The Same Thing Could Happen to You

"I thought you only did this kind of thing for world-class jerks," you say to the hooded figure who seems intent on hovering just behind your left shoulder. It's terrifying. The worst part is, he won't even speak to you. "I thought Scrooge was fiction. Why don't you give a reality TV producer a lesson so he can warn the public? Hey, you could re-boot This Is Your Life! Did you ever see that show?" Silence.

"No?" The two of you whirl through a blur of snow and street lamps and Christmas lights and restaurant signs. You feel no cold, but you're moving quickly through the air. He's taking you somewhere, and you wonder, what's it going to be next? And also, what did I do to deserve this? You're not sitting on some fortune that you choose not to share. You're not a criminal or a mother or anything else that would seem to warrant such an ordeal. You're just an ordinary woman. A secretary. Unmarried. Just...normal. Just fine.

The ghost of Christmas past took you to see your parents John and Linda in their mid-teens, they spent one of their earliest Christmases talking over the possibility of how they were going to handle having a child. It took you a full minute to realize that they were talking about you. You were on the way, the product of a rushed relationship forged in the place where your parents met. A rehabilitation center for drug addiction and depression, a dorm-like building with white walls and fluorescent lighting. Now that's a part of the story you never knew. While your mother sobbed to your father as both of them sat with legs crossed on her top bunk, she kept touching her stomach too high when she talked about being pregnant, not where her womb would be, but where her actual stomach was. You saw the agony and fear on her face and you felt her love for you, electric and firing like a gun through her bloodstream. You never believed her when she told you how much she loved you, now you know.

The ghost of Christmas present took you to visit the home of your one and only sister across town. Prudence married young and she was the picture of an amazing wife and mother enjoying a home and a family. But you saw a different picture. The one painted while she stays up late at night every night, bathing in the warm glow of television and capturing the few hours when the children are quiet, always falling asleep on the couch at three or four in the morning. She watches TV on demand and DVDs from the library and Netflix and she pretends that the leading men are always looking at her. That she is the one set on course for an adventure or a romantic comedy or a Diane Keatonesque career path. Prudence has the depression your mother carried and it sits in her center like a heavy black rock and she doesn't know what to do about it. All she knows is what she wants, some kind of change. Some kind of break from making lunches for her husband and children, from dusting and mopping, and that if she doesn't get it, her life is going to be drained from her slowly over the years like water from a bucket until only the black rock remains.

The ghost of Christmas future brings you to the Costco on Twelfth Avenue, his bony finger points at an old man cruising the soup aisle. Most people go around him with their carts and give him a dirty look for going so slow. Somehow, you just know his name is Lenny, though he is a stranger. And you also know that he's been widowed for three years. That he held his wife's hand as she died of breast cancer, and that the paper thin skin on her hand and her faint heartbeat were all that tethered him to this world. When she slipped away, he wanted to fly off with her.

She made him promise to eat well after she was gone and the most he can muster is to heat a can of soup on the stove. Picking out a new kind of soup every couple of weeks is one of the only things he gets excited about in life anymore.

You feel pretty sad about it and turn to face death straight in the hood. "Is that it? I mean, I'll definitely give to the local food pantry now. Maybe I can even volunteer?" He points again to the aisle where Lenny is, and all of the sudden there is a woman with a sleek blonde bob wearing a knitted pink sweatsuit, pushing a squeaking cart right past him. She flashes poor old Lenny an angry look and he pretends not to see her, knowing he can't go any faster than he already is. She parks her cart in front of his as he gets up close to the soup cans to read them. He lifts his glasses slightly, picks up a can, and then holds it out at arm's length. The blonde sighs loudly and says, "Listen mister, I've got a dinner party to throw a few hours from now and a Martha Stewart recipe to get cracking on."

"A party, eh? You got family coming into town?" he asks pushing his glasses back into position.

The blonde yells, "No I don't. We don't all have to get together for an Osmond family Christmas for it to be the holidays. I'm having my boss and his wife over, okay? I didn't come here to play 'adopt an old person', I just need two cans of chicken broth which you happen to be standing directly in front of. Comprende?" She drums her acrylic nails on the handle of her cart during the long pause that follows as Lenny tries to decide whether or not he heard her correctly. He says nothing, he just stares at her.

She rolls her eyes, "Oh. My. God. Forget it, I'll run over to Wal-Mart. I had to go pick up some napkin rings anyway." Lenny's heart beats quickly as he watches her walk away. Every day he hopes that someone will talk to him. The mailman, a neighbor, someone at the grocery store and every day he is ignored, and standing there with the icy breeze rolling gently off of your tall, dark and silent host, you know (the way you knew Lenny's wife died of cancer) that Lenny wants to kill himself. You know he won't, but he wants to, which might just be a little bit worse. The blonde didn't know it, but she held hope for Lenny. The hope of an invite to dinner, the hope of making a friend, and the hope of having something to do other than watch TV for a night. She comes walking by you at a brisk pace, and as she passes by, you get a good look at her face. It's you. You look like a desperate housewife, botoxed and spackled into oblivion.

It rolls over you like a horrible wave. In the future, you will turn into a waste of space. One of those women who refuses to age gracefully, who dresses like a teenager, who takes to tacky clothes and jewelry and accessories. Who thinks only of herself.

You process the whole scene. You must not be rich or you wouldn't be doing your own shopping. The whole thing strikes you as curious. "Aren't you supposed to show me my gravestone or something? Why this?" You turn to face the ghost of Christmas past who really resembles death. You're beginning to suspect that the two are one and the same. There's a muffled rumble that comes from the center of his being, it travels up to his head like water through a pipe and you can hear it the whole way. He's finally going to speak.

"There are worse things than death."

You can't take it anymore. None of this makes sense to you, "But what will you give me to do about all this? I can't go back in time and fix my mother, I can't force my sister to do something about her depression, and I certainly don't know how to stop that man's wife of dying from breast cancer. I don't have gold coins to throw around at street urchins on Christmas morning or a big turkey to deliver to the Cratchets. I can't even afford my own turkey. I don't have wealth. I don't have anything. I'm just a secretary, what do you want from me?"

Death shakes his head like something is a shame and vanishes.