Cursed [Book 1] ✔

Chapter 2

I saw my first death at eight-years-old.

When I say saw, I mean, I knew it would happen before it did. I should've stopped it. I told myself that anyone would have stopped it, would have done anything to save someone. I found out the hard way that I couldn't.

Jesus and I barely played together, but the day my dodge ball rolled into his yard, I feared for him. He trundled to our door and returned the bright red ball. As he handed it over, an image lit in my head, like a memory. Only, it wasn't mine:

My small fingers fiddled with the marbles. I stepped from the sidewalk to the street, though I knew I wasn't supposed to. In my haste, several of the shining balls spilled to the ground, rolling into the street.

No!

They had taken me three weeks of allowance to buy. Without another thought, I lunged to retrieve them. I could hear a car approaching, but wasn't worried.

It did sound awfully close, so I glanced up, but too late.

The image faded. For me, and it felt like minutes. In reality, only a few seconds had passed. Jesus appraised me with distrust, took his ball, and went home. I hardly understood what I had seen, but chose to ignore it. At my age, I figured it was just an overactive imagination, or some type of bad dream.

But I was wrong.

~*~

Two days later, Jesus's picture flashed on the television, with the headline:

LOCAL BOY KILLED IN A HIT AND RUN.

His cousin, a slight woman with red-rimmed eyes, relayed the scene, "Jesus went to the store to buy some toys. Then, he dropped some in the street." She drew in a breath, ready to break down completely. "He was only eight."

Her head bowed under the weight of her grief. I counted the buttons on her plaid shirt, and noted the dog barking behind her. I couldn't understand what had happened, and tried to make sense of it in the small ways that I could.

He was only eight, like me. Had only been eight. My tears fell slowly. Mom came home from work hours later, worried when she found me curled up in a ball on my bed. She wrapped her arms around me, cocooning me from the horror of my first encounter with death, even as it had seemed to happen from a far. My mother's comfort convinced me that everything was okay.

Just another bad dream. Had to be.

That day was a lesson, but it didn't teach me much. All the day wrought was the knowledge that my memories weren't always my own, and that dreams weren't dreams. I had to get used to seeing a twisted version of what was to come.

My mother called them "visions."

Later, someone would say the visions were a gift, but I knew what they really were. I was damned.

I wanted to give the gift right back, or at the very least, help people. However, the visions held a much different future. This included my death, which coincidentally, I never saw coming until it was too late.