No healthy or mentally stable person ever starts their day thinking they are going to die. And certainly not someone in the flower of their youth, for the very nature of the young is to believe that they are indestructible; that they are immortal.
Any life insurance salesman can, with only a few questions, tell you with a macabre certainty when you are going to die. But it is, after all, only a guess based on statistical mathematics. Sometimes you beat the odds, and not in a good way. Sometimes all it takes is a freak accident and all of those mathematical equations go out the window.
Eleven-year-old Jennifer Woods was about to find out the truth of this. The cliché would be to say that she was about to find out that she was, in fact, not immortal. But that was not entirely the case as she would soon learn.
Jennifer knew the story of the Phoenix quite well. It is the story of the mythical Egyptian bird that upon reaching the end of its life dies in flames. But from the ashes of the Phoenix, it is reborn and takes to the skies to live once again.
The rain tapped upon window of Jennifer's second floor bedroom. The sound was nearly rhythmic, like the tapping at the door by Edgar Allen Poe's portentous raven. The skies were dark and forbidding, not the day that the sleeping girl had expected for the start of a school year; for her first day in the sixth grade.
The gloom cast gray shadows around the bedroom, even with the blinds to all the windows pulled open. It was the type of morning that looked more like twilight than it looked like the dawn. It was the type of morning that begged more for a fireplace and a mug of hot cocoa than it did a trip outside into the cold and the weather.
Jennifer lay in the dim morning light, her comforter pulled up almost over her head with only her disarrayed and tangled red hair spilling out from over a freckled forehead. The blanket itself was pink and covered in cartoon characters; a jarring contrast from the posters of boys on her walls. Orlando Bloom looked down on her from his place above her bed, him and half a dozen others; their images placed around the room with a reverence usually reserved for the gods and their saints. And perhaps in a way they were. Bedecking her walls were the icons of the deities, the patrons of schoolgirl crushes and first loves.
Stuffed animals and boys and little girl lace all combined together to tell the story of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. A girl that was ending one chapter of her life and preparing to step into the next. Mostly, it spoke of the awkward time between childhood and adulthood. It's the time when you felt both overjoyed and reluctant to set aside the trappings of childhood and take on the mantle of a young adult. It is a short but turbulent time, but often the same could be said of life itself.
The shape under the blanket was contemplating no such deep thoughts that dreary September morning. The form beneath it rose and fell lazily; occasionally a soft snore reverberated from beneath it. One freckled arm hung out from the edge of the bed, swinging minutely like the pendulum of a clock that had long since wound down; the lavender nails on its hand almost touching the floor.
Beside the bed was an alarm clock, the time on it read 6:59 in bright red, declamatory numerals. In only a few more moments it would rouse Jennifer from her sleep to start the most important day of her life. Before the day is over, the story of the Phoenix will take on a completely new meaning to the young girl.
Here, enjoying her last few moments of sleep was Jennifer Woods, on the day she died.