I will never forget her, nor will I forget the family she left behind. Poor Charles, knowing who Jasmine is now and having no say in the matter. But despite his pain at the utter unfairness of it all, I know someday he’ll embrace the truth that the universe is as it should be: filled with suffering and joy. One cannot exist without the other. It is the cosmic balance.
My brethren too feel this balance acutely with all its joy and suffering. I feel for Fadele and Nij, but they chose their path and must follow it to its end. Izz and Segil have also embraced the horror of mortality and know their ambition must be stopped. They will meet their natural end as well. One false move and they could be imprisoned like Fadele and Nij.
Segil and Izz showed us one final kindness I didn’t expect. They invited us to their home in peace. We sat in their garden and we were silent for a long time. I felt their balance of turmoil and peace. But their words surprised me. They offered gratitude for our actions and, though they said they would not apologize for their past actions, they did wish us good fortune for the rest of our now short lives. They wished to send us off with a gift. They offered money and permanent identities, for they knew we never were very thorough with either of these things. It was so strange to pick our names and new home. I was surprised by Dymeka who immediately asked to be located in Paris, France as a surgeon and myself as a medical doctor.
We had never spoken at length of where we would settle down, mostly because we never truly expected to have the option to settle down. But I trusted Dymeka in this. And I am grateful, as always, that I did.
I offered a gift to them in return but they waved away the offer, saying we had given the world enough. I’m not entirely sure what they meant but I didn’t press the matter further.
We parted on the street. They promised all the documentation for our new lives would be ready by the next day and delivered to us.
Dymeka and I opted to walk. We wandered aimlessly until we were fatigued. I felt physically tired for the first time in heaven knows how long. I cried.
Epilogue
Charles
On the morning of Jasmine’s fake funeral, I chose to work. She hadn’t been in a newspaper in years but I knew there were still people out there who thought of her as something of a celebrity, “the psychic freak who helped Detective Campbell solve murders.” I knew it would be a large turnout. Milling about in a crowd full of recording phones and reporters wasn’t my idea of a good time.
I did feel a little guilty for making Uncle Vic and Vanessa go by themselves, but they were better suited to field questions anyway. Besides, I’d basically disappeared from the public eye after the curse had been lifted. If I went to the funeral, I’d be back on their radar again.
For a little over a year now, I’d introduced myself as Chuck Winslow. The purple had faded from my eyes with time. One morning, after months of gradual transition, I woke up and they were brown. Not the same brown as the contacts I’d been wearing all my life, but a lighter, almost hazel color. The same eye color as my dad. With a haircut and a slightly more “woke” wardrobe courtesy of my girlfriend, I was practically a different person. It took work to associate me with the twin brother of the girl who’d supposedly been driven mad by her psychic visions and had committed suicide on the North Precinct’s roof.
So there I was, being the perfect medical scribe, asking the same boring questions I’d asked about a hundred times yesterday and would ask a hundred more times before the day was through. I typed up the patient’s answers with a polite smile fixed on my face.
I wasn’t a fan of sick people. I had no plans of becoming a doctor, nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant. I was here for one reason and one reason only: Jasmine. Every time someone died, I got a surge of déjà vu. Sometimes, if I was fast enough, I’d arrive on the scene with just enough time to catch a glimpse of her reflection in a window, a bedpan, or a computer monitor. She looked exactly the same. Short, scrawny, with wispy black hair and eggplant purple eyes almost too big for her oval-shaped face. Pale and pearly as a ghost. She still wore my old hoodie, her favorite jean miniskirt, and those God-awful swampers with tears along the seams. Becoming Lady Death had, apparently, done nothing to change her sense of style. Or lack thereof.
But with all the times I’d glimpsed her, she’d only looked at me once. She gave me this sad, disapproving sort of look, like, “What are you doing here, Charlie? I told you to go out and live.”
Well, if she would just stick around long enough to let me explain, she’d know I was living.
I’d finished my general education courses and was ready to transfer to a university. I was leaning toward criminal justice but Esmer kept encouraging me to get into the welding program at Green Bay Community so I could start my own business. I loved my art, which was why I was
