The Curious Case of Rebecca Crawford

Have you ever seen a bouquet made of black roses that grew in between the cracks of the pavement? I have.

I watched as this flower blossomed and I watched as it withered away, lost in the movement of time but nonetheless unforgettable in its nature.

In a vaguely lit flat lay the contorted body of a young woman who was once filled to the brim with the contents of a fulfilling life.

How she slipped through the gaps within society remained my biggest mystery up to today, but one thing was for sure

I had known at this point that as welcoming as I am, her passing into my arms was premature.

Her name is Rebecca Crawford and in case you’re wondering I just happen to be the greatest detective to have ever died and an old friend named death.

 

Now surprisingly, as Rebecca was born I was taking my daily stroll on Myrtle Avenue which lay adjacent to the hospital,

and instead of my heart filling with scorn since that’s one more person I’d have to monitor from dusk to dawn, curiosity gripped me.

Typically, I must mention, that I stepped through the door with the same holographic but unnoticeable stride,

As the naive humans celebrated the births of their loved ones but forgetting that it also marks their death sentence.

See you can run from me but not a soul can possibly hide.

I entered the delivery room and one thing that took me by surprise was the sharpness of her eyes.

They had the same consistency of darkness and light that her great grandmother possessed when she met her demise.

But I knew she was different.

 

Day and night as I watched Rebecca grow, I never got bored of her ambience. With every pace she took she revealed more about the complexities of her being,

but also it’s mysteries that seemed to plague her, what was she hiding?

And more importantly, I normally see through the shallow self-centred depths of humans but confusingly somehow through Rebecca I couldn’t see.

Was I losing my touch or is her inevitable end the first one in history that was actually beyond me?

I’ve been doing this job for too long and it gets boring watching people’s lives play out to the same old song.

Initially, I thought that Rebecca’s existence will follow the same tune, but boy have I never been so wrong.

 

At the age of 19, Rebecca had proved to me that my strange but intuitive hunch about her uniqueness was indeed no matter of coincidence.

What I deemed as another lethargic day at university (she didn’t seem one bit interested in her course) was due to twist into a series of unexplainable events that even I couldn’t comprehend.

For a reason unknown I watched as she took the long way home. It was a late afternoon many winters ago so you can imagine how dimly lit her surroundings must have been.

Ironically the rain began to spit as I drew nearer to the bus stop she decided to sit at, even the weather cannot contain his emotions in my presence.

It was almost like the weather knew that I was coming for an adolescent boy stood right beside Rebecca, so indulged in the ending of his game that he couldn’t have seen his own end approaching him in the form of a bus driver who had lost control of his life and his vehicle.

 

While I approached the boy with the same embrace that millions had once experienced,  the continuous nature of time had been unexpectedly interrupted and I immediately felt the loss of power.

It only occurred to me after the event that Rebecca had foreseen my coming.

Before I even arrived, she had already seen the distracted driver partially mount the curb while onlookers stared in horror as the boy lay lifeless, undisturbed.

So she decided to change his destiny by grabbing him by the collar and pushing him to safety while she herself misses the collision by mere inches.

It was almost like she had read my script before the curtains were drawn and the show began. But what she didn’t know was that saving the boy from his destiny altered her own forever

 

Now I would explain what happens next, but I’m a bit busy you see and If you’re wondering how death could be this occupied, all you’ll have to do is turn on your T.V.