PREMONITION By: Jamie Eyberg
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009I didn’t know what we were waiting for that afternoon but it was supposed to be big. Really big. Huge was the word that Raul had used. I shook my head and gave him a faint smile as we sat under the rock overlooking the pass.
It was a narrow pass. It had squeezed a four lane highway down to two but the traffic didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t think of it as they looked at millions of years of strata that had been blasted through fifty years earlier.
We sat and waited. It was the four of us. Raul had asked me first but somehow Leonard and Gabriel heard about it. They begged us to come along.
I don’t know why. I didn’t want to come along. I would rather have sat at home.
“How do you know something is going to happen?” Gabriel asked.
“I had a dream.”
Leonard looked at him with a suspicious eye. “What kind of a dream?”
Raul moved closer to the edge of the cliff. “The kind you know will come true. It was like a-”
“Premonition” I finished for him. I had seen his visions before: the time we couldn’t go to the city because we were going to die in a crash, and when I wasn’t allowed to finish a slice of pizza because he was convinced it would put me in the hospital.
“Yeah” Raul said. His head bobbed as he perched himself on the edge and looked down. Crumbles of the mountain tumbled under his feet.
I made myself more comfortable, as comfortable as I could on the pointed rocks. They dug into my legs and tried to pierce my back as I eased down on them.
Gabriel and Leonard moved closer to the edge, but not as close as Raul did.
“How long?” Leonard asked. He picked up a fist sized rock and threw it as far as he could. It sailed down and narrowly missed a car as it sped by.
Gabriel stifled a laugh as he watched the car swerve on the road, even though the rock had already missed, and kept going.
I shook my head and hoped whatever Raul thought was going to happen would come quickly.
“Here we go,” Raul said without any provocation.
I looked up to see him tense his body and I couldn’t help but do the same as I sat up. My head scraped the rock above me and I winced but continued to look forward. Gabriel and Leonard inched forward on their knees, straining their necks to look over the edge when the first movement came.
It was sudden and thunderously loud. The rock above us pitched and fell. It just missed all of us. I looked forward to see the entire landscape roll, like the mountains had been liquefied.
Raul turned and smiled. “It gets better,” he said. He swung his legs in front of him and dangled them over the edge. I stayed put. My heart raced from the narrow miss of the boulder that had once been above me. I wanted to look but could not force my body to move so I waited.
My heart rate was just settling down when the next shock struck. It was harder and more violent that the last but Raul stayed put. Gabriel and Leonard moved back.
“Pretty cool, huh?”
I could barely hear him over the roar of rock grinding on rock. Helplessly, I watched as Gabriel and Leonard tried to stand before they lost their footing and fell over the edge. They grasped for Raul but he made no motion for them. I tried to break my paralysis but could not force my body to override fear.
After the sounds of their screams had stopped, silenced by the sliding of billions of tons of rock against each other or the stop at the bottom of the fall, Raul turned around and looked back at me. He stood up and motioned to follow him. The trembling stopped and I blindly obeyed. My stomach churned with disgust and fear.
“Why didn’t you do anything about it?”
He smiled. “It’s okay. You can look now. It’s done.”
I moved closer to the edge now. I tried to keep one eye on Raul, unsure of what he would do next. He stayed put, his arms crossed in front of him and a smile still curled on his lips.
The pass had disappeared. The mountain it had been dug through was closed up.
“I told you it would be huge.”
“You could have done something for them.”
“If they hadn’t come with us, they would be crushed in town.”
“Town is gone too?” I imaged a Vesuvius type catastrophe. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? You could have saved everyone. Why did you keep it to yourself?”
He stood there with his arms still crossed and the too-proud smile still plastered on his face. “I can’t change fate. It is what it is.”
I shook my head. “What?”
“Fate is what it is. They would have died anyway. The same reason you are still alive and the rock that Leonard threw didn’t hit the car. It is meant to be. Just accept it and move on.”
Raul turned and walked away from me. I let him. I think he knew it was going to end that way.
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©2009 Jamie Eyberg
Jamie Eyberg is a full-time father and a part-time writer from somewhere in Iowa. His exploits can be found at www.acontinuityofparks.blogspot.com. He has works forthcoming in 52 Stitches and Night To Dawn.
