(un)Lucky
By: Tim Heare
Tags: Flash Fiction, Death, Afterlife, Luck, Fiction

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Kyle sat in a row of worn oak chairs with orange corduroy cushions. A short oval matching coffee table held a pile of unfamiliar magazines, completing the waiting room’s cliche design. He wasn’t convinced this was his doctor’s office, but the room felt right. Then again, his damned headache was making it hard to remember anything.

“Kyle Kinney?” A smiling man dressed in white directed Kyle to follow him. After wandering through a labyrinthine corridor the man stopped and motioned to an open door. “I’m glad you made it Kyle. Please have a seat.”

Kyle was confused. Instead of an exam table covered with two-cent tissue paper, there was a desk and two metal chairs. The only thing sitting on the desk’s polished wood was an old computer, somehow making the room seem even more barren.

“She’ll be with you shortly. Relax, the hard part’s over.” The man gave a wink and exited the room.

Kyle took a seat and settled in for the long wait that always came with a visit to the doctor. Despite it’s industrial appearance, the chair felt like his bed after a long day. He had just started to slide into a slouch when the door opened and the most captivating woman he had seen walked in. Her radiant presence seemed to fill the room and Kyle found himself immediately willing to do anything to please her.

“Hello Kyle, my name is Evelyn,” she walked over and shook his hand before gracefully taking her seat across the desk. “We have a lot to cover, but don’t worry, time isn’t an issue.”

“Good to know,” Kyle swallowed and tried to sound cool. “Remind me again why I’m here? I’m having a hard time remembering.”

“That’s perfectly normal. Everyone goes through it.” Evelyn said.

“Through what?” Kyle asked, enchanted by her rhapsodic voice.

“That fuzzy feeling like you just woke up.” Evelyn pressed a few keys and looked at the monitor. “Oh I see. Head trauma.” She walked back over to Kyle and placed her hands on his temples, tilting his gaze up to meet hers. Warmth filled his head like a mug of hot chocolate on a wintry day, and he could remember everything. Everything. She let go and moved gracefully back to her seat with the same kindly expression she held when they first met, as if his world hadn’t just ended.

“I died?” Kyle already knew the answer, but he needed to hear himself ask.

“Happens to the best and worst of us.” Evelyn said while she smiled. “Although your death was definitely something to see.”

Kyle remembered it clearly now. His air conditioning had gone out on the way to work. It was ninety degrees by the time he left for home, so he decided to roll down his windows on the highway. They’d only been down for a few minutes when a goose flew in and smashed into his head. He jerked the wheel, wedging himself under a fuel trailer. This of course caused it to flip, resulting in what may have been the biggest fireball ever seen on I-15.

“Damn,” Kyle said. “With my luck I shouldn’t be surprised. Did I…did I hurt anyone?”

“Actually no, the truck driver walked away. Of course he had a much higher score than you.” Evelyn said, as if stating water was wet.

“Higher score? What does that even mean?” Kyle wanted to be annoyed at her indifference, but he just couldn’t find himself thinking badly of the radiant woman.

Evelyn paused as if trying to find the right words. “Everyone is granted mortality to flourish. Many religions call it being tested. It isn’t a test of faith as much as a test of behavior.”

Evelyn waited to see if Kyle was following along, and when he had no objections she continued. “It’s the unexpected that allows the expected to have meaning. Luck is a fundamental force of the universe like magnetism. Lower luck scores attract negative luck. Higher luck scores attract positive luck.”

Kyle thought for a moment. “You’re telling me my life’s bad luck wasn’t a fluke? That sucks. I must have been a One.”

“Oh no, not a One. Those mortals rarely make it past infancy.” Evelyn hit a few more keys. “Your score at the time of death was one-thousand and two. The driver you hit had a score of nine-thousand, which allowed him to walk away.”

“Wait. That doesn’t seem fair. Lucky people get to have better lives and the rest of us die in fireballs on our way home?” Kyle wanted to raise his voice, but couldn’t once his gaze met Evelyn’s.

“It’s completely fair.” Evelyn leaned forward and smiled. “How you respond to your luck polarity is the ultimate measure of how you treat yourself and others. Is it better to be good in the face of adversity, or be good when you have no reason to be? The answer is it’s equally hard to be good when your luck is positive or negative. It’s just hard in different ways.”

“Why can’t everyone just have good luck? It seems wrong to make people experience bad things.” Kyle asked.

Evelyn clasped her hands on the table. “We don’t make bad things happen. Negative and positive are attracted to your score, but it isn’t a certainty. The universe requires balance. So think of luck as a giant bell-curve. In order to have incredibly positive luck, you need incredibly negative luck. As you get closer to the middle, negative and positive find a kind of equilibrium. Most people have both kinds of luck, and fewer experience more of one polarity.”

Kyle looked down and whispered the questions he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. “Was I always doomed? Could I have changed my luck?”

Evelyn reached across her desk and placed her hand on Kyle’s. When his gaze found hers again she continued. “Your score is tied to the person you are. Every time you change who you are, you get a new score. This isn’t a tally. Good actions don’t give you a better score. If you’re a different person it wouldn’t be fair, as you put it, to test you the same way. Nothing you do means you deserve good or bad luck.”

Kyle wiped a tear and whispered to Evelyn. “So, how did I do then?”