Soft rain sprinkled down from the heavens – God’s tears, a nun from Catholic School had once told her – but it barely registered in Jessica O’Riley’s sensory log book. As the droplets of water trickled through her shoulder length burgundy hair, they tracked various pathways down her forehead and eventually met up with the tears streaming out of her red-rimmed eyes.
Jess O’Riley rarely cried, and if she did it wasn’t while out in public, walking along a lonely sidewalk at seven o’clock at night. She was crying because she knew that she was going to die. This wasn’t the knowledge one had when they knew that they were going to die ‘some day’, these tears had sprung from eternal wells because her death was going to transpire in the ensuing weeks and years. ‘Maybe two years, but in all honesty that’s being very optimistic”, her pug-nosed doctor had told her, the sympathy evident in his morose eyes.
“I don’t need your goddamn sympathy,” Jess sniffed, running her hands through her rain slicked hair.
That had been two hours ago. Only two hours. It felt like years, decades, millennia, anything but one hundred and twenty minutes.
The person she’d awoken as this morning was not the same person that was now in control of her body. This person was different, altered. In some way the dark knowledge she now possessed had deeply changed her. The world didn’t appear as linear as it once had, and everything had undertaken a bizarre edge – the fabric of reality seemed skewed, possibly torn.
All thoughts that entered her mind, even those that were inane, ended with the sentence, ‘I’m going to die.’
It simply wasn’t fair. Bums she passed on the street every single day were probably going to live longer than she would. She was fit, ate a balanced diet, practiced safe sex and never used public restrooms.
“How did this happen?” she had asked Dr. Phillips.
“We’ve been over this, Miss O’Riley. We can try to backtrack until the cows come home, the truth is, you’ll probably never know. It must have been an accident of some type, but we’ll never be able to locate the origin. These things are virtually untraceable if you don’t even have a vague idea.”
The low-hanging rain clouds were an ash gray, like the ghoulish texture of an ancient tombstone. The mottled-gray twilight was in its own death-throes, yet tomorrow the sun would revive itself and again go through the entire process of dying slowly. Jess had read somewhere that it would take six billion years for the sun to go nova. It would eventually implode in on itself and then become so dense that any matter within its orbit would be sucked into it and be crushed, including its neighbour, Earth.
“Your cock is untraceable,” she muttered to herself, still thinking about Dr. Phillips’ words as the soles of her running shoes squelched against the wet, shadowy concrete.
All of a sudden the streetlamps winked on like a set of falling dominoes, one lighting up after another until there were no more unlit globes in her line of sight. They cast a soft glow on Jess as she ambled down the sidewalk, her eyes lowering to the ground as a laughing couple passed by.
How dare they laugh! Didn’t they know she was dying, that their laughter seemed to mock her misery?
The only cold comfort Jess could seek was the soothing splatters of rain that were drenching her as she tried to come to grips with her destiny. Walking aimlessly through the city seemed to calm her screaming nerves. The sidewalk wouldn’t mock her, because it was her friend and companion. It knew exactly how it felt to be walked all over by people whose feet carried them to destinations unknown. But Jess knew where she was headed, she knew all too well.
A woman as pretty as Jess O’Riley at her relatively young age of twenty-six, walking on her lonesome through the main streets of Melbourne at night, was simply asking for more trouble than she could possibly handle. Her native homeland was Ireland, and many men found her creamy complexion sensual when it was framed by her locks of burgundy hair. There was still a faint trace of her Irish accent and it apparently drove guys wild.
The clothes she was wearing were far from conservative. When she’d left for the hospital at 3 p.m. she’d decided to jog, which she did three times a week in her never-ending quest for peak physical fitness. The problem was that at this time of night her jogging attire wasn’t very suitable.
To begin with: she wore a tight pair of blue tracksuit pants that accentuated the smooth curves of her ass and her long, feminine legs. Although tight, the fabric of the suit remained flexible and was perfect for the free-movement required. Panties made jogging severely uncomfortable because they dug into her crotch and rode the crack of her ass, so for some time she’d foregone that particular item whilst exercising. The matching blue tracksuit top was made from the same thin fabric as the tracksuit pants, and came with the added accessory of a hood that lay comfortably between her shoulder blades. Underneath the hooded top she wore an off-the-rack sports bra, which snuggly held her medium-sized breasts so they didn’t bounce obscenely as she jogged.
An old boyfriend, Nathan Thorne, had often remarked that she never looked quite as fuckable as she did in her running outfit. Before she would leave for her jog she would often gaze at herself in the mirror. Every time she came to the same conclusion that Nathan had – she looked damn foxy and very fuckable.
After leaving the hospital crying, God’s tears had seemed to saturate Jess faster than what seemed humanly possible. Although trembling from the cold rain, she didn’t particularly mind because it was an emotion that was raw and stark. In fact, it was the only emotion she had coursing through her body that wasn’t focused on her demise. That’s why she kept walking. If she stopped and managed to get herself warm, what would she have left to feel?
The streets were barren. The rain seemed to create a lifeless void that extended beyond the walking pedestrians and touched on those who also owned automobiles. There were people driving around of course, although traffic seemed rather sparse in contrast to the usual motorcade moving through the inner streets of Melbourne.
Jess didn’t have a boyfriend – which was probably just as well – nor did she have any friends to consult or seek comfort with about her illness. She was alone. It was just the sidewalk and her, the soft squelching of her running shoes and the tears that God seemed to be shedding in commiseration.
She couldn’t call her mother. “God has a plan for us all,” she would say. And then, not wanting to hurt her mother but unable to keep her mouth shut, Jess would respond with: “Well mum, God went and fucked me over big time. Is that God’s plan, huh, to fuck me?”
That wouldn’t do at all. It would just make matters worse.
