Short Stories

Prompt #28

"You were born with a birth mark the shape of a '9' on your wrist. One day you get in a fatal car accident. You wake up in a strange room and the first thing you notice is the 9 has changed to an 8."

Eyes slowly open to a blaring room, human instinct clenching them back shut again at the bright white of the ceiling. There's a beeping that is constant, leaving imprints in the mind like a migraine as she tries to wake her consciousness. She stretches an arm out, hits something hard and the beeping disappears. It stops.

She remembers the accident, the car crash and her parents bodies being thrown like ragdolls in amidst the collision. She sits up and looks around. The room is blank, there is a chair by the bed and she can feel from the draft that there is a window open somewhere.

But this was not a hospital.

There were no wires, no IV, no beeping hospital machine, no cuts or scars, no trace of the accident whatsoever. Instead the beeping had come from the phone she had managed to instinctively find on the bedside table, despite having never seen the room, the bed or in fact the clothes she had slept in.

Still sat upright, she first reached for the phone, the quickest way to get any answers. She didn't remember having the latest model of the iPhone, growing confused as it scanned her face and unlocked with facial recognition. The only people she had known with phones this new were her parents,  but they had never given her access to their mobiles and for all she knew, they could be dead.

She looked for their contacts first on her phone, scrolling through names of strangers for the universal names of Mum or Dad or their various synonyms. When that didn't work, she searched for their names instead and upon searching for her mother, Sophie, she came across the contact titled 'SOS'.

Her finger lingered over the call button. Was she really in that bad an emergency or was it all a terrible dream?

She got up from bed and decided to look around. The bedroom she was in wasn't huge, but it was a reasonable size that one could live comfortably in it. First she made her way towards the wardrobe, looking inside to see if the style of clothing was outrageously different from what she could remember.  A few pieces stood out as outrageous, a neon dress and an extremely low cut top, whilst the rest seem to match her usual fashion choices. Though it caught her off guard when the sizing of the clothes were two below what she remembered being.

She shivered, she was in shorts and a t-shirt and the draft was freezing her ever so slowly. Despite feeling like the chill of a morning, she could tell from the sun that it was at least midday, that and the world outside seemed way too alive for it to be early morning.

Turning away from the window, she headed to the door that led to the rest of the building she was in. She realised that she didn't even know if she was in a house or an apartment, she truly knew nothing about where she was and her temptation to press the SOS contact was growing.

Walking into the open space, the large open room with a view of the city answered her first question, she lived in an apartment... if this was even her apartment.

The same apartment that was currently being unlocked from the other side of the door.

Not knowing what to do, she stepped back behind the door of the bedroom and hid even further behind it. She pressed the SOS contact and hid the ringer volume of the call the best she could.

"Kath, I'm back, why are you calling me?"

She froze. Who was Kath?

"Kath? Did you oversleep again?"

"Kath?"

The voice searching for "Kath" approached the door and pushed it open, looking around the door when it bumped into the woman hid behind it.

"Kath, what are you doing?"

Her eyes widened at the sight of the woman in front of her. The long dark hair, the green eyes with a flec of yellow in only her right eye, the beauty mark on her chin. It was undoubtedly her best friend, but also not.

Her best friend had died when she was in high school.

Still, she couldn't help her inner teenage self call out for the person she had lost all those years ago.

"Anna? Is that you?"

Anna hesitated, frozen for only a moment before she stepped back far into the room, allowing to step out of her hiding place. "I'm Julia Smith, Jules? Remember? Kath?" The woman was looking at her, confused and worried. But she wasn't Kath.

"I'm not Kath... I'm Jessica Townsend, Jess for short."

Anna began crying. She didn't know what to do. She didn't know this woman, but she was supposed to. She imagined how she would've cheered up Anna, Julia's doppelgänger, and moved over to console the crying woman. "Look I know this is probably confusing, I'm confused too, so why don't I make a Jess hot chocolate special and we can talk this through yeah?"

Anna cried more.

"Did I say something wrong?" Jess asked warily.

Anna made a futile attempt at wiping her eyes as she shook her head. "You did nothing wrong, I just can't believe it happened to you too. I'm so glad it did."

"Happened to me... too?"

Anna nodded, "I'm Anna. But in this world, when I came to this world, I was her, I was Julia and I had to learn her life. We looked and sounded identical, even family looked and sounded the same, even you. Katherine Chase, you told me you were my best friend. I cried because I remembered dying and leaving you behind and there you were again, but it wasn't you at the same time and that hurt more."

"But now we're... Jess and Anna again?"

"I guess so, is there an eight on your wrist?"

Jess was amazed, there in place of the nine was an eight. She held up her wrist to show Anna and she revealed one to her too. "I don't know if this counts as having different lives, but I think as long as our numbers are the same we'll still be us."

Jess felt relieved. "You really think our lives are that intertwined?"

"I don't know, but if I'm gonna die and come back as someone else, the least the universe can do is give me my best friend back right?"

Jess laughed, "right."

"So, about those hot chocolates..."

Jess grinned, "coming right up. You've got to update me on who Katherine Chase is."

Anna scratched her head and grimaced, "yeah... about that..."

Jess glared at her with a dead expression, "please don't tell me she does something I hate."

"Well..." Anna trailed off into awkward laughter. "Not completely..."

Jess groaned and Anna gave her an apologetic grin, "maybe we should get something stronger to drink?"

Agreeing, Jess scoffed, "you think?"