Unlucky Number 13
It's hard to say exactly when she woke up. Time seems to slip when you live as if asleep. She moved as if sleepwalking, the surreality of the world around her stirring like a dream when her fingers reached out to touch. She went through the daily motions as if entranced by the emptiness around her, living a dull nightmare that never seemed to end.
Then, one day, something changed. The screens in the city projected something that struck a chord with her. She felt familiarity. She felt fear. And somehow, she felt a strange sense of hope. It resonated inside of her until she felt it at the tips of her fingers and in the heels of her feet. Perhaps that was the day she woke up, because suddenly she was paying attention.
They referred to themselves by number, an activity she was quite familiar with. There was One and there was Two. They took turns talking, a well versed riddle ricocheting between them. It was with open eyes and cognitive function that she witnessed her heart race. Her eyes were glued to the screen, a different kind of reverie overtaking her.
She sought this feeling out once the message had run its course. Fortunately it was all over the internet, another thing she was quite familiar with. She reviewed the video countless times, hardly listening to the words at all, hardly caring. Something in the way they moved, the way they spoke, pulled at a long forgotten image in her mind like a magnet attracting its partner. It wouldn't meet though, so she assumed something was blocking the connection, or perhaps she had one side turned the wrong way. For many days she contemplated this and for many days it eluded her.
Real dreams, the ones she sometimes couldn't discern from reality, consumed her each night as she slept. She would stand beside Pallas Athena as the boys from the telecommunication tried to run as far and as fast as they could. It connected something for her that her waking mind couldn't, and now she knew who they were.
They had reset the numbers, it seemed. Nine had become One, and Twelve had become Two. She wondered what Thirteen would become.
If she could just find them, maybe they would tell her. But a city is a hard place to find someone in, especially he who wishes not to be found, so she never did end up with an answer. They appeared more frequently, the aftershock of every riddle more riveting than the last. For her, they were what kept her awake. One and Two had made a name for themselves in an interesting way. Japan clawed at its seams, brandishing a careless needle with too little string attached. In the end, nothing could control them, and One and Two took their final step.
It was beautiful. A supernova just overhead. It imprinted itself on satellites and in stardust and Saturn's distant rings. The world beneath became a black hole, but burnt its fuse quickly as a star was reborn. There was beauty in annihilation and it took her breath away.
Then they vanished. There was no warning, only a sickening twist in her intestines at sundown the next day. She had visited the same home they all shared that very evening. There was a Three with them. Three wasn't one of them—didn't move like them, didn't speak like them, didn't think or feel or see like any of them—but to them, she could have been. Maybe she helped reset the numbers, maybe that was why they let her be Three. One and Two and Three together, they were happy. Every question she had had about what would become of Thirteen died very suddenly in a way she hadn't foreseen. In a way very similar to the way One and Two died.
This new man they confessed to, the one who approached them at sundown, he was strange to her. He treated One and Two familiarly, though she could tell they had never met. He declared his victory, to which One and Two agreed. Three sat by with nothing to say.
The numbers would have to be reset again. She decided this as she turned her back. She would never consider their Three in this numerical limbo they had all once danced in together. You couldn't just make up a number; they all existed already. So when she reset the numbers, she returned to the graveyard. There were two new stakes in the ground, engraved with the numbers 9 and 12. It occurred to her that maybe they hadn't really reset the numbers, that this mathematical hierarchy she had designed in her mind was nothing but her imagination.
So when she reset the numbers, she set them straight. She moved to One first—the original One—and then Two, and Three, and Four, and Five. . .
That was new. She had thought Five had made it out alive. Then again, she had thought a lot of things recently. When she reached Thirteen, she hesitated. What could Thirteen be? That's what she had wanted to know all this time. Indecisive, she skipped Thirteen and moved on.
When she finished with Twenty-Six, she returned to the stake labeled 13. She had thought on it and decided what Thirteen would be. She kicked the stake. She kicked it again. She kicked it several times, until her foot hurt and the stake was askew. She stepped back and observed her work. The second Three would probably return to read them all someday, so she wanted to leave a message.
She knew what Thirteen was.
Thirteen was many things. Thirteen was awake and alone and alive. Thirteen was walking with her shoes off away from her grave marker. Thirteen was carrying her shoes over her head as she ran past a bridge and into a creek, feeling the water surge around her. Thirteen was young for someone so damaged but old for someone so free. Thirteen was watching as years passed on, as people found out.
Thirteen was many things, but she supposed that, in light of all that had happened, she would never be unlucky.