The Book of Plot Twists

Voices

I, Ryleigh Arleighna Bannerman, am not crazy.

I, Ryleigh Arleighna Bannerman, am not schizophrenic.

I, Ryleigh Arleighna Bannerman, am a normal teenage girl.

Except for the fact that I'm not.

It started when I was seven years old. At first, they would come to me in dreams. They would sit down with me, explain that they weren't evil, and then they would ask me for my help. Then, they stopped visiting and started speaking to me instead. At any random time and in any random place, they would just start whispering in my ear. They would tell me their situation and beg for me to find them answers. Soon, that stopped as well and the newspapers began.

Once a week, a random newspaper clipping would show up at my door. They had articles about everything from someone winning the blue ribbon for biggest pig to finding the dead body of a little girl who had been snatched up on her way home from school. Clearly, I preferred getting articles about the pigs. The ones I had to do about death and murder were never any fun.

Recently, though, my shrink put me on medication and my mother took me to get blessed by a priest. Since then, the voices, the dreams, and the newspapers have become a thing of the past. That is, until random links started appearing in my email.

Apparently, they have Internet connection beyond the grave.

The weirdest thing about the emails is that they have no sender. Where the sender's email would go, there is just a little, white blank space. Usually, there isn't a subject or text included either. Just links to different stories from different websites.

The first was a link to a picture of a girl with fire red hair holding up a flag while millions of people bowed down to her. The picture was followed by quotes from many people claiming her to be God, Satan, or Athena.

The next link I got was one that led me to an article about some war I had never heard of. It was refered to as the most "tragic event in human history" due to the three billion known casualties (and one billion estimated) it caused. The pictures were of brothers slaying brothers and bone-thin mothers devouring their young. It was the most horrific thing I've ever seen.

Once, I received a link to my own hard drive. I didn't think such a thing was possible until it happened to me. When I opened the link, there was a picture of an old man stepping onto the tracks as a passenger train sped towards him. I didn't know what that was or how I was supposed to help, so I just left it alone.

The picture now pops up everywhere I go. I've found it in a number of places: my sociology textbook, the background of my uncle's computer, the cover of a book about suicide at the library, on random posters in New York City, and any other place that a picture of the sort could possibly end up.

Today, I received another link to my hard drive. This time, it was a picture of my mother holding two four-month-old baby girls: One with hair like fire and the other with a curly brown mop. The picture looked older, but at the same time it looked new. As usual, I was provided with no explanation.

It was only a minute after I saw the picture that my father called me and my little brother downstairs for a "family meeting." He told us that there would be some big changes in out lives and that we should probably be prepared for it.

That was followed by mother coming out of the kitchen and handing us a couple of sonograms as she excitedly announced that she was pregnant with twins.

It was in that moment that I realized the dreams, voices, newspapers, and emails were not past happenings at all. They were events of the future.

And the voices were begging me to save them from it.

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AUTHORS NOTE:

This story was inspired by the text post of the person who recieved an email from no one containing nothing from the future. I don't remember who posted it, but it was on Tumblr and if I find it again I'll be sure to credit them. If you know who posted that, comment it and I'll credit them. Thank you!