This is the 71st installment of a 100-day challenge to write a new vignette every morning.
He realized there had been several deaths on this road but his concern rose when he saw the exact number: 37. His birthday—March 7.
Ricky had never really been a superstitious person. Black cats, salt, ladders—he’d found it all silly, at best, and devastatingly stupid, at worst. He knew people searched for connections, and he knew the word for all that: apophenia. That’s all superstition was. Apophenia.
Still, he avoided the road. That number alone would mean nothing, but in the past few weeks, local news outlets—and even a couple national outlets—had picked up a peculiar connection: Every person who had died on the road died when the death toll was equal to their date of birth. True, the news stations had discovered the pattern via a Tweet chain from a well-known conspiracist, but that didn’t make the whole thing less odd.
Or concerning.
He avoided the road—until he couldn’t. A detour redirected him one rainy Thursday afternoon, and he didn’t realize until it was too late. Everything was fine for the first few miles; road conditions seemed decent, and the sun had even begun to emerge.
Maybe that was the problem, though. He glanced up at the sun, scolding himself for being superstitious.
He only took his eyes off the road for a second—a fraction of a second, really—but when he looked back down, he saw only headlights.
Days later, he woke in the hospital and learned the other driver—someone who happened to share his birthday—didn’t make it.
Miles Away 