Counting Down

The second a person is born, a number appears on their arm. Not just any random number like 7 or 23 or 89. It's a number that shows how many years, months, weeks, days, hours, and seconds you have until you meet the one. Your soul mate. Your significant other. There are many different names for it, but they all mean the same thing. When your number reaches zero, you meet them. The one person who completes you. Your other half.

When your a toddler, you don't even notice it. You don't care about the small blue numbers quietly ticking down to nothing.

One thing is very strange though: no one has ever known their soul mate before their time hits zero. The first time you lay eyes on them is when the clock runs out. Nobody knows why.

Something that's really popular now is the Cover. The best way to describe it is like this: if you want it, you can have a weird black square cover your number. You can't take it off once you have it (even if you want to), and when you have about five minutes left on your clock, it falls off.

Your mom told you about how she met your dad. She was 15, and she was in the middle of her gym class when her Cover fell off. The teachers let her leave class and run to the small strip mall across the street. Bad things happened if you tried to stop someone from going somewhere in their last five minutes.

Anyways, your mom told you how nervous and panicked she was. 'What if he doesn't like me?' She kept thinking. People around her noticed how worried she was and they knew what she was going through, so they encouraged her. She told you that she felt the world stop when she saw your father. She never went into much more detail after that.

You turned 16 two weeks ago and you was starting to get worried. People's numbers usually counted down to zero by age 15, yet there you were with that stupid Cover, unable to see how much longer you would have to wait. Your friends had convinced you when you were eleven to get the Cover with them, and (stupidly) you agreed.

You flopped down onto your bed and looked at the blue and brown polka-dotted walls.

'Great. Maybe I will be forever alone,' You sulked to your stuffed bear, Rufus. Usually you wouldn't be inside on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, but all of your friends were out with their soul mates, and you were definitely NOT going to be the third wheel.

Suddenly, you got the strangest craving ever: raspberry ice cream. It was strange because you hate raspberry, and only two shops in town sold it. Sighing, you grabbed your wallet and headed out the door.

As you hopped into your car, a tingling sensation rippled through your body, and your Cover fell off, revealing the numbers 00:00:00:07:43.

"Seven minutes?!" You shrieked and, as if you were trapped in a trance, you pulled out of your driveway and sped towards your favorite ice-cream shop.

You arrived at the shop few minutes later. Since you had four minutes left, you ordered a double scoop raspberry cone and sat at a table while you waited. The girl who was serving you looked up from scooping the ice-cream.

"You nervous?" She asked you and you gave her a fast, jerky nod. The girl giggled and handed the ice cream into your shaking hands. "Don't worry. When it hits zero you'll be happier than you've ever been in your entire life."

You stare and the girl and strangely, you feel comforted by her words. On impulse, you looked down at the tiny blue numbers and gasped.