text: NOTE: this is my first short story, so please leave any criticism or thoughts for improvement so I can grow as a writer. Thanks! Often in life, the most idle and mundane of situations can quickly become an instance of strangeness, mystery, or absurdity. Dinner is typically an uneventful affair: feel hungry, eat, feel full, repeat *ad infinitum*. But this ordinary cycle was recently broken for me in an unusual way, that left my life feeling somewhat misaligned. All due a short conversation with a ten year old boy. Albeit a particularly odd ten year old boy, but still, a young child nonetheless. I was travelling around Asia, and had stopped for dinner in a small vegetarian restaurant. I’m not a vegetarian, but whilst travelling I was frequently forced to eat in restaurants of questionable hygiene, and vegetarian restaurants feel like the safer option for keeping illness and resulting anxiety at bay. I’d had difficulty finding the restaurant because my phone’s battery ran out. So, after several conversations in broken English with locals, I eventually arrived at my destination disheveled, sweaty, and hungry. For all intents and purposes, it was a perfectly normal looking Asian vegetarian restaurant. Large murals of buddhist deities adorned the walls, meditative music was playing, and small incense were burning by a shrine at the entrance. Rightly, I felt at ease. I sat down in a chair in the corner benefited with a gentle breeze from a ceiling fan, and situated in the shadow of a terrifying depiction of Makahala. He looked benevolent and malevolent. Wrathful and peaceful. Friend and foe. The table was slightly greasy, and the floor was dusty. A trail of ants dutifully carried small scraps of food off to their colony. Not the cleanest place I’d visited, but also not the dirtiest. I considered crushing the ants to send them into a collective frenzied panic. Makahala’s eyes put me off the notion. A large clock in the center of the wall was no longer working, it’s hands resting at 11:59. The restaurant was largely empty, save for a small family in the opposite corner, and a young couple two tables across from me. The aroma of their meals reached me, so I quickly picked up the stained menu, which was fortunately in English. Deciding what to eat was easy enough. Seeing my favourite dish at the top of the first page was clearly destiny. After some awkward pointing at the menu, the waiter understood what I wanted, and scuttled off to fulfil my order. Now I had only to wait. My phone was flat so my primary source of entertainment was lost. I only had my own thoughts for amusement, which quickly became boring. Did you ever try sitting and doing nothing? No phone, book, or TV. Only your imagination. In childhood we have a brilliant capacity for this mental distraction, spending hours in our own vibrant fantasies. Of course this is the bane of school teachers everywhere, and they quickly try to discipline it from us before our teens. But more than that, as we age something changes inside us and we lose the skill forever. It cannot be regained, or retrained. The world inevitably becomes grey and diffuse. My restless mind tried to tune in to the distant alien languages echoing around the room, in an attempt to hear a familiar word or phrase. Nothing. Although, the unique cadence and vocalisation of the language did provide a brief glimmer of stimulation. It made me wonder how many languages there had ever been and what they all sounded like. How many were forgotten? Language feels so permanent but historically it can be swept away and vanish so easily. I was suddenly snapped out of my brooding, by a polite ‘hello’ pronounced in a misplaced, faux-American accent. I looked up to see a short boy, with scruffy hair, wearing an obviously counterfeit FC Barcelona shirt spattered with food stains. His posture was somewhat awkward as he stood staring at me. At first glance he appeared perfectly normal though; a copy of thousands of identical children seen around the world, that like to eat chocolate, watch cartoons, and run around outside. But after initially registering his appearance I noticed something deeper was maligned about him. The air around him was strange. His deeply contrasted eyes were weary, and seemed wise. The ants at their floor banquet had mysteriously fled. To use the coloquial: this kid had some bad juju. Of course I did not say this to him out of politeness, but I felt uncomfortable around him, and not just for the intrusion. His appearance had startled me and after a small moment I enacted a delayed greeting to him. ‘Hi.’ I responded, with a forced smile fading across my face. ‘May I sit with you?’ he enquired. ‘My family are boring.’ he pointed in their general direction, where his mother was frantically gesturing him to comeback. Or was she warning me not to talk to him? Who knows? ‘My family are very boring too, so don’t worry I understand. Please sit down.’ I motioned my arm to the empty seat across the table from me, and he struggled on to the chair leaving his legs dangling and swinging freely off the floor. ‘What is your name?’ I asked with an overemphasis on my pronunciation. ‘Jake.’ he said curtly. This name was a somewhat jarring to me, but it was not uncommon among the anglophiles I’d met in Asia to adopt an English pseudonym. ‘And how old are you, Jake?’ ‘I’m ten, but I’ll be nine soon.’ he replied confidently. ‘Do you mean you’ll be *eleven* soon?’ ‘No.’ he blinked with each eye independently. I thought he was either an idiot or was messing with me. ‘So...how long have you studied English for?’ I asked after a short, tense pause. ‘I have to study it at school, which has been for five years, but I also study at home, because I like to watch a lot of videos on youtube in English.’ ‘That’s good! I wished I’d studied more when I was younger, but I’ve always been lazy,’ I laughed, ‘So do you enjoy going to school?’ ‘No, not really. I don’t like the other kids at my school. They’re mean to me now and sometimes they throw rocks at me and laugh with each other. Last week, they threw water on me while I was in the bathroom. None of them will talk to me anymore. I don’t understand them.’ he said, with his head bowed. I felt sorrow as I looked at him, remembering the similar misfit feelings I had at his age, but also a flash of guilt as I found myself mildly repulsed by this peculiar child. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. When people get older they usually get nicer. They’re probably mean to you because you’re smarter than them, and that makes them feel stupid.’ I comforted him. ‘Do you have any friends at school you can talk to?’ ‘No, not anymore. Only my dog is my friend.’ he said, looking back up at me while executing another of his offputting, goldfish-like blinks. ‘Oh, did your friend move schools?’ ‘No, he died.’ he stated as a matter of fact. By this point of the conversation I had become a little tense, but social convention and morbid curiosity implored me to continue talking. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, what happened to him?’ ‘He just died, the doctors didn’t know why, but I do.’ he said calmly. ‘He just died?’ ‘Yeah. Tell me a sad thing that’s happened to you.’ I was a little taken aback by the path of the conversation so far, but managed to collect myself. ‘I don’t know...I guess the saddest thing that's happened to me was when my cousin died in a car accident two years ago. He was only eighteen, and all my family were obviously very upset. We played together a lot when we were young, but by age nine he’d moved to another city, and I never really saw him again. He was an important part of my childhood, and I have a lot of nice memories of him, but he died and I didn’t really *feel* anything. That was the saddest thing for me - realising that someone so close to me became so distant.’ I said. A crisp red-brown leaf strolled past me in a light breeze. I glanced up to its parent tree in the courtyard of the restaurant, its tangle of auburn hair lightly shedding. ‘It was a joke by the way.’ ‘Huh?’ ‘When I said I was ten. I’m actually nine.’ ‘Oh right, okay. Very funny.’ I paused, taken aback by his dismissal of my story. ‘It was a joke,’ he repeated ‘Or should I say a “yolk”?’ he grinned maniacally and laughed to himself. This would have been funny if he had held up an egg or had some egg related thing with him. He did not. I have thought about this moment repeatedly, and still can not make sense of his attempted comedy here. Humour doesn’t always translate well linguistically or culturally though. ‘Another sad thing that happened to me is that my grandma died a few months ago. She wasn’t sick, she just died in her sleep. But I knew it was going to happen.’ ‘What do you mean you knew it was going to happen?’ ‘It always happens around me. I’ll have a dream about a person or animal, and then something bad happens to them, but there’s nothing I can do about it to help them.’ he said, eyebrows obliqued. His belief in his supernatural powers was entirely contrary to my disbelief in the supernatural, so I said ‘I’m sure the dreams are just a coincidence, aren't they. No one can see the future, it’s not possible. How do you know they’re related?’ ‘Because it’s always the same dream. I’m in a room with the person or animal talking or playing with them, and then the room gets bigger and darker. The walls get further and further apart, and the person I’m dreaming about slowly moves into the dark until I can’t see them anymore, and I’m alone in the empty space.’ ‘And then something...bad happens to them?’ ‘Yes, sometimes they die, sometimes they just get sick, or sometimes it happens to someone they know. I’ve tried to warn people but it doesn’t help.’ ‘Did you dream about your friend before he died?’ I asked, still skeptical of his claims. ‘Yes, I tried to help him. I told everyone in class something would happen to him and be careful. No one believed me, and then he died and they said it was me that killed him,’ he clenched his fists. ‘But I didn’t I tried to help him, and grandma. And now I’m trying to help you.’ ‘Excuse me?’ I didn’t believe this child’s stories at this point, but the statement certainly shocked me, and regardless of my beliefs a slither of fear ran through my mind. The unshakable “what if” got lodged in my thoughts, like a vinyl record skipping over, and over. ‘We’ve never met before. I don’t...’ ‘I dreamed about you so that means something bad will happen to you. That's why I came to talk to you. To warn you, John.’ he interjected, his eyes wide and unblinking. The room became static. The pleasant sounds and smells disappeared. My chair seemed small and weak underneath me, like it would shatter and the earth below it would swallow me. ‘I never told you my name’ I stammered. ‘I know,’ he smiled benignly ‘Sorry I have to go now, goodbye’ he said, as his mother whisked him away, saying what I assume was an apology to me. When my food finally arrived I struggled to eat more than a few mouthfuls. My mind was racing and my anxiety piqued. The rational and irrational parts of my mind were at war, and struggling to reconcile what had just happened. I paid for my meal having eaten less than half of it, and left the restaurant with dark clouds looming overhead. I’d always prided myself on being a person of pure logic, but this illusion was suddenly broken. The walk back to my hostel felt like a minefield. Every crack in the pavement, pair of ladders, and mirror was now threatening. Crossing the chaotic roads I had a heightened sense of things, where I was normally oblivious. When I got back, I had a restless night of sleep, in a cold sweat. The walls were watching me. This mood lasted longer than I care to admit. A week or so after meeting Jake my mum told me my pet rabbit had died. However, this didn’t feel tragic enough to fit the “warning” I had been given. I didn’t like my rabbit anyway, so I felt a perverse sense of relief knowing he’d died, and my distress continued for a long time. Ironically, nothing bad ever did happen and my worry was arguably misplaced. My anxiety eventually ramped down, but since that day I can’t get past the feeling that something is around the corner waiting. A shadow lies over me. Not because I now believe in magic, fate, supernatural forces, or whatever you want to call it. But because that day I realised how much closer loss is to all of us. How dangerous the world is, and how fragile we are. I’m not more scared of dying, I’m more scared of losing the people I love from around me, because that is a fate worse than death. Watching everything and everyone that you love in the world disappear and fade away into the dark, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.