Hey everyone! So this one is a little something I was working on around last semester when I should have been listening to an Astronomy lecture but ended up starting a story idea (and as much as my teachers hate that I say this, some of my best writing happens when I'm not paying attention in class).

So this one was a strange little fictional write up of personal experiences of my dad and myself. My dad talks about remembering things from when he was really little, like even when he was a baby. That, and my dad has always had this creepy sixth sense about things. Then when I was little, I remember (as described in the following) sitting in the shopping cart and being ticked that I couldn't understand what was on the sign. Ask my parents; I taught myself how to read by age 4 or 5.

So I began to think: what if this weird memory could unlock something in the brain that allowed you to know things normal people wouldn't? Not so much like being psychic but more like having your brain be ultra sensitive to a person and see the mostly probable outcome in their future. It was this thinking that lead to this Writing Workout.

As always, feel free to comment and enjoy!

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It’s happened for as long as I could remember. It didn’t happen all the time and I definitely couldn’t control how or when or to whom they happened; but, every now and then they would.

                And there was nothing that I could do about it.

                I remembered things from before. Things that I know I shouldn’t remember but I do -- things like my birth; actually being a baby in the womb coming forth out of my mother. The feelings, or rather the lack of feelings as I was separated from that simple, in between state and having to begin feeling the harsh reality that is mortality. I remember sitting in the shopping cart and seeing the signs above the aisles and being so frustrated that I didn’t know what they said. I remember being held by various family members, some of which passed away before the age when I should have remembered things but I was able to recall details that my family passed off as memories from a picture or hearing from others talking about the event or day.

                I figured out very quickly that my family did not understand things the way I did. My comments about the things that I saw and the things that I remembered were often written off as the silly imaginations of a little child so I began to keep these things to myself, bottling them up inside.

                The earliest – I guess I would call them visions, or premonitions – happened in the first grade. There was a girl, I wasn’t even sure of her name. I remember everything about her that day, down to the pink ribbons she had tied in her pigtail braids and her untied shoes. We were playing hide and go seek tag and she had been hiding behind a tree. When I came around the tree to tag her, I was struck suddenly with the image of a woman, much older than we were, but – when looking back – couldn’t have been more than 26, laying in a bed being told that she had something called pancreatic cancer and that she wasn’t going to live more than a few months. I didn't even understand what all of that meant. The vision fast forwarded and the little girl I was playing tag with was standing next to a grave, crying in the pant leg of man’s dress slacks. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that this girl’s mother was going to die. By the end of the school year, her mother had died, she had been pulled out of school and her and her newly widowed father had moved to another city to escape the grief of losing a loved one.

                I tried to talk to my mother about it but she quickly dismissed anything that I said. I tried to make sense of the things that I saw on a regularly saw. No matter what I did or said, nothing ever made sense. I was alone so often in my life. I saw things, and I had no idea what to do about it.

 CH 1:

The bell rang and my head snapped up from my desk.

“How nice of you to rejoin the class, Mr. Wright. Hopefully someone in the class would be kind enough to fill you in on the homework assignment since you so blatantly missed my explanation,” my teacher said.
I nodded at her. She’d be dealing with losing her house here pretty soon anyway, I thought. Why bother? I hated that I knew that. I hated that I knew how she would fight and appeal but nothing she did would make a difference. I hated knowing that by Christmas break she wouldn’t be my teacher anymore because she was going to have to move in with her sister in Tampa.