Dark Fates

Death at First Sight Angela Roquet

Chapter 1

Lia lay awake in bed, her face upturned and eyes squeezed shut. She didn't need an alarm clock to know that the sun was rubbing elbows with the horizon. Dawn would break any second now. The hitch in her heart rate told her that much. Her breath grew shallow and her skin clammy as she waited.

She tried to imagine what her mornings might be like if she were normal. The fantasy was a simple one, but with precise details—the sun greeting her through gauzy curtains pushed aside by a warm breeze, children giggling in the distance, someone's moist breath tickling her neck.

A breakfast scene followed, with a checkered tablecloth, steaming cups of coffee, and buttermilk pancakes drenched in maple syrup—the real kind, like her father used to make, not the generic crap that Saunders delivered every Wednesday. An imaginary, blissfully happy family would join her at the table. A slew of children would bicker over whose stack of pancakes was tallest, while her pretend husband winked at her over the rim of his coffee cup.

Lia wondered if anyone actually had mornings like that. Then she wondered if she had just seen one too many Folger's commercials. Her breath steadied long enough for her to expel a disheartened grumble, and then the sun broke the sky.

She couldn't see it through the boarded up window of her bedroom, but that never seemed to make a difference. Her back bowed and she knotted her fists in the bedsheets, trying to hold herself in place. Pain spiked through her brain in two lines that began in her eye sockets and felt like they exploded at the back of her skull. The room tilted sideways and she was thrown to the floor.

Lia panted against the weathered hardwood as her mind split open, her consciousness stretching out for miles and miles until it crumbled at the edges like a pie crust rolled too thin. Her breath ached in her lungs, and a hoarse whisper slipped past her lips before she braced herself for the main event.

The faces came next. They poked holes through her fragile mind, searing their swan songs into her memory as she pre-lived their final moments. She never recognized them, but each one left a scar.

The first was a boy on a skateboard. He glanced over his shoulder—a split second before a van smeared him across the blacktop. Lia strained to pick out details, like the van's license plate, but the letters blurred at the edge of her sight. The street sign was easier to read, even with the streak of blood running down one side. Someone screamed, but it was drowned out by the shrill horn of a nearby train.

The scene spun away from Lia as if she were on a merry-go-round, and then there was an old man, clutching his chest in a tattered recliner, a television remote squeezed in his opposite hand. For a second, Lia could hear the channels clicking through too quickly in the background. A blue and orange lunch tray lay upside down on cheap carpet, the letters LV stamped into the plastic.

Last, she saw a woman reading in a park. There was a concrete bridge behind her, leading to a wide lawn where a dog show was taking place. Lia smelled lavender perfume and felt the aged paper under her own fingers as the woman turned the pages of a novel. A man watched her from the shadows, but she didn't notice until it was too late. Then there was gunfire and blood on the grass.

Lia pressed her cheek into the hardwood and her eyes closed tighter as if she could block the image out. Her body shivered, drumming her shoulders and knees against the floor. And then, just as suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it was over. Her mind rolled back in on itself, feeling loose and too large for her head. The visions' parting gift was a migraine from hell.

The nameless faces were still there, their deaths imprinted on her as if she'd experienced them firsthand, but she'd learned a long time ago to distance herself from them as quickly as possible. They were all strangers, and that was her only comfort. Every morning. For the past twenty years.