Dark Prophecy

flip, flip, flip, boredom, early in the morning, the day after Christmas. the channels go by quicker than the memories of life from a death bed. i stop on the Montel Williams Show mostly out of thumb fatigue. i see a-pain-faced woman speaking about the recent unsolved murder of her father. coincidentally it's the story of my uncle Hal and the woman, Nicole, is the grown-up version of my cousin Nikki. until this moment, i haven't seen her since she was the tom-boy who tried to show me how to bait a fishing line by grabbing a live worm and stabbing through it twice with the hook in different places to keep the worm from falling off while it was in the water. i was too squeamish to do it myself. a wimpy boy in her ten-year-old eyes. we were visiting the Florida town they lived in during a rare Christmas vacation. although she told me i would see her again as we hugged goodbye, i never thought i would because she lived across the country. now i have seen her, this morning, exactly 19 years to the day, under the worst circumstances i could think of, but she was right in her now dark prophecy.