Un/reality

The day the world’s defining lines disintegrated turned out to be a Tuesday. Eva was late for work, but she didn’t care. She felt confident it would work out, and she was never wrong, so she took her time walking there, letting sweat trickle down her back and bead her hairline as she absorbed the warmth of the morning. A light breeze made her shiver. It was a good feeling. Craving something else cold, she popped into her favorite coffee shop to grab a drink. 

The line was long, which gave Eva a welcome excuse to get lost in her thoughts. She let her mind wander over her living room (which needed vacuuming), her shoes (which were new, and a source of intense joy), her sister (who had just adopted a cat with a bad attitude), what she wanted to have for dinner that night (either Thai food or pizza, definitely nothing she had to prepare), and finally, the dream she’d had the previous night. 

Eva had never thought there was anything particularly strange about dreaming the future. She knew how other people would react, of course. She never talked about it, not even with her closest friends. Not even with her sister. She’d seen enough movies to know how you were supposed to react: with terror. But Eva had always known her dreams were prophetic. She had no memories of it being any other way. 

It wasn’t just the dreams, either. She got these gut feelings. If she just stopped and concentrated for a second, Eva could tell what was going to happen, and how, and when. This one was trickier to hide. Like when she’d pulled her sister out of a perfectly empty side street seconds before a driver lost control of his truck came careening down, obliterating a sign on the corner. She unfailingly predicted the outcomes of games and gambles; her friends laughed about it, and she got many an “Eva! How did you know?” She always answered quite truthfully– “I just had a sense.”

Sometimes, she saw ghosts. It really wasn’t like a whole big thing. She didn’t get why everyone seemed to think it would be. This wasn’t a constant, like the sensations or the dreams. There was always a future, but there weren’t always spirits around, obviously. Like with people, it depended on where you were. She would just run into them. They never bothered her. For the most part, she did the polite thing and left them alone, assuming it was what they’d prefer. Every so often, she’d get one who wanted something of her–an object returned, a message delivered. Eva did her best. She liked that this random talent of hers let her do something good for someone. 

She could move things without having to touch them. Hand-held objects mostly, but her friend Sara swore by weight-lifting to build your upper body strength, and Eva figured she could do the same thing with this if she tried. She would look at an object and think about moving it. Feel a little tug at her mind and there it went. It was really convenient when she was on the couch and didn’t want to get up for a snack or a blanket. She could influence the world around her in small ways, like encouraging a tree to grow or lighting a fire without materials.

She liked that she had a skill. She knew people who were exceptionally talented, or beautiful, or bold, or ambitious, or kind. She had a friend who could play the violin, another who was a brilliant cook, and her sister read about a book a minute. Her niece–named Evelyn, in her honor–could touch her nose with her tongue and wiggle her ears. “I’m jealous!” Eva had told the delighted three-year-old, and to her slight surprise, she’d meant it. 

What she could do was what people called magic. She knew that in the unlikely event anyone believed her about it, they would assume it was either extraordinarily wonderful or extraordinarily bad. It wasn’t, though. It was just something she’d been born with–just Eva. 

Sometimes she twisted her long, curling dark hair up on her head and put on the floor-length gown she’d worn to her sister’s wedding and made flowers float around her in the bathroom while she looked in the mirror, just so she could imagine she was dramatic and romantic. Eva often thought she could do with being a more dramatic, romantic person.

She took another step up in line and chewed her lip. The dream hadn’t been a good one. Of course, not every dream of Eva’s predicted something. Some of them were just dreams, of the most usual kind. She’d had the one about running away from something, and the one where she was in her underwear in public. The problem was, the one she’d had last night felt like a prophetic dream. She’d jolted awake with her heart thudding wildly in her throat. That wasn’t surprising, given what she’d dreamed about. And it had been outlandish, ridiculous, but not uncommon for a nightmare. There was no reason to be nervous about it. She was overreacting, getting herself stressed for nothing. 

Eva placed her order and moved to the pick-up area, enjoying the sound of her shoes click-clacking on the floor. Eva grinned. She swore she walked different in these shoes. There was more confidence, more swagger.  

Then she heard her sister’s voice shout her name. Lili sounded delighted, and Eva swallowed a groan. She would love to spend the day with her sister, but she did have to go to work eventually. Eva turned, bracing herself to refuse a flood of invitations. 

Standing there, beaming cheerfully at Eva with her arm resting casually across Lili’s shoulders, was the woman Eva had dreamed of the previous night. It was her; there could be no question whatsoever. There were the same gold-flecked brown eyes, the dimply smile, the heart shaped face and red-red lipstick. Lili opened her mouth and Eva knew she was about to say that this was her friend, Rachel. 

Rachel was pretty and bubbly and stylish, which didn’t help. Eva managed to keep her face reasonably controlled, and she didn’t think either woman noticed the slight tremor in her voice when she said hello, she was Lili’s sister, so pleased to meet you! It took immense willpower for Eva to make herself shake Rachel’s proffered hand. She felt revulsion so intense she tasted bile. Rachel’s touch made her want to sear her skin off. Eva had never experienced loathing like that before. She balled it up tight and shoved it down, deep deep deep. 

What is she doing here? My God, what is she doing here? 

Eva thought that really, this just was not happening. This didn’t happen. It couldn’t. 

She hardly heard her sister’s explanation of how they’d met at a mutual friend’s bridal shower. Rachel laughed loudly and frequently. It was a nice laugh. It made you think of ice cream dribbling down your chin on summer evenings. It made Eva want to throw up. 

By the time she finally managed to disentangle herself, she’d accidentally agreed to have dinner with Lili. If I ever eat again, it will be a miracle. Before everyone parted ways, Rachel gave warm goodbyes to both sisters.

Head spinning, heart thudding, Eva swallowed repeatedly until the dryness in her throat abated enough to let her talk. Then she called in sick to work. She needed to be at home, by herself where no one could find her or speak to her or reach her or touch her. She needed to be alone where she could think. 

Eva curled herself into a tight little ball on the couch and pulled a blanket up to her chin. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hands to her forehead. She made herself be compact, contained. Then, biting down hard on her lip, Eva forced herself to go through the dream again. This was important. She wanted all the details straight. 

It wasn’t what she called a character-centric dream. She wasn’t in it as herself. Instead, she seemed to float, disengaged and observing. Events played out beneath her. 

If the dream had a protagonist, it was Rachel. She saw Rachel going about the everyday aspects of her life–working, chatting, driving, running errands. Then she saw Rachel enter her sister’s apartment. She floated in after her.

Rachel talked briefly with Lili, exchanging garbled words dream-Eva could not make sense of. Still talking and gesticulating fluently, Rachel and Lili moved out onto the balcony. Rachel maneuvered herself slightly to stand at Lili’s shoulder, just behind her. She gave a single, clean shove. It was so fast dream-Eva’s eyes could barely follow it. 

Lili didn’t have either the time or the presence of mind to scream. She gave a sort of strangled gasp, like the air was scrabbling at the insides of her throat. When she hit the ground though, the sound was sickening. Dream-Eva hovered over a body smashed beyond recognition as sirens began to wail. 

At this point last night, Eva had sat bolt-upright in bed, awake all at once and shouting. Then she’d lain back on the pillows and breathed deeply, taking in the comforting awareness of her room, her bed, her things. Just a dream. She’d drifted off quickly after that. 

The appearance of Rachel in real life with her sister was enough to convince Eva this hadn’t been one of the just-a-dreams. Eva tasted something strange and metallic on her tongue. She realized she’d bitten through the skin of her lip. She was bleeding. 

What am I going to do? 

As she paced the living room with a tissue against her wounded lip, Eva realized why she’d asked the question–not to find an answer, but to stall. She didn’t need to find the answer because she already knew what she was going to do. It was as simple as knowing what she was not going to do, and she most certainly was not going to let this person touch Lili. 

For the first time in her life, Eva felt real fear. You would think there couldn’t be fear, or surprise, for someone who always knew what was coming, but I’m afraid. It was her knowledge that scared her. Not her knowledge of the world but of herself. Although two hours ago the idea would have struck her as impossible, Eva had perfect and utter confidence that she was going to kill Rachel. 

In all her twenty-five years of foretellings she had never once been wrong. Well, here was a guaranteed way to prevent anything Rachel might ever do again. There was just one, and Eva intended to take it. This was what scared her. No, that wasn’t what scared her. What scared her was how she felt about it, because she didn’t feel anything. 

Kill a person. Kill a person, end a life. Take everything, all possible futures, Eva. She pounded it into her head a hundred ways and found she still didn’t care. 

That was disquieting. 

She went into the bathroom again. She shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. No floating flowers, no arrangement to her hair, no special outfit. Eva’s reflection looked back at her with concern, with judgement: a messy-haired, wide-eyed girl with a sore lip whose eyeliner had smudged slightly at the corners. She glanced at her nail polish and noticed it was starting to chip. She looked at the scrunchie around her wrist and the wispy curls that tickled her forehead and thought, this is the face of a killer. 

It had never really occurred to Eva to think of herself as anything but an ordinary person. She’d often wished she was more exciting, actually. More interesting, dynamic, spontaneous. She wanted to be the kind of person who just jumped in the car one evening and started driving, went wherever the road took her. She knew she wasn’t. She wasn’t bad; maybe just a little boring, a little too predictable. So why wasn’t she upset or even unsettled at the prospect of murdering an as-yet innocent person–a nice person, based on their only interaction–in cold blood?  

Eva wondered where Rachel lived, and whether she was home. She wondered whether her resolve to kill Rachel made that a future she could look to. Of course, Google could help her if this didn’t work, but she would rather not have it be traceable that she’d wanted to know where Rachel lived. She’d bet that even if she used a private browser, they’d be able to figure it out. She closed her eyes and concentrated. It was like extending feelers out to the universe and inviting it into her mind. She felt a familiar tug. Then she went and got her keys. Rachel lived a few miles away. It would be quicker if she drove. 

On the ride there, Eva had plenty of time to address the two things that were occupying her. One: how was she going to do this and get away with it? Two: why wasn’t she freaking out right now? 

The first didn’t concern her all that much. As it turned out, getting away with murder was easy for someone who could anticipate events before they occurred. She parked a few blocks away. Lingered on the peripheries of sidewalks and streets until she found all the security cameras, then suggested to them that they look away while she walked past. Or had leaves blow over them, either way. 

Rachel had an apartment, same as Lili did. Eva was thinking maybe she could just do what Rachel was going to do and push her from the balcony. Could she get Rachel to walk out there with her? She’d never tried her persuasion thing on a living being before. It might work. She didn’t see why it wouldn’t. Was she that powerful? 

Powerful. It was a word she’d never thought of in association with herself. It made her heart beat a little faster. 

Then she thought, no. Wait. Rachel could hit someone. When Rachel hit the ground, who knew who’d be below? Eva didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Besides, there might be witnesses. She’d never been to Rachel’s apartment. She had no idea who might be around, or how much of the balcony would be visible from the street. 

The building’s doors were locked of course, but they opened when Eva asked them to. That one she’d done before, but not for years now. She used to check what Christmas gifts her parents had gotten her by opening locked closets periodically throughout the month of December. She was the first of her friends to stop believing in Santa because of that, which was sort of ironic now she thought about it. The magic girl doesn’t believe. 

No one saw Eva make her way to the ninth floor corridor; she was careful. She closed her eyes again, stretched her feelers. Rachel was in the kitchen, or she would be in the next moment or so. Good. Eva waited two minutes, then let herself in. 

It does something to you, living on the outside of the possible. Eva reflected on this as she walked toward Rachel’s kitchen, which she knew would be the second door to the right after you went through the living room. Her heart had thundered when she’d realized she was powerful, but now it was quiet, calm. Eva was calm too. She’d gotten so used to her divided realities that when they merged, adapting was natural. 

She had not called this murder yet, but she knew that was what it was. It didn’t freak her out, though. Magic and murder shared the same, off-limits corner of most minds; not Eva’s. All her life Eva had been living in a strange and wild world. On this lazy late-spring Tuesday, the magic had spilled over, forcing her to acknowledge that that world was the one everyone lived in. She was just a little extra in-tune to it. 

It briefly flickered across her mind that if she were someone else, if she’d lived a different life, she would feel a lot of things right now. Eva wondered what they would be. Guilt, probably, and fear of detection, and shame. Maybe anger. Maybe sadness. She didn’t feel any of those things. She knew she’d never be caught. She had an enormously unfair advantage, after all. This was just like when she’d pulled Lili back from the onslaught of the truck. She saw the danger threatening her sister, and she prevented it. 

“Rachel,” she said, quick-scanning the room. Rachel liked antiques. She kept an extensive set of large pots, baskets, basins and bottles on the upper shelf that wound its way around her little urban kitchen. Eva didn’t know why she said her name. Maybe to remind herself that Rachel was a person. 

Rachel spun around. She didn’t have either the time or the presence of mind to scream at this absurd intrusion into the actual, physical center of her life. There was a nice heavy pot directly above her head. She didn’t have time to react before it came smashing down on top of her. 

She made that sound, like the air was trying to claw its way up the inside of her throat. Eva only heard it because she knew from her dream to listen for it. The pot made a much, much louder sound, somewhere between a crash and a smash. Underneath that was a sickening crack that could only be Rachel’s skull. Red leaked onto the floor as clay and bone shattered against one another. 

Eva left the way she’d come, urging the door to open and close itself for her–no fingerprints. She tried to pick up her pace; the day had flown. Lili would be over within the hour. If she hurried, she’d have time to grab pizza on the way home.