Rapidly approaching the sidewalk after hurling herself from the roof of the financial company where she’s worked since graduating from college, her final memory involves a blind date she had nineteen years earlier at age nineteen with a twenty-six-year-old man; he took her to a trendy restaurant, where, after they’d ordered dinner, he said he worked as a systems analyst for the Pentagon. “I do research to make sure our bombs’ll go ‘boom’ when we drop them on the Middle East or wherever,” he said with a chuckle. She considered him a callous jerk and never dated him again; in fact, she had forgotten about him until now, near the end of her six-story fall. Maybe the subconscious connection involving death from the skies had caused her to remember that jerk, she would have thought if her depressive thoughts hadn’t predominated. Not even the probability of receiving yet another glowing performance review from her company could improve her mental and emotional state.
Meanwhile, six hundred miles away, her older sister, who had set up that blind date, and who works as an assistant district attorney for a county that prides itself on its high percentage of drug-related asset-forfeiture cases, experiences “a full-body chill,” or so the older sister will call it anonymously on a psychic-phenomena chatroom that night. Soon after flying back from the funeral, the older sister will purchase a jasmine-scented, eight-inch-long, herbal “healing candle” from a local strip-mall store that sells paraphernalia related to spirituality, mysticism, and magick-with-a-K; she will keep the candle, unused, in her dresser drawer for a week before thinking Well, might as well, you sucker, then taking out the candle and inserting it inside the crystal candle holder that a boyfriend gave her eight years ago as a present after she’d won her biggest trial to date, sending the county’s biggest marijuana cultivator to prison for life without parole.
Copyright © 2016 by David V. Matthews
