. For good measure I turn up the wiper blades.

“Jennie?”

“Hmm?” I focus harder on the road.

“It’s close now. I can feel it coming up on the right.”

I nod.

She’s always had a connection to the world, one I couldn’t understand or fathom. When we were younger, I mocked her for it. That was when she stopped talking about it, when it made her even more of a social pariah. Her silence was so deep regarding it that for many years I forgot about it altogether. I still do on occasion, because I can’t rationalize it and it scares me. It is yet another nuance in her plethora of gifts.

I remember back to another drive like this, not to our cabin, but just the normal routine of coming home from the store. We had been passing through our neighborhood when Lisa turned to me with a hollow look in her eyes, whispering that our neighbor had died. When I think back on that look it bothers me. Not just because of how empty and dark her normally bright eyes were, but because she had been right.

Lisa’s intuition comes to the forefront of my mind again as I study her. We drive in silence and the wiper blades keep time with an eerie gate. The swish is all I hear as I look away and concentrate on the right hand side of the road.

“Jennie?”

I narrow my eyes at the expanse of snow and rock and fallen branches. “Yeah?”

“Do you ever think about death?”

I arch my eyebrow without letting my eyes leave the windshield. “A little morbid to talk about now don’t you think? I mean, we are supposed to be enjoying each other’s company and our small vacation.”