It started with an accident. A tiny one, my heel striking the curb at just the wrong angle, twisting the bones till they popped. The doctors wrote it off as a minor strain, sent me home with a pat on the back and a scrip for painkillers.
It was my brother–a math major–who pointed out the coincidence. “So it happened at the intersection of 1st and 28th Street, on the 128th day of the year? Freaky.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “What time did it happen?”
I’d taken a late lunch, worked a bit in the cafe before heading back to the office. Gotten back shortly before 1:30 PM.
His eyebrows flattened. “Seriously? Weird.”
I didn’t think it was weird. I would’ve forgotten about the incident completely if I hadn’t been for what happened two months later.
I’d only lost my focus for a second. Normally not an issue, unless you’re behind the wheel on the interstate with a four-wheeler pummeling in your direction.
I’d wrenched the wheel, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision. I veered over to the shoulder and waited for the smell of burnt rubber to leave my nostrils. When I chanced a look at the dashboard clock, it read 1:28 PM.
I twisted around just in time to see the four-wheeler disappearing around a bend in the highway. Its license plate: FYU128.
-
That night, I made a list.
Accidents, mistakes, plain back luck. The time I subluxed my patella on the soccer the field in third grade, or got trapped on a rollercoaster for six hours following a park-wide power outage. The time I learned I qualified for a full-ride university scholarship the day after the paperwork was due.
The little things–misplaced valuables, cracked iPhones, unpleasant surprises on tax day–didn’t need much. They might’ve happened on 1/28, or in the 128th house on the street. The only college class I had to retake held its final exam in classroom 128, which might explain how I failed a test I’d spent six weeks studying for.
The bigger ones–bad breakups, terminal medical diagnoses, deaths in the family–seemed to need a confluence of symmetries, date aligning with time or address or coordinates. The greater the confluence, the worse the outcome seemed to be.
My friends always joked that I was unlucky, a lightning rod for misfortune. But it wasn’t that at all.
I was being targeted.
-
I rang up my brother.
He might as well have been sitting across from me for how clearly I could read his expression of concern. “Targeted? By who?”
“Do you remember the day Dad died?”
It took him a second to process the emotional whiplash. “Yeah. But what–”
“It was January 28th. I called the hospital. Guess what room number he was in?”
“Erin…”
I surged on, determined to get my story out before he had me committed. “I’m just saying. You hear some numbers are more common in the universe than others, some weird quirk of nature that nobody really understands. Or people see the same number over and over and claim it has some spiritual significance. Like angel numbers or the Fibonacci sequence or Benford’s law or–”
“Schizophrenia?” he suggests.
“Shut up. Here’s my theory: there are entities, intelligences, whatever you want to call them, that express their will under certain conditions–in my case, the appearance of a specific sequence of numbers. Just pretend, for a second, that it’s possible. What would you do?”
“I’d roll over and wait to die. Statistically speaking, there’s no way to avoid a number. Numbers are the blueprint for everything you see. They’re the language of nature, they’re–” He stopped himself, realizing too late that he’d allowed himself to get swept up in the intellectual exercise. He cleared his throat. “But this isn’t about reality. This is about your perception of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s take the accident. Do you remember how fast you were driving?”
“I don’t know. Eighty?”
“Do you know how many kilometers per hour that is?” I felt a chill walk slowly down my spine. “Exactly. And if you wanted to take it further, how many times do you see a 128 degree angle? or read the 128th page in a book? The point is, you’re not aware of these instances so you don’t experience any bad luck. And anything that is affected by your perception, not the undeniable fact of reality, has to originate inside your head.”
“Or,” I suggested, “you just made it easier for it to find me.”
As I stared at my phone, a popup alerted me that the 49ers had won by a landslide score of 1-28. My weather app notified me that it was raining again, coming up on 1.28 inches of rain. I had a missed robocall: (128) 555-3647.
I was still staring at the screen when lightning split the sky in two.
-
A freak accident; that’s what the news outlets called it. Vox did an article about it: you might still be able to find it floating around the Internet somewhere.
They called me the girl who lived through lighting, but that’s not really true. The lightning didn’t hit me; it hit the roof, cracking the house open like an egg and spilling singed shingles all over the front lawn.
I knew I couldn’t stop coincidence. I couldn’t avoid the manifestation of this thing, this entity, any more than I could stop the march of time. But I could try. My brother was right; if I didn’t know when the door was open, it couldn’t come in to greet me.
I destroyed all the clocks in the house. Defaced too many books to count and burnt the offending pages. Then I booked a last-minute flight to somewhere I was unlikely to find a clock or license plate. There are precious few of those places left.
-
I should probably explain why I’m writing this.
At this moment, I’m sitting on the plane as it descends through dense black clouds. Thank god for in-flight wifi, or what could very well be my last words would be lost.
I’m scared. I feel the vice enclosing me, an incredible pressure building.
We’re finally breaking our holding pattern. While it circled in the sky, waiting for the storm to clear, a flight that was supposed to touch down well before midnight on January 27th altered its arrival date to January 28th.
We’re approaching 12,800 feet. And I can’t stop staring at the little screen in front of me, announcing the latest update to our flight details.
Our estimated landing time is 1:28.
Wish me luck.
Please.