Chills & Thrills Anthology

Flash-Forward | Winners

I dreamt about me.

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#2

izzywriter2

I didn't let go of Mariana at all that day. My hand stayed fastened on her upper arm. She didn't ask why, not because she hadn't thought to, but because she already knew the answer.

It had been happening as long as I could remember, these flashes of the future. The worst part of the future, the one thing promised to everyone upon their birth. So she stayed close to me, face pale, voice quiet, and she didn't ask any questions I didn't want to answer.

Her face had been the first thing I had seen that morning, although she had been sleeping in her own bedroom as I sat straight up in bed, gasping at the sight of my sister's face contorted with pain and smeared with blood. It had been one of the worst sensations I had ever felt. Probably the second worst of all time. I was saving the first place for what was about to happen.

But what was about to happen came and went and Marina was still standing next to me, clutched in my white-knuckled grip.

My mother, on the other hand, lay on the ground, still, prone, the car that had clipped her pulling to a stop in front of us.

Marina was the first to move in the crowd of stilled people around us. She dashed to our mother, collapsed at her side. Holding her hand, begging, crying her name. Leaning down to rest her face on her stomach, on the growing bloodstain. When she looked at me, it was like an overlay on some terrible picture, one I had first taken this morning. Face bloodstained, screwed up with pain.

Not pain for herself, though. Not her blood.

I had been right. That vision was the second worst feeling in the world.

*

#3

MaddieBrinn

My eyes popped open. It was happening again – the visions. Those infernal visions!

They had come before, their source hiding within the shadows of my dreams, scaring me to my core. But this time it was different. Someone I knew would die, someone I loved – and I was powerless to save him because I didn't know who.

Throwing off the covers I got up from my bed and pretended to go about preparing for work as if nothing was wrong. But there was no one I could tell who would believe me. Lacking the stomach for breakfast, I left my house for the busy thoroughfare I took every noon, avoiding eye contact with anyone.

The thought of seeing someone familiar, and wondering if it was whom I'd seen in my visions, made the back of my throat coat with bile. Startled by the boom of thunder, I felt the terrible singing crackle across my skin as lightning zigzagged above...

And in that instant, the knowledge of death came again!

With nowhere to hide, I ignored each stinging slap of my feet against the unforgiving concrete beneath them as I pushed myself almost to the point of exhaustion in my relentless drive to get to a place of safety, a place where I prayed the visions wouldn't find me – and all before time ran out!