Being able to see six minutes into the future had never proved a useful skill. Sure, she could tell if a film was going to be worth leaving, or a TV show worth switching off, but only six minutes before it started, and only if the first six minutes were just that bad.
Kate mostly just used it to avoid meeting people in the corridor at work whenever she popped out for a coffee. The removal of that needless small talk was some comfort in her day.
There was that time she’d managed to stop herself getting run over by the number 23 bus, and the time she could dump a worthless partner six minutes before they could pull the pin themselves. And there were times when she needed money and could pop into the betting shop and make some seemingly daft bets on horse races. Not too often, else she got banned.
It was no good for the lottery either. They stopped selling tickets long before the draw.
So, she never wanted for money, not really, and she didn’t have to do the small talk. It wasn’t enough for such a super power though.
She played around with it, just for her own amusement, blowing people’s minds, when six minutes after she said something like “wouldn’t it be weird if Marcus spilt his coffee in Helen’s trifle?” that that exact thing then transpired.
She’d learned not to overuse the trick though, because it freaked people out enough if done too much that they then stopped talking to her.
Predicting plot twists became too easy.
Knowing the final score a bit in advance took the edge off penalty shoot outs.
As far as she could tell, the best thing about it was never stubbing her toe.
Sometimes, she considered confiding in someone about her power, but every time she decided to do that, she looked ahead, saw the look on their faces, and thought it best not to bother.
And now, six minutes from her death, knowing it was coming, and knowing there was nothing she could do to stop it, she looked back for once.
Looked back at all the times she’d done the other thing, to avoid the initial bad, instead of the thing she wanted to do. Knowing that six minutes into her first audition she would be dismissed with vitriol by a casting director who later turned out to be an idiot, well, that just meant she never became the actor that she had always wanted to be.
That was the biggest choice, but the past was littered with so many other examples.
With five minutes to go, Kate knew she was going to pass never having been happy.
She never saw that coming.
