This was written to a prompt about a machine that can predict how you’ll die.
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You know how you say things like “If I have to wear these shoes one more time I’m just going to die” or “It’s really going to kill me if stirrup pants come back”? Well, that’s kind of what happened to me.
Everyone was talking about the Machine of Death, reading their results to each other, trying to figure out what they meant, arguing about whether it was possible to cheat fate or postpone the inevitable. Now, when you hear that a machine is going to tell you how you’ll die, you have certain expectations about what that answer is going to look like. And some of them were pretty much what we expected: heart attack, house fire, gunshot, rare tropical disease. With answers like that, you could at least imagine the situation, and then it was just a question of whether there was some way to outrun it. Like, if you had fire extinguishers in every room and replaced your gas stove with an electric one, would that save you?
Some answers were kind of comforting, but even those produced a certain amount of anxiety. My friend Sally, for instance, got “old age,” which made her happy until she remembered her underfunded pension. Some of the answers turned out to be a little bit less transparent than they’d originally appeared. My cousin Gloria’s read “hit while riding a bicycle,” which she assumed meant “hit by a motor vehicle while riding a bicycle,” so she vowed never to ride on the street again. It turned out, though, that it meant “hit in the head by a softball while riding along a bikes-only path.”
Yolanda’s answer was particularly obscure: just the word “family.” Did that mean one of her juvenile delinquent nephews was going to kill her? That she’d catch something from her sister, who worked at a day care center and seemed to bring home every bug that passed through it? Was there some hidden genetic anomaly she didn’t know about? Or was it more global, like her family would cause her so much stress that she’d die? She finally decided she might give herself a stroke just trying to figure out what the answer meant and resigned herself to knowing pretty much what we all knew before the MOD was invented: that eventually she’d die.
I didn’t find that attitude very satisfying. Sure, humans had managed to live for millennia knowing nothing more than that about their upcoming demises. But like most people I knew, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to find out more. I mean, if the answer was out there, why not get it?
So I made an appointment and went in to get my prediction. I told myself I was just curious, that I didn’t necessarily even believe the machine was accurate. After all, it’d only been in operation for a few months and Gloria was the only person I knew who’d actually died since then, so even though that meant the MOD was one for one in my social circle, this seemed like too small a sample to extrapolate from. And my suspicion that this whole thing might be an elaborate hoax seemed to be confirmed when I got my answer: “Fashion Disaster.”
Seriously, I thought. How could that even happen? I immediately thought of complaints like “These pants are so tight they’re killing me,” but I couldn’t see how even the worst outfit in the world or the stupidest moment in the history of style could literally kill me. Still, better safe than sorry, so I went home, made myself a martini, and sat down at the kitchen table, trying to imagine potentially lethal clothing. What about a sudden craze for long trains on something besides bridal gowns? I thought. That would be have some serious Isadora Duncan potential. I could think of lots of designs that involved trailing fabric or extra-long shoelaces or leather straps that could choke or trip me or leave me hanging upside down from something. I got so excited about this that I started to imagine opening a consulting business to advise designers on how to make their clothes not kill people.
I forced myself back to the task at hand, making a list on the back of the envelope from my Macy’s bill: untied shoelaces, extra-long scarves, floor-length skirts, shawls with excessive fringe, shoes with heels over 6”, trains. Pointy jewelry, I wrote, imagining some sort of stabbing incident involving oversized brooches or earrings that sliced into my jugular. Vision-obscuring hats, scarves, veils, hairstyles, etc. The return of tight-lacing.
For the next decade I took every precaution I could think of, double-checking for safety each time I experimented with a new design trend to make sure there weren’t any dangly bits or sharp edges or tight parts. Even though I longed for a pair, I passed up the fad for Special Edition Converse sneakers with four overlapping sets of shoelaces.
By then, though, we’d all realized that the MOD was pretty damned accurate. There were signs that you might be able to postpone the inevitable, but you clearly couldn’t evade it, and even the strangest predictions were turning out to match people’s deaths in uncanny ways. It wasn’t exactly like the Greek oracles’ tricks, where they told you something that seemed to make perfect sense and then 20 years later you discovered that they’d left out the crucial detail about not realizing that beautiful woman you’d just met was your mother. The MOD results were more like reminders that you couldn’t take anything for granted.
Say, for instance, you got a prediction that your death would be caused by “influenza,” so you made absolutely sure to get a flu shot every year, kept up with all the CDC postings about new strains, washed your hands religiously, maybe even wore a surgical mask when you went out in public. But none of that helped if you ended up with a shot from the contaminated batch that was released last year. It might be indirect, it might be statistically unlikely, it might be damned unfair, but you were still dead.
Anyway, I’d come to accept the fact that I wouldn’t be able to outwit “Fashion Disaster” completely, but I figured it didn’t have to happen right away. I still checked my clothes and accessories like Sherlock Holmes and his tobacco ash, and I’d taken to wearing my hair in a short ponytail just to make sure none of it fell across my eyes as I crossed the street in traffic. In the end, though, the inevitable caught up with me.
I was at a friend’s cocktail party and I’d chosen my outfit carefully: a short dress no one could trip over, made of perfectly smooth yellow cotton that wouldn’t catch on anything and would be visible to any driver, motorcycle boots ready to handle any stairway, a tiny clutch bag with no strap to strangle me. It was a look that always worked for me: a little girly, a little punk, and every piece from cool indie designers. I was especially happy because I knew I’d stand out in a crowd caught up in the latest trends, which involved long lacy nouveau hippie dresses that just begged to be snagged on a piece of machinery and irrationally complicated bowties that looked like they’d been deliberately created as choking hazards.
For the first hour of the party things went beautifully. I strolled around the atrium of my friend’s lavish house, always alert for the unexpected but confident that I’d predicted correctly that nothing I wore could trip, catch, or otherwise endanger me. I got dozens of compliments on my outfit and I even caught a few fashionable women examining my spare silhouette from a safe distance, reluctant to admit that they looked slightly ridiculous draped in all that fabric.
Then I saw her. At first I thought I was looking at a distorted reflection of myself in the French doors that led to the garden: a woman in a short yellow dress, motorcycle boots, and a smooth ponytail, glancing confidently around the room, assured of her safety and welcoming admiring glances. But I suddenly realized that although I was standing still, my reflection was moving towards me and in the next second I saw that it was, in fact, another woman, dressed exactly like me, but with an enraged expression and something shiny in her right hand. People stepped back as she closed in on me and the shiny object turned out to be a small paring knife she’d apparently grabbed from the fruit buffet. Before I knew what was happening, she’d slit my throat and I fell to the floor, blood darkening my beautiful dress. Out of the corner of my eye I could see someone tackle her and the last thing I saw was her head hitting the marble floor.
One of the great advantages of having your MOD prediction come true is that you can finally understand exactly what it means. When the police opened her tiny clutch purse—an exact duplicate of my own—they found the familiar slip of paper inside: “Fashion Disaster. ” I bet they found a list on her kitchen table, too: untied shoelaces, extra-long scarves, floor-length skirts, shawls with excessive fringe, shoes with heels over 6”, trains, pointy jewelry. Vision-obscuring hats, scarves, veils, hairstyles, etc. These shoes are killing me. I’ll die if I can’t have that bag.
We’d both forgotten the worst danger for those of us who revel in our own signature style: If I see anyone else wearing this outfit I will kill her.
