The little girl would die with her face stuffed into a pillow. Or she would grow up to be a school teacher. Or a scientist. Or there would be a car accident when she was twenty. Cassie shook her head, trying to clear the images and come back to the here and now.
It was no good. There were too many of them. The futures, the possibilities, and the things she could see. Path over path interlaced with the reality in front of her. The little girl was three, then she was eight with two missing teeth. She was dead on a pink blanket, no she was ten winning an award at school. Bits of cotton stuck out of her teeth, no, no, she won a science fair project.
Dead or some other future, they kept coming up in pairs. Dead or a good life, dead or this, dead or that. Like rolling a pair of dice and always getting a six on one of them. Cassie felt the pressure behind her eyes. There would be flashes of light next, starbursts, and then the pain. She had to do something about this future.
Her knee ran into a park bench. She focused on that while she sat down, taking deep breathes of air. People were starting to stare at her. She had to get it together, to stop the pain from coming. Stop the future and you stop the pain, her mantra spooled out in her head.
Steadying herself, she focused on the futures. They ran through her mind like someone flipping through channels on the television. Flickering images of one life, then another. With concentration she could slow the flickering, and look for details in the background. The pink coverlet was a mess, balled up in a big hand. The scene shifted, the little girl as a grown up with a microscope. Cassie waited, it went back to the murder. The little girl wore a blue dress. Cassie squinted, sunlight making her head throb. In front of her, in the real world, the little girl wore the blue dress. It would happen soon.
“Ma’am? Is there a problem?” The police officer wore a concerned expression. Cassie nodded, then looked back at the little girl. He’d broken her concentration and the images became a jumble again. A spike of pain lanced through the right side of her head. That hand reaching for the pillow, taking it out from behind the girl. It wore a heavy silver ring. Cassie fought to stay in that future, the one that came just hours from now. “You hurt your knee?”
Tears of frustration began to form in her eyes and she felt her nose start to run.. If she told him and he didn’t believe, the little girl would die tonight. She needed him to believe. This couldn’t be like the other times. All those futures no one believed in. She gritted her teeth.
“I hit my knee on the bench.” She slid back, letting her shoulders rest on the warm metal, keeping her eyes on the little girl.
“Let me take a look.” He dropped to examine her knee, and over his head she saw the flash of the ring in the sunlight. The heavy silver ring, on the hand attached to the hairy arm. The one the little girl would see just as the man smothered her. Without thinking she let a cry slip out, the future hurt. The cop misunderstood. “Yeah, you smacked the bench pretty good.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Cassie leaned forward, putting her mouth close to his ear. “The man with the cotton candy, to your left, do you see him?”
The cop turned to the left slowly, as if he guessed her strange behavior was somehow important. He nodded in a gesture no one else would see.
“He’s going to kill her.” She could see it, the whole scene now, staggering forward with each pound of her head. “He’s going to murder that little girl tonight.” She steadied herself with a hand on the cop’s shoulder. They must have looked so intimate. But really, all she saw was the room, with the pony dolls by the bed, and the little girl’s fingers in the shaft as sunlight as she reached for air. “Before sunset. He’ll smother her in her bed. You have to stop him.”
Cassie pulled back, memorizing everything about the soon-to-be murderer, the thick black hair, the expressionless eyes. Wetness hit her lip, tears or from her nose. She scrubbed at it with a hand, not caring because it was stopping. The cop got up from his kneeling position, walked over to the man, hand on his gun. Cassie watched at the way his head tilted to the left, talking into the box on his shoulder, calling for more men.
“Excuse me, sir?”
The murderer dropped the cotton candy.
“Uncle Mike?” The little girl’s asked.
And just like that her headache evaporated. Cassie indulged herself in the scene for a few more seconds, watching not the people in front of her but the images in her head. The girl and science, the girl getting married, the girl teaching children, the girl winning awards, the girl struggling to pass classes. So many futures, she let herself smile for a minute, there would be death eventually, but not today.
Cassandra hurried away before anyone had a chance to ask any questions.