Inevitable
Everyone is born with three prophecies, but not everybody knows what their prophecies are. Most often, it is because parents want to protect their children. As you may already suspect, at least one of the prophecies predicts how a person dies, or at least that is the rule of thumb. But, sometimes, a person doesn’t know their prophecies because they don’t want to know, or they only know some of them, or they know their prophecies deep in their subconscious but have buried it in a place that doesn’t make them want to walk into the ocean and give into the despair of it all.
Take George Pernikis, for instance: George is middle-management in a company that makes a product he’s never been clear about. It is uninteresting work, yelling at the lesser employees and filling in numbers on paperwork that has no obvious meaning, but George has never thought to ask someone what it is that their company does. He has never been curious about the world around him. Once George has had two Budweisers, he will tell anyone unfortunate enough to stand near him his theory of the prophecies. He, for one, is entirely too reasonable to believe in such childish fantasies. Has anyone ever really read the prophecies? he asks. No, his unfortunate companion will tell him. They are not written; they are known. Then George will wave a proud and pompous finger in the air, spilling some beer on the ground. You see? he’ll say, triumphant. You see? Things are not simply known. They must be studied, documented. Have you known anyone to trace the origins of these silly little notions? Here, he’ll let out a full, honking belly-laugh that will cause a lull in the room at the party as everyone else stares at George and his unfortunate companion; the companion’s face will, inevitably, go red and George’s, inevitably, will not, because George is not one to wonder about the world around him. The unfortunate companion might suggest Gravity is known. To which George, now red in the face, might reply, It was not known until it was a theory. The unfortunate companion might reply But it still existed. It does not need to be theorized to be truth. George might laugh, falsely, attempting to turn the boat of a conversation around. He might clap the unfortunate companion on the shoulder, explaining The theory of gravity is clear. Up, down. It’s neat. It’s simple. When has a prophecy ever been anything but cryptic? And the astute observer, an unfortunate companion who is really paying attention, might notice the sheen of sweat along George’s hairline, the way that his voice is so insistent, the way that prophecy seems to have gotten under his skin in a way that he would deny to an early grave. And the most astute of observers might notice that this was what George feared; don’t we all? But it was as though a prophecy had revealed an early grave to George in no uncertain terms. George might search, then, for another beer, and a different unfortunate companion to gloat to.
Or you might consider the case of Henrietta Fisher: Henrietta could only remember half of each of her prophecies, which is worse than knowing a full prophecy. Her parents died when she was young, and Henrietta was raised by a grandmother who didn’t know what had been predicted for Henrietta’s life. At this time, Henrietta wanted to be a scientist and study the swamps of Florida. She was very curious about the world around herself. The first prophecy, Henrietta knew, had to do with the death of her parents; prophecy number two warned of the betrayal of a beloved, and prophecy number three was about where orange kisses pine, something including gravity determinate. (George Pernikis in North London was not wrong about the cryptic nature of the prophecies, his other views aside. It’s difficult to know a meaning if you don’t have the key.) As Henrietta became a teenager, when it would be natural for her to spend more time out of the home, she spent less, eventually leaving school altogether before ever graduating. She would wake in the night, screaming so loud that her grandmother needed to shake her out of her panicked trance on more than one occasion. Henrietta would avoid any word from her prophecies, as though this sort of superstitious tiptoeing would do anything to change a sealed fate. Still, Henrietta would find a way to not use Pine Street, and she never visited Pine Valley even though it had been her departed mother’s favorite place. She did not travel through Orange County, by any means necessary, and if a book she was reading had been opened to a page with the word “gravity” on it, still she would immediately take the book to the library as a donation. And so Henrietta lived her life in this way, treading lightly of any sign of fate. She was fearful, but she was not a nun, and by her twenty-sixth birthday she bore a child. The child’s father never took responsibility, but Henrietta’s grandmother thought that this child would be a savior for its mother, that finally Henrietta might not be frightened of every shadow or sound. And it did work, for a time. Henrietta had no nightmares once her son was born, and she doted on him always. Sometimes, she would even leave the house for walks with him. Henrietta ignored the way that her child’s prophecies came like faint whispers. Within the first year of the child’s life, Henrietta’s grandmother’s final prophecy came to pass, and because her grandmother never spoke of prophecy because her granddaughter feared them so, grandmother and granddaughter did not realize that theirs was the same final prophecy. Henrietta’s grandmother had fallen asleep with a cigarette on her nightstand, still lit; no one woke up in time to survive.
Or perhaps you’d prefer to think instead of the prophecies of Rosa Zambrano: it was prophesized that she would live a happy childhood with a big family, which came to pass; it was prophesized that she would start a business that would be meaningful to herself and her community, which came to pass; and, finally, it was prophesized that she would go with peace, surrounded with love, which, in its own time, came to pass.
Some people are simply born under brighter, luckier stars, others born without any starlight at all, but most are somewhere in between. At any rate, everyone prefers the happy stories; they keep us from walking into the ocean. Everyone tries to manipulate their prophecies into happy ones, even when it comes to death, timely or otherwise.
But here’s the truest part of all: you don’t care about George or Henrietta or Rosa. Actually, what you have been wondering this whole time is what your prophecies might be. Well come, then. Gaze into the buried finality of your past, graze your fingertips along the inevitabilities of your present. Take a deep breath and listen closely to the whispers, to the way that your fate is written in everything around you, everything that holds you in one place, that bars you from another.
But first, ask yourself honestly: is your future something you truly want to know?
Most try to escape their fate, manipulate their fate, make a prophecy come quicker or slower. I’ve never seen it done, and I am the speaker of the prophecies. I’ve seen artists become politicians to defy my words, and I’ve seen healers become warriors and rebels become removed from the world; it is as though they do not understand that their societies set them on these paths at nearly the same time that their prophecies were spoken. Their fate still comes to pass as it was always meant to. You can try, if you’d like, to defy me, spite me. Many have. See, now, if you can escape the confines of your era, of the conditions of your birth, the pressures around you to conform.
I’ll wait. It would be nice to be surprised.
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. She can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.