DeathSample

Officer Rhoades couldn’t have been much older than me, too young to be standing on my doorstep. His young face had that fresh ‘out of the academy’ look, the kind of look where everything was still separated into good and evil with no grey areas in between. His baby blue eyes had too much pain in them which gave away that it was his first time delivering bad news.

He really had been too young.

I suppose I could have put him out of his misery and told him, ‘It’s alright. I already knew,’ but that would have changed his sympathetic heart into a suspicious one. How do you tell someone you already know your mother is dead?

Even as he told me how sorry he was for my loss, the squealing of tires and the crunch of metal could still be heard in the recesses of my mind. I’d known for a while this day would come.

But then again, I’ve known a lot of things I shouldn’t.

A gift, that’s what my mother had always called it. To be able to witness it all before it ever happens. Maybe if it had told me the lottery pick for that week or helped me pass a chemistry test, then I wouldn’t have minded, but knowing the six-year-old boy you babysit every other Thursday would grow up only to die from a drug overdose was not what I would call a gift.

I wonder if God does returns.

Officer Rhoades was staring at me again. Why was he looking at me like that? Oh. He asked me a question. What did he say?

“Miss Richmond, are you alright?”

I cleared my throat and hoped I looked like the distraught daughter he expected. “Uh, what? Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little bit in shock.”

Officer Rhoades quirked an eyebrow at me. I don’t think he believed me. “Are you sure? You don’t want me to call someone for you?”

“No. I’m fine.” Maybe if I said it enough, it would have been true.

I tried not to flinch away when he held his hand out to me. I looked down at it, and my stomach clenched. Touching people was a bad idea for me.

Most of my visions are random occurrences. Sometimes they are triggered by a word or a phrase. Sometimes, something as small as a flower on the ground would do the trick, but every time I have touched someone new, whether I want to or not, I would see it.

Death.

More often than not, my visions are always about death. Theirs or someone they loved, and it was never as simple as when, but how too. If they are going to die drowning, that’s where I’d find myself, submerged, lungs burning as I struggled to find the surface. And the fear, the gut-clenching, throat-closing fear that always washed over me.

I wasn’t brave. I didn’t pretend to be. Is everyone afraid to die? I didn’t know, but never did I have a vision where someone is dying with a smile on their face and joy in their heart. Yes, I knew fear very well, and the hand stretched out to me encompassed the very definition of my fear.

I ignored that hand and looked up as a small smile forced its way onto my face. “Thank you, Officer Rhoades. I’ll be okay. I have people to call.”

He hesitated for a moment and then withdrew his hand. The clenching in my stomach relaxed a bit. He cleared his throat and glanced back at his squad car where his partner was waiting before he surveyed me with a raised brow.

“Well, if you’re sure, but you really should call someone. You shouldn’t be alone now.”

“I know. I will. Thank you.” I backed up and closed the door before he could say anything more.

I leaned against the door and held my breath as I listened to the sound of Officer Rhoades’s footsteps on the porch. They paused for a moment like he wasn’t sure if he should leave yet. Eventually, his boots pounded down the three front steps that lead up to our house, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.

Staying there against the door for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do next. I had years to become accustomed to the idea that my mom would die today, but the pain was still there. My heart still throbbed and ached as much as if I had just found out.

I didn’t know when exactly it would happen. Visions don’t work like that, but I could speculate based on what I see, the weather, the clothing someone is wearing. Usually, I pushed my visions to a special place in the back of my mind that I like to keep locked tight, but not Mom’s. Hers, I had gone over a thousand times. Was there anything I could do to stop it? No. Could I have told her not to go out that day? Yes, I could have, and she would have given me one of those looks, the kind she always gave me when I tried to change the future.

“You can’t save everyone, Ellie,” she would have said. “Some things are just meant to be.”

Then I would have crossed my arms and scowled at her. “But what is the point of having visions if I can’t do anything about it?”

She’d give me this little smile, like I was silly for asking, then say, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Laughing as if it was some kind of private joke, she would go back to whatever it was she was doing and leave my question unanswered.

Now, I would never know.

I took a deep breath in, then let it out in one rush. Pulling myself up off the wall, I lifted my head and straightened my back. Enough self-pity, there were things to do.

I walked to the desk in our small living room and tried not to look at the walls. The floral print always made me a little nauseous. I pulled open the dark wood drawer and searched for the folder that Mom always kept in case something like this happened.

Grabbing the folder marked ‘In Case of Emergency,’ I flipped the manila cover open. I scanned over the first few pages, ticking them off as I went. Will. Funeral Home. Logins. There was the thing I was looking for. Call List. My eyes scanned over the list of friends and relative that needed to be notified, and I stopped when I see the name at the bottom of the list. The one name I’m not sure what to do with.

Bart Richmond. Dad.

I took a seat at the desk and stared down at his name. Should I call him? Would he even answer? He was not the most reliable man in the world. I hadn’t seen him since my thirteenth birthday, and that was five years ago. It wasn’t unusual for him to be gone, but when he did happen to turn up, he was usually distant, only ever saying a few words to me, before he had ‘a work emergency.’

Mom told me he was a big shot advisor for a multimillion-dollar corporate head. If she were here, she’d say he loved us and would be here if he could.

I didn’t buy it. What important advice could he give that would cause him to only visit every few years? No, if he wanted to be here, he would. Tucking the loose strands of blonde hair behind my ear, I grabbed the cordless phone from the top of the desk. Let someone else call him.

I glanced back at the top of the list. Aunt Sue. Mom’s too intuitive for her own good younger sister. She would know what to do next, but she would also be able to tell that I didn’t sound surprised or upset at Mom’s passing. None of us ever told her about my gift, but somehow, I think she has always suspected.

“Your eyes are so old,” Sue would say with a bewildered look in her eyes.

If she had to see death and carnage all the time, she’d come out scarred too. I closed my eyes for a moment. If she found out, I knew she’d want to know why I didn’t stop it from happening. She wouldn’t understand.

I needed to sound devastated. I looked down at my hands and watched the tremors that start to envelop them. I really didn’t want to do this, but…

The door in the back of my mind was made of hard steel. The cold silver metal was closed shut with a heavy steel lock, a key tightly sat in it. I took a deep breath and twisted the key in the hole where it lived. A resounding click rang through my mind, and for a second, I hesitated. But then with one sweep of my mind’s hand, the doors flew open, and I was engulfed.

The images that poured out almost caused me to forget myself. The crunch of bodies smashing against the pavement. Blood spilling out of fresh cuts. Gunshots fired. The sharp, deep pain of a knife slipping into my flesh. Then there’s the screaming. The screaming is unbearable. High pitched wails of unspeakable terror and gurgling breaths. Any sane person would go insane by the chaos of images that assaulted my mind. They barely caused an emotional reaction from me anymore. I sometimes wondered if that made me a sociopath.

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, and the physical pain of them biting into my flesh pulled me back into myself. I shoved all the images back into the room and slammed the door, the force of it vibrating through my head. With the visions safely closed up once more, I could finally breathe again, so I did just that, taking a deep breath as I clicked the lock back into its place.

Touching my face, I felt the wetness there and almost glared down at it. I never cried. I learned a long time ago that crying doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t bring people back, it doesn’t stop the visions from happening. But today? Today, it was necessary. I glanced back at the list and started to punch in my aunt’s number.

It almost felt good to cry.

 

###

 

In my short eighteen years of life, I have seen more death and destruction than most war veterans. I would rather face an onslaught of bleeding soldiers than face the crowd of mourners before me. Death, I could handle. People?, Not so much.

Mom would have been happy that so many had come to mourn her death. She had far more friends than me… which wasn’t hard since I only have one friend: Nicole Berman. Or Nikki to her friends, meaning me. Nikki actually was the only one at the funeral home I was happy to see. The rest could go find a shallow grave to lie in.

Unlike my somber personality, Nikki is a breath of Jewish sunshine, from her dark curly mass of hair all the way down to her sensible “got them on sale” shoes. She really was my lifeline in this world. She’d helped me more than once from getting completely lost in my own sinking pit of carnage. To top it off, she was completely aware of my little ‘gift’ and had no problem telling me where to stuff it when I tried to warn her off of any guy who is doomed to die in the foreseeable future.

We actually met because of a guy, way back in sixth grade when all the other kids avoided me like a bad case of cooties. I’d been hanging out by the swing sets, watching the other kids playing kickball. I’d never been a joiner, to begin with, but it would have been nice to be asked to play sometimes. But, by then, I had already been labeled as that scary blonde girl. I had made the mistake of telling this one girl, Jessica, that her new puppy was going to get its head chopped off by her dad’s weed whacker that weekend. Ever since that came true, not too many people talked to me if they could help it.

Nikki wasn’t like them. She had been a transfer student, so all the boys were in that new toy phase with her. This one boy, in particular, David Bartelli, the Tom Cruise of Ms. Johnson’s sixth-grade class, was hardcore for Nikki. He even brought her flowers one day. It would have been sweet if I didn’t already know that David would die later that year from a bad outbreak of measles.

I probably should have kept my mouth shut. Probably. Who knows? Maybe my vision was wrong that time, and David would have grown up to be a charming man who would have married Nikki and brought her flowers every day for the rest of their lives. At that point in time, though, David was a conceited little brat who stole the Twinkies out of my lunch box every day.

So, when I saw Nikki heading over to where David was hanging out with his other equally stuck-up friends, I had to intervene. I mean, it was my civic duty to let Nikki know just how short term of a relationship she was in for. When I told her, she just looked at me like I was the most fascinating thing in the whole world. From that point on, we had been inseparable.

“Great party.” Speak of the Devil. I loved her sense of humor, it was one thing we actually have in common. She liked to see the glass as half-full, but most of the time, her jokes came out as demented as mine.

I smirked at her when I thought nobody was looking. “Killer.”

Nikki giggled, something that caused the older adults around us to glare back at her. She glared right back at them. “Liven up, would you? It’s not like we’re at a funeral or something.” She turned her head back to me and quirked a brow. “So, how long did you know?”

“Jeez, Nik, get right down to it, won’t you?”

She snorted and waved a hand at me. “Whatever, like you haven’t had enough people coddling you already.” She gestured to the group of relatives fawning over my mother’s coffin. “You could use a break from the sympathy wagon.”

With that, she grabbed my hand and led me towards one of the side exits of the funeral home. I tried to dodge people the best I can, but a few brushed me here and there, causing my vision to blur out momentarily. As we burst out the side door and out into the open air, I made a mental note to spend more time with Uncle Bob. He had liver failure coming, though I guess you didn’t need to be a psychic to figure that one out. I guess I’d be an alcoholic too if I had to live with Aunt Kate’s criticism.

I leaned against the brick walls of the funeral home and snuck my hand into my clutch to find my pack of cigarettes. Sweet reprieve. I didn’t know if I could have handled one more nugget of the future that day.

“You really should quit, you know?” Nikki said with a raised brow.

I gave Nikki a pointed look as I lighted the end of the cigarette in my mouth and took a big inhale. She has never approved of my smoking. Cancer and all that.

“When I no longer have near-death experiences daily, I will gladly give up my nicotine, but until that day comes, you can kindly fuck off.” I blew smoke in her direction to punctuate my point.

She let out a small cough and waved her hand in front of her. “Hey, just because you want to die young doesn’t mean the rest of us do.”

I gave her an apologetic shrug though she knew I was anything but. It’s no secret that I didn’t want to live longer than I had to. I would have gone off and ended it already if it hadn’t been for Mom and Nikki. Well, only Nikki now.

“So has your dad showed up?” Nikki tucked her hands in the pockets of her long black dress pants. Her long legs really did astound me. Being five two most of my teenage life had me accustomed to always looking up, but at nearly six feet tall, Nikki dwarfed me.

I took another drag of my cigarette and stared down at the ground. “No.” I wanted her to drop it. I didn’t really want to see him. Didn’t know what I’d have said if he did show up.

“Well, what did he say when you talked to him?”

My eyes snapped up to hers, I could feel my gaze harden. She wasn’t going to drop it.

“I didn’t.”
Nikki threw her curls over her shoulder and scoffed. “Meaning you didn’t try. I keep telling you, sometimes you have to be the first one to reach out if you ever want to have a real relationship with the man who helped create you.”

I flicked the cigarette and watched as it bounced across the pavement. She was on that kick again. Nikki was always working on a new self-improvement project, and this year was all about repairing personal relationships. This was a conversation I definitely didn’t want to have.

“Can we not talk about this right now? I have enough to deal with today.” I looked down at my right hand and rubbed at the bend in the c-shaped scar on the back of my hand near my thumb. I didn’t remember how I got it, but lately, whenever I start getting irritated, it would start to burn like it had just happened recently.

“You can’t hide your feelings forever, Ellie.”

“You know, I think I’m starting to remember how you die.” I tapped my chin, pretending to be deep in thought. “I think it had something to do with bees.”

“Bees? But I’m not even allergic to bees!”

The door to the funeral home opened then, and the pallbearers lead the people out with my mother’s coffin in hand. I moved towards Aunt Sue and away from Nikki’s squawking.

Nikki had been hounding me since day one to let her know how she dies, and every time she asks, I give her a different answer. A hit and run. Suicide. A freak accident involving a blender. And now bees. She was more obsessed with death than I was. Really, why would you want to know when you die?

It’s not like I didn’t know. I just didn’t want to think of Nikki that way. If I let myself think of the way she goes, then that is all she will be. A label permanently imprinted on her face every time I saw her, and there would go my one and only friend.

I let myself be ushered into the black limousine reserved for immediate family and leaned against the door. I knew Nikki well. If I told her how she died, she would never let it go. She would be looking over her shoulder all the time, more worried about dying than living. I couldn’t do that to her.

Nikki’s small hand pounded against the glass of my window. I tried to school the emotions on my face to show nothing as I rolled down the window. Giving her my best poker face, I waited for the usual explosion of questions.

“Come on, Ellie! You can’t be serious! Bees?” Her face would almost be funny if I hadn’t seen it so many times when I had fed her one of my previous lies. I rolled my eyes at her and started to roll the window back up.

“You’ll just have to wait and find out like everyone else.” I bit back a grin when she smacked the glass and let out another muffled, “Come on,” before she marched towards her own vehicle.

“You really should be nicer to that girl,” Aunt Kate scolded. “I don’t know how she stands to be around you as it is.” Aunt Kate’s snide remarks always made my day. It may be mean and unkind, but the fact that I know exactly how she dies filled my step with a little bit of a pep whenever she went into one of her tirades about my character.

“Oh, Katie, leave Ellie alone.” Aunt Sue glared at her sister and reached over to pat my hands with a small smile. I quickly moved it out of her reach and stared down at her own paused in midair. She cleared her throat and dropped the hand, she knew not to touch me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… Well, anyway, don’t listen to her. She’s just a bitter old woman. You’re perfect the way you are.”

“Thanks, Aunt Sue.” I gave her a small smile in return and turned to look back out the window. For all her suspicions, I always liked Aunt Sue. She was always standing up for me against Aunt Kate, even if her older sister was right on most occasions. At least I wouldn’t have to see any of them for a while after this. College was right around the corner.

One good thing about not having that many friends growing up was there was always plenty of time to study. I actually had the highest GPA in my graduating class. If I weren’t a social leper, I would have been valedictorian, but no one wants to hear inspirational speeches from the death girl. I could just imagine what my speech would entail.

“Thomas Jefferson’s class of ’08, though many of you will die before you have time to do anything exceptional in your lives, you made it through high school. Your lives will go on to be completely boring and meaningless, and while your husbands and wives have affairs behind your backs and your children end up in Juvy, you will think back to this day when you were at the height of your lives. Congratulations, you poor sad suckers.”

Or something like that.

While I wish I could say I got into Princeton or Harvard, what with having the highest GPA and all, my having don no extracurricular activities did not help me to stand out to any of the big Ivy League colleges. Still, since Nikki didn’t have any such high standards, despite what her parents wanted for her, I would be joining her at the big UN of O in the fall, majoring in whatever I found to be the least nonsensical and touchy-feely. Maybe I could be a scientist, hiding in a tiny lab every day. Nikki was going to be a nurse.

“We’re here, kiddo.” Uncle Bob, who had been snoring most of the trip, kicked my black ankle boot with one of his dress shoes. I glanced at him and then looked back out the window. We actually were there. When had that happened?

“Come on, kiddo, they ain’t gonna start without you.” Uncle Bob waited outside the door for me as I smoothed out my short black dress over my knitted tights and stumbled out onto the gravel of the graveyard road.

So this is what a graveyard looked like. For all the deaths I had seen, I’d never actually been to a funeral before, let alone a graveyard. I thought I had enough problems with the dead that I didn’t need to rock that boat quite yet.

I followed the trail of black dressed people as we made our way towards where my mom’s new home would be. It was a lot cheerier than I would have expected a graveyard to be. I mean, where were the darkened skies, the crows, and all the creepy weeping angels? Maybe that was only a nighttime attraction.

A hand grasped mine in theirs before I can pull it back. When I followed the hand up to the owner’s face, I relaxed. It was just Nikki. No more visions for me today.

Yay.

“How you holding up?” She gave me a small concerned look.

I rolled my eyes at her. “How do you think?”

“Well, judging by the scowl on your face, I’m assuming your Aunt Kate said something rude again, and you are trying to decide if it is worth it to tempt the fates and kill her early.”

I snorted and tried to cover it up with what looked like a distraught cry of anguish. God, did I love this girl.

Nikki pulled me into a hug in front of the coffin that held my mother’s body and pretended that she was comforting the crying daughter, when really, I was trying hard to breathe through my laughs. She gave me a particularly hard pat on the back, her signal for ‘knock it off already, it wasn’t that funny.’ What can I say? I’m easily amused.

When I finally had myself under control, I pulled back from her and took my rightful place next to the coffin. The minister was staring at me as if he knew I hadn’t really been crying. I narrowed my eyes and jerked my head towards him. I almost start laughing again when the large man startled at my hard gaze and quickly looked down at the book in his hand. My eyes started to wander away from the minister as his gravelly voice went on to talk about walking through the valley of death.

There were a few family tombs around the outskirts of the graveyard, each lined up along the metal fence. At least that part of the graveyard was consistent with horror movies. I moved my gaze along the different types of graves and paused. There, in the midst of them, sticking out like the only black guy at a Justin Bieber concert, was a tree. Though it was mid-June, the tree looked like it was stuck in a perpetual winter. Not dead, but not full and vibrant like the rest of the trees outside the graveyard. I stared at the tree for a moment, wondering why they decided to put one tree in the whole lot of land when suddenly a lone figure came out of the base of the tree.

It was a man. Well, at least it looked like a man. He was blurry at first, but after a few moments, he seemed to solidify. Dressed in what looked like a pretty expensive black suit along with a pair of black shades, there stood my dad. Bart.

What the hell was he doing here? How did he even do that? Crap, he was looking at me.

I looked away from him and turned my gaze back to the minister. Did they see? I chanced a quick peek at the others around me. None of them seemed to have noticed Bart just standing in the middle of the graveyard. A quick look at Nikki showed she hadn’t noticed anything either. She glanced down at me as if she expected me to do something.

When it looked like I wasn’t getting what she wanted me to do, she nudged me forward with a nod of her head towards the casket. Oh. It was that time already. I tried to keep my eyes off my father, who just watched us from his place by the tree, and reached out to take one of the white roses off the casket. I clutched it in my hand and moved back to my spot, letting the aunts and other relatives have their turn at it.

I took a hurried look at the tree and saw him staring at me. He had taken his sunglasses off now, and I could practically feel his eyes boring into my skin. What was he doing? Without a remark to those around me, I pulled away from the pack and marched over to where the lone tree waited.

As I arrived in front of him, I took in his features. Honestly, I looked just like him. The straight blonde hair that swept across his forehead, slightly blue-green eyes, and bowed mouth. Even the little upturn of his nose was the same, and he didn’t have a wrinkle in sight. How was it that he looked this perfect when Mom had grey coming in and laugh lines around her mouth?

Ignoring his outstretched arms, I stopped in front of him, arms crossed. “What are you doing here?”

Bart dropped his arms and just looked at me. What was he staring at? It’s not like he hadn’t seen me before. I hadn’t exactly changed since the age of thirteen. Yea, I had boobs now and maybe a curvier figure, but I was still the same.

“You didn’t call me.”

Had his voice always been that melodic? I glared down at the grown and kicked the dirt beneath my feet.

“Didn’t think you’d care.”

I watched his face turn from concern into anger and then controlled irritation. Wish I had that much control over my temper. I usually just let it out.

“Of course, I care, Eleanor. I’m not completely heartless.”

I snorted. “Could have fooled me.”

His eyes returned to their previous concern, and for a moment, he seemed flustered. “I wanted to be here for you. Especially today. I… I didn’t know. I didn’t see.”

I stared at him for a moment, my mouth agape. I watched as he dragged a hand through his hair in a gesture I had never seen him use before. My dad was not the frazzled type. He didn’t get flustered. He didn’t show emotion. He definitely never said anything about ever seeing anything like this, like my own visions. My shocked look must have made him realize he was breaking his usual cool exterior because he quickly dropped his hand and hid his eyes behind his sunglasses.

I forced my mouth closed and put on my best interrogator face. “You didn’t see what exactly?”

“Don’t start, Eleanor. You know damn well what I said.” Oh, my father wasn’t as put together as he seemed. I took joy in knowing he wasn’t as perfect as he put off. It meant he could be hurt.

“Don’t what? Don’t wonder why my father is never around? Don’t ask why he never thought to mention to me not once that he could see stuff too?” I held a finger up in his face. It felt good to vent. “Or how about the fact that when I was five, I watched my mother die and had nightmares about it for months?!”

“Enough, Eleanor. Stop.” The calm in his voice made my own repressed anger break its leash.

“No! You don’t get to tell me when it is enough. Do you want to know she died crying out your name? Do you? She was waiting for you to save her! Why? Why would she call for you? A husband who is never there, when I have been there for the last eighteen years, and she wouldn’t let me save her. She wouldn’t let me!”

A large part of me delighted in the pain that marred my father’s flawless face. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to hurt him like he had hurt me all these years, like he had hurt her.

“How long has your hand been bothering you?”

I took in short shallow breaths and stared at him. What? Out of all that, he was only worried about my scar? I looked down at my hand where I had been rubbing at it. I hadn’t even realized I had been doing it.

“A few months. Why does that matter?”

I almost laugh when he cursed and pulled out his phone like nothing I just said mattered. Watching him talk into his phone, I realized something. The man I thought was my father was not who I thought he was at all. I don’t know this man.

“Yes, now… Perfect… Be there soon.”

My brow furrowed as he hung up his phone and turned back to me. “What’s going on? What’s my scar have to do with anything?”

He suddenly grabbed me by the shoulders, and I tried not to flinch against him. He had never touched me before, and I didn’t really want to see anything about him… but nothing happened. No blurred eyes. No images. Nothing. It was like he doesn’t exist.

“We have to go,” was all he said.

“Go? Go where? I’m not going anywhere with you.” I tried to jerk out of his grasp, but he just tightened his grip.

“I’m sorry. There’s no time.” He pressed his lips to my forehead in the way I’d always secretly hoped he would. When he pulled away, I could only stare at him in wonder.

“No time for what?”

But my question went unanswered as the world started to darken around me. Later, much later, I would wonder how nobody noticed when he picked me up and faded back into the trunk of the tree like he was never even there.

Book 1: Death In Her Eyes