By Rod A. White
The numbers appeared after Tara’s tenth birthday. Always red. Never another color. Bright as warning lights. They were hovering above her father’s head while he buttered toast.
32
They flashed like a reflection off glass, wavering each time he leaned toward the raspberry jam. She blinked until her eyes watered, but the number remained, pulsing faintly, as though it had its own heartbeat.
“Tara?” her father said. “You’re staring.”
“Just tired.”
She didn’t tell him that every time he moved, the 32 left a brief smear of red behind it, like a brushstroke dragged through the air.
Others had them too.
Above her mail carrier: 114
Above the neighbor who screamed at raccoons from his porch: 3
She tried ignoring them. She tried squinting until they blurred.
Nothing worked.
Why were they there? After her neighbor was bitten by a rabid raccoon, she assumed it was an omen announcing a tragic occurrence. Bad things happened to people once their numbers hit zero. To her relief, her dad’s number rarely ticked down. But she didn’t understand why.
At twelve, she asked her mother, “If you knew something might happen to someone after a certain number of days, would you tell them?”
Her mother, elbow-deep in dishwater, didn’t look up. “That’s a strange question.”
“Hypothetically.”
“I’d mind my own business,” she said. “Life’s hard enough without countdowns.”
Tara pursed her lips. A 6 blazed above her mother’s frazzled hair.
Her mother died ten days later in a freeway pileup. The police called it a fog-related tragedy.
Tara called it arithmetic, although slightly skewed.
She became obsessed with color after that.
She filled notebooks with comparisons: vermilion versus scarlet, cinnabar versus cadmium red. Though vermilion was the closest, none matched the numbers, because they weren’t just red—they were hungry. Alive in a way mere color could never be.
At sixteen, she experimented. When the number above a classmate read 1, she followed him after school, shadowing him like a guilty ghost. He climbed into his older brother’s car. They argued, and his number dropped to 0. The brother peeled out, and the car wrapped around a lamppost three blocks later.
Tara vomited.
By college, she had figured out the numbers didn’t mean days. They were more like turns―the number of significant choices a person had left before all went wrong.
She confirmed it with painstaking observation. Some people burned through numbers quickly, gambling them away with reckless impulses. Others hoarded them, paralyzed by caution. But at zero, irreversible disaster followed.
She tried saving them occasionally.
It never worked.
Warn someone and they’d panic, wasting choices faster. Interfere and the outcome merely shifted shape, like water finding a new path.
The vermilion ledger balanced itself with brutal elegance.
Eventually, Tara stopped looking at people directly. Sunglasses helped, but not enough.
She chose to work in art restoration, away from people. She spent her days repairing Renaissance paintings where saints bled symbolically instead of literally. Where red meant sacrifice, or passion, or divine love, instead of mathematical doom.
It was almost peaceful.
Until the day the courier arrived, delivering the cracked triptych.
The gallery had acquired it from a monastery closure: three wooden panels depicting the martyrdom of Saint Agatha. The saint’s robes were painted in deep, flaking crimson. The courier signed the paperwork and handed Tara the stylus.
She reached for it and froze.
Above the courier’s head hovered a vermilion 2.
She signed.
“Beautiful place to work.” He smiled politely glancing at the paintings. “My sister paints. Says red is the hardest color. Too dark and it looks dead. Too bright and it looks fake.”
Tara swallowed. “She’s not wrong.”
He hesitated, as if standing on the edge of a question. “Do you ever feel like some colors watch you?”
The vermilion 2 pulsed brighter.
“Yeah,” Tara whispered.
He exhaled. “I thought I was crazy,” he said before turning to leave.
The number fell from 2 to 1.
Tara grabbed his wrist. “Don’t leave yet!”
“But I… I have another delivery.”
“Call in sick. Take lunch. Anything.”
He stared at her. “Why?”
She wanted to tell him, “Your ledger is bleeding out.” Instead, it came out, “I have a bad feeling.”
He studied her the way people did when deciding whether she was dangerous or just crazy.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “How about coffee? By the way, I’m Sam.”
The red 1 flickered like a candle in a crosswind.
They sat in the museum café, surrounded by tourists and overpriced pastries. Sam told her about his sister, about his dream to quit courier work and start a small framing shop. He laughed easily, the sound warm and unguarded.
The 1 hovered stubbornly.
Tara’s heart hammered. Why had the number stalled? Usually, fate snapped quickly.
He leaned forward. “Why did you stop me? Tell the truth.”
The 1 faded slightly.
“Because, sometimes I see how many chances people have left. And you only have one.”
Silence fell.
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t recoil. He simply gazed at her.
“I believe you,” he said.
The number shattered into a spray of vermilion sparks and vanished.
Tara gasped. That had never happened before. Zero always came, carrying catastrophe in its wake.
“Did I… die?” he asked under empty air.
“No,” she whispered. “You finished something.”
Weeks passed. He kept visiting. He showed her samples of molding for his future shop. He asked her opinion on varnishes, on wood stains, on names for the business. She waited each time for new vermilion digits to appear.
They never did.
One evening, while she retouched Saint Agatha’s robes, she realized the restored crimson no longer looked like martyrdom. It looked like sunrise through stained glass.
Then, for the first time since she was ten, Tara stepped outside and found that the people streaming past were unnumbered, their futures spilling out unmeasured and wild.
Like her mother said, the world was hard enough without countdowns.
And, for the first time, she felt that life was gloriously mysterious.
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Fascinating story! I’d love to read more on this. Chances to turn your life around- I wonder how many people would act if they could see it like that?
Tara, the world needs you to settle a debate for us. Does a person’s number go down when they order a pizza with pineapple on it?