"What's your sign?"

“What’s your sign?” The man sitting next to her asked. She glanced over at him with disdain. Did he really just ask that question? Had she some how been transported back in time to 1978? He looked normal enough and was actually kind of cute so she wondered what he was thinking by using such a silly pick-up line. When she turned back toward him he was gone. That was weird she thought but as she sipped her drink and tried to forget about her terrible day she forgot about him and listened to the inane conversation her friends were having about some celebrity. The next morning as she was just coming out of that deep refreshing sleep one achieves from just a few glasses of wine she recalled the guy and his “ What’s your sign?” line. The more she thought about it the odder it seemed. That afternoon while she was sitting at the café drinking her coffee and typing on her laptop the last thing she expected to hear was that same question “What’s your sign?” This time it came from an elderly women sitting next to her at the coffee shop. “You look like a Gemini, are you a Gemini dear?” She could only nod her head yes as the woman started to babble on about Gemini and their traits. She packed up her lap top finished her coffee and escaped. Two days in a row the same question, this was getting weirder by the moment. The next evening as she walked her dog along the path by the lake she heard it ever so faintly wafting on the breeze from the beach, “What’s your sign?” She jerked her head up and looked toward the beach but did not see anyone there. Weird! After several days with no one uttering those three words again she forgot about the weirdness of it all and after several weeks it did not cross her mind again. So the day it happened she was not prepared for it, if she had maybe noticed the signs she would not have been walking alone that night along that stretch of road where he was known to have struck before.

The next morning the paper waited on her front door step. A door step she would never cross again. The headline read, “Gemini Killer Strikes again.”

It Started With a Scab

She picked at the scab on her knee. It felt good and when the scab slowly peeled away leaving a shiny bloody spot it felt even better. That was how it started, the cutting. As a remembrance of that day she first picked at a scab as a small girl. Now she cut all the time and each time she did it felt better then it had the last time. She hid the cuts behind long sleeves and no one had guessed yet and that also made her feel good, knowing that it was her secret.

He was a Hit and Run Hugger

As he crossed the street he did not notice the taxi that was zooming toward the intersection. Perhaps the taxi driver was distracted by the pretty girl in the back of his cab but he failed to notice the red light and ran it, hitting the man crossing the street. There was a slight thump as the taxi winged the man’s right leg but he remained upright and although he would have a nasty bruise he was uninjured. The taxi screeched to a halt, the driver jumped out ran toward the man and screamed, “Are you hurt?” The man shook his head no and then as if possessed the taxi driver reached out and hugged the man. He released him as quickly as he had hugged him and ran back to his cab, screeching as he fled the scene.

The Corn

When she left the city on the lake to drive home to her parents for a week-end or a holiday she would drive straight down the interstate. With each proceeding mile the city would become a distant memory of steel and concrete as the cornfields and cow pastures grew more numerous. She would exit the interstate at a small town 9 miles from the tiny town she grew up in and although she cherished every minute in that city on the lake she always felt like she was coming home as she sped through the fields high with corn. That is how she remembered her childhood. Corn. It had been everywhere. Across the street and up on the hill and surrounding her High School. She recalled long summer drives on lone country roads with corn six feet high on both sides. She and her brother and friends had built a corn fort one summer. Knocking down the stalks in a circle that surely from the air looked like a crop circle. Corn. It had played a large part in her world in the country. In the city she only found corn in cans or in a farmers market stall. But she could still conjure in her minds eye a dark night lite only by the moon with corn surrounding her as she walked the country road near the house she grew up in and if she tried really hard she could still remember the scent of the corn in the night.