SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGIES | PREMONITION

I was afraid that it would happen again. I opened my eyes and my fears emerged, like sudden springs from a placid ground. I looked around me, it seemed that things were getting out of control, but the time had come when my will to live was slowly being consumed by the memory.

It all started one quiet morning, a new kind of plant had appeared that looked like a flower and a mushroom. It was purple, shining in the light, blinding with its beauty and hypnotizing whoever smelled it. My brother was very struck by it, he was a botanist, and unfortunately, he was the first to fall for its charms.

My wife, Alina, had a bad feeling, she was always suspicious of anything strange. She was, according to my testimony, constantly nervous. She never evoked death with her dry, pink lips, but every now and then she would faint from a terrible premonition. Perhaps, in a remote dream, she had been the victim of some world event, taking away from her vestiges of her sanity.

In those days, very often, she would call my brother, completely upset. He said that Alina was a madwoman, because she let her dreams disturb her sanity, and asked me to calm her down, which shocked me and left me completely angry.

I cut off all relationship with him, and avoided from then on Alina forgetting all communication with my brother. Her reaction was one of panic, she looked me in the eyes wrapped in tears and said, "We are all doomed, I hope I am wrong", then she lost herself to our room and lay down on the bed full of grief.

The plant was extracted from the soil. Many tests were done on it in different laboratories. They extracted a viscous, yellowish substance from its leaves which, after preparation, left a rather peculiar oil, which had the proportion of healing diseases such as Alzheimer's, encephalitis, dementia and other ailments. Mankind was happy, for it had obtained a posthumous cure, but not for long.

It only took a couple of months for medicine to flood the markets, many people were cured of brain diseases, but that gift from the earth came with a curse, and it didn't take long for the after-effects to manifest. A disease, a terrible disease, began killing people in just a matter of hours. The virus spread rapidly from body to body, and humanity had no choice but to begin adapting to a near post-apocalyptic world.

My brother was one of the first to fall, he was my only family. I looked for Alina to take her away, but she was gone, she had abandoned me. I found a letter on our bed written in her handwriting, which caused me great terror:

"You should have listened to me, I can no longer stay. Forgive me my love, but now I must go where no one will find me."