Boring Asian Female

Prologue

She always suspected she would die young. She often dreamed of it, in fact. An intruder stabs her in the neck. A drunk driver crashes into her car. Her heart stops beating in the middle of the night.

As a child, she started to carry around slips of paper in her pocket. They were notes for her loved ones for the day she’d meet her fate. She wanted them to know that she wasn’t scared. That she had been preparing for this all her life.

Her mother took her to a child psychiatrist once.

He said that she would grow out of it. He was right.

As a young woman, she still kept the notes in her pocket, still dreamed of serial killers and car crashes, but she no longer treated the visions as premonitions, only as passing thoughts.

The milestones passed like scenery out the car window during a road trip, each birthday celebration a highway mile marker to a place unknown, and she marveled that she had made it another year.

She became sure that there would be many more.

As the dark figure stood over her, weapon still in hand, she realized that this was nothing like she had expected.

No stabbing, no car wreck. She was not as young as she’d thought she’d be, but was, by anyone’s standards, still much too young.

She wondered if she was being punished for complacency.

Punished for taking too much for granted.

Punished for forgetting she was on borrowed time.

She tucked her hand in her pocket and felt for the piece of paper she hoped was there. It was. She tried to take it out and show it to her attacker. “Please,” she wanted to say, “please give this to my mom,” but the attacker had left, leaving her to suffocate alone.