He wore a white dress shirt tucked into black slacks. The steel-gray tie knotted too tightly around his neck was purchased by his wife from the sale rack for his fortieth birthday. His neatly trimmed black hair was slicked back smoothly, accentuating his cleanly shaven round face. Martin Johnson was a man of simple tastes. He worked as an accountant on the fifteenth floor of a cookie cutter office building in a big city. He commuted in his white, fuel-efficient sedan to and from his two story suburban house. His favorite food was peanut butter and jelly. Martin kept to himself for the most part, socializing, if you could call it that, with few people other than his wife and his coworkers. His numbers were never off, his files alphabetized, and he never missed a deadline. Wrinkled papers made him cringe, he hasn’t been late to work in thirteen years, and he hasn’t vacationed in even longer. Martin Johnson couldn’t hurt a fly.
His Tuesday began as every other one did, with the buzzing of an alarm at exactly 7 a.m. He was in the shower by 7:05, and dressed, sipping his morning coffee: one cream, one sugar, by 7:25. He punched in at 9:00 a.m.
“Mornin’, Martin.” The all too familiar voice of a boss whom he hated was the first to greet him in the morning.
“Good morning, Mr. Brunning. How are you this morning?” Martin replied upon turning around. Their matching fake smiles screamed, “I couldn’t care less what you have to say,” but the sound of the screaming had drowned itself out over the years. The routine conversation carried on mindlessly as it did every day, and Martin eventually reached his desk and began crunching whatever numbers needed to be crunched that day.
The clock struck noon and Martin ran his fingers through his finely combed hair. Lunch time: a monotonous ninety minute break from the monotony of the work day. Martin clicked in his seat belt and began to venture toward the local Chinese restaurant, the same place he has been for lunch every day since he started at the accounting firm. The restaurant smelled of fried rice and some sorry excuse for chicken, and was more crowded than usual that day. As Martin patiently held his place in line, a finger tapped him on the shoulder. It startled him.
“Who could this be? Nobody from the office comes here for lunch,” he quickly thought to himself before turning around. The finger was connected to a man donning a leather jacket zipped three quarters of the way up, sunglasses, and a baseball hat pulled suspiciously low on his face.
“Hey buddy,” the stranger murmured quickly, “mind if I hop ahead of ya in line? I’m kinda in a rush.”
“Sure,” Martin quietly replied, staying true to his passive nature. The strange man quickly glanced over both shoulders before sliding past Martin for the next spot in line. After ordering his food, he hastily grabbed the greased paper back from the lady behind the counter, and left without talking to anybody. Martin thought nothing of it.
His usual sesame chicken, some fried rice, and an egg roll stared back at him as he excitedly began his lunch. The food was just as awful as it always had been, his surroundings were all the same, but Martin could not help but sense a feeling of peculiarity in the air around him. He shook it off as he finished his meal and wiped his mouth with a napkin. As soon as he was prepared to get up and leave, he realized that his fortune cookie was tucked away underneath the lip of the tray. How could he forget his favorite part? The small slip of paper with some corny one-liner inside every cookie that determined his outlook for the rest of the day. The cookie opened with a crack, but the paper inside did not read its usual Chinese proverb. The blood ran from his face.
"Your life is in danger. Say nothing to anyone. You must leave the city immediately and never return. We’re watching you.”
His body froze, but his mind raced. What? Who wrote this? What did I do?
He frantically rose and headed for the exit. Though nobody seemed to take any notice of Martin, he took notice to all of them. He felt as if all eyes were glued on him. Any of the other ten inconspicuous people standing in the small Chinese restaurant could be responsible for the message. Any of them could know exactly why Martin’s life was in danger, but he was just a small, clueless fish in a large pond. He pushed through the door and made a left. He walked passed his car; it was too obvious to drive away, they would see that coming.
He didn’t want to go anywhere; he was comfortable. He was comfortable with his middle class lifestyle. He was comfortable with his average looking wife. He was comfortable being a stagnant piece in a moving world. His eyes shot side to side and a single bead of sweat streamed down his stone face. He kept a steady pace down the sidewalk, headed to no particular destination, contemplating what his next move will be, like a chess player in a match for his life. Every person he passed was his enemy; every window had a pair of eyes behind it watching him. Then everything went black.
His eyes failed him, but every never ending in his body seared in pain. Consciousness came and went sporadically, until the only thing he could make out was his bare feet resting upon a hospital bed. He could hear two deep voices conversing somewhere near him in the room.
“Yeah, he stepped right off of the corner; clear into traffic. The driver never even saw him coming. God must’ve given him another chance, ‘cause I’ve never seen somebody hit at that speed live to see another day. The freaky thing is though, his body skidded across thirty feet of asphalt, but he managed to hold onto this little fortune from one of those Chinese restaurants. The driver sped away; this was the only evidence at the scene.”
“Live life to the fullest because it only happens once, what a corny fortune,” Martin heard the doctor say aloud.
He went black again. His thoughts were clear, but all sound and what was left to his sight was tuned out. What are they talking about? They must have the wrong fortune! Somebody somewhere wants me dead or gone and they have no idea!
When Martin was finally coherent and able to talk to the doctors and the officer, he never spoke a word of what he read on the fortune. As time passed, he questioned what really happened that fateful Tuesday afternoon. There were days which he almost confessed and pleaded his case about what he knew he saw, and other which he was nearly convinced it was solely a hallucination from that sorry excuse for chicken. But despite all of the bizarre events that took place that day, Martin Johnson realized one thing: his heart beat more in those ten minutes of uncertainty, than in the last forty years of his life which he was certain was just the way he liked it.