The first time she sensed someone’s death, Bela was seven years old, and it happened on the other side of Rainbow Montessori, where the shadow from the church steeple fell in the perfect shape of a cross on the playground. She had stepped right onto the shadow and felt a small tightness in her head. She left the shadow but the feeling grew, first invading her head, until Bela felt it aching throughout her whole body. And then it stopped. Just like that.

She didn’t think much of it at the time—after all, she was just a seven-year-old child. But Mother was late to pick her up that evening, and when she arrived, face tight and drawn, Bela realized, as all perceptible children do, that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Running into her mother’s warm embrace, she smelled faint traces of iron and bleach and shuddered. Mother leaned down to Bela’s level and grasped her arms tightly.

“Bela, darling,” Mother choked out, her pasty white face trembling, “I have something to tell you.”

Bela’s eyes widened and the blood seemed to drain out of her face, leaving it pale as a ghost. She watched as all the children were ushered out of the building, each of them holding their parents’ hands tightly and wondering what was going on.

None of those children saw their Montessori teacher again after that day.

Later that night, Bela snuck out of her room, unable to sleep. She couldn’t get the strange smell out of her system, not to mention the throbbing pains that she had also felt earlier in the playground. She peered down the staircase, seeing her parents sipping coffee in the kitchen.

“I can’t believe the brain cancer got her.  She looked healthy—I thought she was on the road to recovery.” Her father sighed, squeezing his wife’s hand.

Bela’s mother nodded. “It was a shock. I feel bad for the children, poor things.”

A sense of dread enveloped Bela. “What did you just say?” she asked, almost staggering into the kitchen. “Are you sure?” Slowly, her parents turned and looked at her, faces twisted in sorrow.

Bela sank to the floor, cupping her face in her hands. As she shook with sobs, her mother and father rushed to comfort her. They rubbed slow circles on her back, whispering soothing words that did fairly little to alleviate Bela’s discomfort.

Her five-year-old brother poked his head around the door. He, too, had been rushed out of the building by the teacher’s assistants and was too lost in the crowd to find his older sister. But Bela’s acute empathy was no surprise to him. Two years ago, when Bela was five and he was three, their parents had rushed to the hospital for some emergency. On the way, their father ran over a squirrel. While everyone else in the car felt a tiny bump, Bela curled up into a ball and sobbed. Tears streaked down her face as she shook violently, almost as if she was that squirrel whose life had ended so abruptly.

Bela contemplated hard about whether she should tell her parents about the strange sensation she had felt on the playground that day. She hadn’t told anyone about the squirrel incident, but this was different. This was a real human life. Whatever she felt, even though she didn’t really understand it—it scared her.

She had to tell her parents. Trembling, Bela opened her mouth to tell her parents, only to find that she couldn’t speak. The words were clogged up in her throat, and no matter how much she tried, she couldn’t free them.

Bela squirmed and ran upstairs. She slammed the door and started to cry. The pain she felt ran through her, aching in every corner of her body. She finally took a deep breath and opened her drawer, decorated with old, faded stickers of stars and curled-up cats her teacher had once given her for every assignment she got a full score on. A puff of dust appeared as she grabbed a red notebook from the bottom of the wooden drawer. Bela flipped the notebook to a blank page and documented her experience.

If she couldn’t speak the words, she had to write them down. This dairy was the only outlet where she could express her feelings and the pain she had been  encompassed with earlier. For Bela, the diary would keep her sane.

Suddenly, a loud screech followed by a murmur was heard from below. Bela tossed the diary under her bed and rushed downstairs.

Reaching the bottom of the staircase, she slowed, suddenly aware of the overwhelming stillness of the lower floor. Slowly, she shifted her weight from one foot to another, so as to avoid the cold tile lining the hallway. Her previous hesitation vanished when she heard a sniffle coming from the kitchen. She quietly padded towards the dining table where she had heard the noise. Her voice seemed to find its way back to her throat when she was once again met with heavy silence.

“Mom? Dad? What’s going on?” Rounding the corner, she saw her parents standing on either side of the table, eyes locked in a tense battle. A chair was knocked over about two feet away from where her father stood. Bela guessed it was the source of the screeching sound. Her mother’s eyes were teary and red, but they softened when she saw Bela standing in the doorway.

“It’s… nothing, Bela,” her mother reassured in a shaky voice, crouching down to meet her eye level. Judging by her father’s unsuccessful attempt at hiding his sniffles, it was decidedly not nothing.

“Your dad and I were just having a talk about something,” she said, hurriedly wiping her tears and replacing them with a smile. She pulled Bela into a hug and Bela relented, not knowing what to say. A familiar scent reached her nose, one that she recognized from before: iron and bleach.

Before she could ask her mom about the stench, Bela’s head tightened, worse than ever before. If it weren’t for her mother’s grasp, she would have completely collapsed onto the floor, and that’s when she heard a frantic shriek for help.

“Luke?” her dad called out sharply, instantly running over to the front door, “What was that?”

Bela let out a high-pitched keening noise as she fell to the floor, rocking back and forth with her arms squeezing tightly around her head and fingers digging through her hair, pulling and massaging at the scalp, trying to quell the sudden onslaught of agonizing, searing spasms across her entire body as her insides felt like they were scalded and dunked in ice-water repeatedly. She gasped for breath as she jerked against the cold hardwood, body betraying every stab of pain against her skull, her feet, her chest tightening in a vice-like grip as visions flashed across her retina. Her brother sprawled on the street. His body, twisted, his eyes, wide and unseeing, his neck—

“Luke, it’s Luke!” she screamed, as her mother frantically wrapped her arms around her to stop her writhing.

A distant melody built up, harsh and grating even as she covered her ears.

“What, Bela? What about Luke? Bela!”

A thin sheen of sweat had begun to build up on her mother’s forehead as her face paled, so similar to how Bela’s had earlier. The sounds of the sirens became louder and louder, climaxing to a full stop as heavy doors opened and slammed shut, and voices rose in tandem, barking out orders for equipment.

Bela strained to lift her head to watch her dad drop to his knees by the pavement where the sidewalk ended. A small sing-a-long toy that could have distracted a child unaware of his surroundings was scattered by the gutter. Her body wracked with sobs as the last clenches of pain fizzled out to leave her feeling empty and hollow. All at once, she became cognizant of what had transpired and what had happened to her brother.

“H-help him, Mom! Please!”

It was too late.

Bela watched a small figure draped in white cloth being lugged into an ambulance, her parents following suit. Her neighbors were out and muttering to themselves. “That poor boy,” Bela heard from a woman rubbing the side of a young girl’s arm. Bela’s favorite neighbor, Miss Mindy, crouched down in front of her, cupping Bela’s cheeks in her cool hands.

“Luke is going to be okay,” she said, and she seemed to really believe it. But Bela knew, even if no one else did for certain. Bela knew it was too late, and she knew Luke was dead. Bela shook her head: slowly, at first, but gradually faster and faster.

She felt it again.

A violent thudding in her heart, a shadow creeping up her spine, and an ache spreading all the way down to her toes.

Bela grabbed Miss Mindy’s arm and buried her head in her shoulder, letting herself cry for a few moments. The ache of yet another death passed, but she held on a bit longer. These connections between the overwhelming pain Bela had felt and the deaths of people she knew—Bela couldn’t understand why this was happening.

And whose death did she just experience? Who was next?

Miss Mindy hustled her back into the house. Bela sniffled, setting the turned-over chair back to rights. Sitting next to the phone, Bela stared numbly at the walls, gruesome scenes still playing in her head. After an indeterminate amount of time—just enough for Miss Mindy to brew some soothing tea—the phone rang. Bela already knew the message, but she picked up, hoping for the best.

“Bela, darling,” her mother sobbed, a painful shadow of her words when her teacher had passed, “Luke… Luke is gone.”

Bela howled.

A glowing dome of light spread from across town, centered on the gurney that Luke lay upon. Bela gasped as she dried her tears. She could feel that Luke was back. Somehow, a miracle had happened and Luke was back. She sprinted in the direction of the glowing lights until she finally arrived at the hospital. Many others were already crowded around the entrance of the hospital, as they had also followed the lights. However, the police were at the doors, blocking spectators from entering. Bela weaved through the crowd and ducked under the arms of the police.

“Hey, kid! Wait!” one of the policemen yelled after her.

Bela didn’t wait. She couldn’t. She ran inside and up the stairs, panting. Bela checked every room on every floor, hoping to see Luke. Finally, on the third floor, in the first room, there he lay. Luke’s eyes were closed. A nurse and her family surrounded the cot that Luke lay on, staring in shock at the heartbeat monitor.

“How is he?” Bela pleaded. “He’ll be okay, right?”

“Y-yeah, he should be?” the nurse said. “But we’ll have to continue monitoring him…”

“What happened?” Bela asked, looking at Luke, who seemed as if he were simply asleep. As if he hadn’t died just a while ago.

“It was a true medical miracle!” Bela’s mom said excitedly. “His heart stopped, and then it started again!” She continued, “No defibrillator necessary!”

Bela stood on the spot, gaping in shock. She knew Luke was dead—she had felt it! But how had he come back to life? Whatever the case, she couldn’t think about it too much since Luke soon woke up. Although Luke was supposed to stay and be monitored, it was clear that he was better as he ran and jumped around his hospital room, so he was soon discharged.

After Luke almost died, Bela never felt the death of anyone else again. However, Luke seemed to occasionally get chills, break down, and have other symptoms similar to the ones Bela had. Bela sometimes wonders if he was still injured from then, or if maybe, her curse was passed forward.