((This one I wrote years ago. Not very good, but it made me feel happy, typing it out now. I also thought that maybe it was time to show the other side of the coin))
Shinko Knami could have been the bad news.
Shinko should have been the good news, but she never really made it that far. Because her power was really no good for that. She tried to be optimistic about the big picture, the rest of the human race. But her power tended to bring out the worst in people. Bad luck was a curse that followed her around, a plague that she passed on, and a dark cloud that weighed at every feature. That, in turn, led her to wait for the little things. And if she focused really hard on the details, the big pictures ceased to exist.
But wherever Shinko was, bad luck wasn't far behind.
When her first house burned down on her twenty-third birthday, with the insurance application sitting on the front counter waiting to be postmarked... Shinko couldn't find one good thing about the whole affair.
She stayed in a motel that night- it was dinky and roach-infested. The ceiling dripped, and the TV just spluttered about disappearances, no matter how many times she tried to shut it off.
She wasn't late to work that morning.
She didn't burn her breakfast, the bus was on time, and no errant pieces of gun found their way onto the bottoms of her shoes. She had a normal, accident-free day at the office, and her mother called. There had been something wrong with the house's electrical wiring. They may even be able to get the money back on that front.
She felt like she was on top of the world.
Whether the bad luck had been a curse, just chance, or as one friend joked, mutation, it seemed to have finally passed on.
Someday, maybe she will feel pity for the people she could have maybe, just maybe been a member of. A people who now number in the hundreds instead of the millions. One last bit of irony, that for her to be content, a species had to disappear. And as the last laugh, she is blissfully unaware.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was just her luck.