Amina was sixteen years old when she first had a premonition about a dead body that did not yet exist. She was going about her day, uneventful and all cheery-like, typical of a 16 year old her age. She was in class, in a crowded classroom in Kaduna, also typical of a public classroom in Kaduna State, half-listening to a Literature class while the afternoon heat was scorching. Then, she dosed off a little, cos the class had been incredibly boring, they were made to watch the classic movie “The tempest” and without warning, the classroom disappeared.
For a brief second, everywhere was dark and she tried to open her eyes forcefully and she did only to find herself standing alone on a rain-soaked highway. A damaged, accident Toyota Corolla rested against a concrete barrier. People were screaming, the blood was flowing mixed with the rain and lying beside the wreckage was her teacher, Mrs. Yakubu.
Amina saw the blood and the shattered glasses. The accident was gory and Mrs Yakubus body lay their lifeless, she saw the lifeless stare, she stood their terrified, trying to get herself to wake up from this nightmare and then suddenly the vision vanished. The classroom returned as though nothing had happened.
At first she thought it was just a nightmare and she just prayed against it but three days later, she noticed Mrs. Yakubu preparing to leave school, in the same clothes and car that she saw in her dream/vision. Also almost immediately dark clouds gathered overhead and the vision came rushing back. Terrified, Amina ran after her, Amina had always been the superstitious type and she thought about how to stop Mrs Yakubu from leaving and consequently she lied and said she had overheard some drivers discussing a major accident on the expressway. The older woman laughed at first, but Amina's fear was so genuine that she eventually decided to use another route home.
That night, news spread of a terrible collision on the exact stretch of road Amina had seen. Mrs. Yakubu survived. Amina cried tears of relief and she believed God had given her a gift. Months passed and Life returned to normal. Then, years later something happened, Mrs. Yakubu eventually became principal of the school, and during a period of budget shortages, she approved repairs on some buildings while postponing work on an aging science laboratory. A project her successor asked her to prioritize but she ignored and even experts had warned that the structure was unsafe. Then one afternoon, a gas explosion ripped through the laboratory. Fifty- Eight students died.
The news haunted Amina, she remembered the vision. One death prevented, but she couldn’t but help think that this was a direct consequence of her “saving” Mrs Yakubu. The thought made her uncomfortable, but she dismissed it as coincidence. Surely, she could not be responsible.
Then came the second vision and this time it was a young man named Daniel. Amina saw him beneath a collapsed building in Abuja. Dust filled the air and concrete slabs and crushed his body. Construction workers screamed for help. The vision lasted only seconds. Instinctively Amina was determined to save him, Amina tracked down the construction site and anonymously reported serious safety violations to the authorities, consequence of which Inspections were carried out. The site was temporarily shut down and the collapse never happened, she saw the young man Daniel crossing the street with two children whom she presumed to be his kids and she smiled , very assured of herself that she had done a good thing.
Nearly a year later, she was watching the evening news when she saw Daniel's face. He had developed a severe gambling addiction and accumulated enormous debts. During a robbery at a pharmacy, he shot the owner while trying to escape and a stray bullet struck an eight-year-old girl who had been hiding behind a shelf. The child died before reaching the hospital, Amina stared at the television in horror, mouth wide open, it was as if she had almost forgotten how to breathe.
That night she barely slept, questions kept circling inside her mind. What if some deaths were supposed to happen?
Then the third vision came, this time the third vision frightened her even more because it seemed so harmless. An young woman named Esther appeared in her vision, she knew Esther as she was their neigbour. There was no accident, no gory scene. The woman simply lay peacefully in bed, having died quietly in her sleep. Amina could not understand why she had been shown such a death.
Still, she could not ignore it and after weeks of effort, she managed to convince Esther's family to seek medical attention for her. Doctors discovered a serious heart condition and performed a procedure that extended her life. The family celebrated what they called a miracle. For a while she felt proud an d then the years passed, she thought maybe this was different and the others had just been coincidences and then the news hit and it spread around the neighbourhood like wildfire. A rare neurological illness slowly consumed Esther's body, it was as a result of the operation that was carried out earlier. Some way the doctors had been negligent and it resulted in an infection that affected her brain and was eating her up slowly. First she lost the ability to walk, then she lost her speech and then in a matter of months she lost control of nearly every muscle, she became a vegetable.
Yet her heart remained strong. The very treatment that had saved her life also prolonged her suffering. For almost ten years she remained trapped inside her own body.
The patterns at this point were impossible to ignore, these visions were not random. They were in their way a sort of superpower but these didn’t bring about warnings of death, but they were warnings about interference. Perhaps there was a balance in the world that human beings were never meant to understand. Perhaps fate, cruel as it seemed sometimes carried its own purpose.
As these thoughts consumed her, another vision suddenly struck. The room vanished. She found herself standing beneath a massive tree on a grassy hill and right there, lying peacefully beneath its shade, was a woman. It was non other than Amina herself. Her own body. Her own face. The vision ended. Amina sat trembling in the darkness. For years she had fought death wherever she saw it. She had believed survival was always the answer. Now she knew her own death was waiting somewhere in the future. She thought to herself when that moment came, she would want to stop it. She would want to save herself, nobody wanted to die and not even Amina. But then again if the pattern remained true, if every rescue carried a price, then preventing her own death might unleash something far worse than anything she had already witnessed and at that moment time she made peace with dying.
Images are A.I generated Gemini
