The Anatomy of Misery, March 1993

Harper Bloomingberry was certain that she would die before the age of 25. As a young child, she forecasted this to anyone who would listen to her. More often than not, the person approached assumed she was suffering from Asperger's or some rare neurological defect that caused her to blurt out such miserable and depressing predictions at awkward and inconvenient times.

She never believed these outbursts to be anything but genuine. Death isn't convenient, she thought to herself. And why should she pretend it is. It seemed to Harper that adults were constantly pretending and until one Tuesday afternoon in March of 1993, she believed they had been pretending for her benefit. Pretending was transposable with protecting in her mind. That must have been what those adults were doing all along.

But it was on this Tuesday that she had very little interest in being protected. She sat on a bench near the Red Road Canal, waiting for her mother to pick her up after school. 3:05 had come and gone. And then 3:30. And then 4:07. And at 4:10PM, an older gentleman took a seat next to her.

"I'll only be here for a minute. I just need to rest my feet," he said.

She stared at the man, unaffected by his hurried nature. She knew who he was. His daughter, a young girl named Allison in the grade above her, had gone missing last year. He was never completely cleared of suspicion.

"You can stay," she said.

"I know you don't want me here. You don't have to act like it's okay. Kids like you--you're all afraid of me now," he responded.

"I'm not afraid of you, Sir."

"You're not?" he asked, surprised at this remark.

"No."

They sat in silence for well over five minutes.

"I'm going to die before I'm 25," Harper said. "It's really nothing to be concerned about. I'm just quite certain that it is going to happen with an automobile and in the countryside, somewhere far from here, where no one will hear my last breaths, and no one will find me for days on end."

"Why would you say such a thing like that?" he asked.

"Because it's the truth."

"It's not the truth. It's a theory. A premonition," he retorted.

"I'm not afraid, Sir."

They sat again in silence and the man wondered if she meant that she was unafraid of death or unafraid of his presence. He supposed that at this point in the conversation, they were perhaps one in the same.

"She said that you taught her how to make little figurines out of copper wire. She said you were brilliant," Harper confessed to the man.

A tear fell down his left cheek and he couldn't bring himself to say anything back.

"I'm sure she misses you," she said.

"What do you know? You're just a child. You don't know--"

"You're right. I am a child," she admitted.

Silence befell them once more.

She raised her voice while getting up to leave. "But at least we don't pretend," she said.

"At least that."