Sometimes we wonder what made our lives the way they were—the pains we felt, the horrors we experienced—are they because of our own faults, or is it because of something else?
Jake was never graced with an answer all his life, as all the bad luck flooded him right from the moment he was born up until the day that he died, struck by lightning on a rainy night.
[....]
The cold emptiness of the surroundings clung to Jake's skin, making his hairs stand on edge. His eyes fluttered up, his fuzzy gaze struggling to see clearly.
"Where am I? Didn't I get struck by lightning?" he asked himself. He looked around him; he was seated on a dark brown wooden chair, a spotlight was cast over him.
He looked down at his feet and saw a patterned black and white tile floor. His eyes moved from the floor to his feet and legs. He was still in the black tracksuit and white shoes that he had been wearing moments before his death.
Looking up, he tried to see what was in the distance, but all he saw was utter darkness, filled with nothing but a cold atmosphere that he couldn't really put his finger on how it felt.
"Is this the afterlife? Or am I in some sort of hallucination?"
As he asked himself that question, screens suddenly appeared all around him from top to bottom. The sudden appearance of all the screens shocked him, frightened him even, but there was nowhere to run.
He sat there, his hands grabbing the bottom of the chair so tight that his fingers went numb. He looked at the screens with uncertainty, but the moment he saw what those screens showed, his demeanor changed, his face went dark, and he felt a blockage in his throat.
The screens held everything that had happened to him for the past sixteen years of his life, every negative event that had followed him from his onset.
His eyes locked on one of the screens, his body slowly trembling as he was forced to watch this. He saw a woman on a hospital bed, singing a lullaby to a baby wrapped in her arms.
Her beautiful coffee-brown hair was the same as the boy's; their eyes resonated with each other. Her gaze was soft, her voice as beautiful as an angel.
She sang with so much love and joy, rocking the baby in her arms. Jake watched that scene. He knew the baby in her arms—after all, it was him, the day he was born, and the day he cursed to no end.
The reason for that? It came from what happened next. The phone at the side of the bed suddenly rang. His mother glanced at it as it buzzed relentlessly on the table, so she stretched out and carried the phone.
She glanced at the screen and saw an unknown number. She furrowed her brows, unsure. She decided to pick the call. She put the phone against her ear, and in the next moment, her face froze, her eyes widened, and her body began trembling.
Her breathing became sharp and scattered, her heart rate spiked. The shock of the news that came through that phone caused her to hyperventilate.
Soon after, she fainted on the bed, and a nurse found her a few minutes later because of the cries that came from the baby. She was rushed, but died soon after.
What news could have caused this? Well, her husband had died in a car crash on his way to the hospital to see their baby. He had been held up at work and only made it out after the baby was born. In his rush to come there, he died.
Jake watched the scene from the screen come to an end and begin again. He didn't remember that scene, but he was told the story by the nurse that had adopted him before she died as well, from brain cancer.
Jake watched the rest of the scenes that played out on the screen, all of them about the things that happened in his life—all his negative happenings.
Jake closed his eyes. "Why? Why are you showing me this? Isn't it enough that you put me through all of it? Why do you have to show it all to me again?" Jake yelled, saliva spewing from his mouth as he yelled, tears streaming down his eyes.
"Why, why, why? Why are you doing this to me?" he yelled.
Suddenly, he felt a warm hand touch his face. His first instincts were to run, but the warmth was so comforting that he couldn't move away.
"I'm sorry for making you relive the pain that made you miserable, but I believe it was necessary for what I'm about to tell you," a soft voice reached his ears, a voice so comforting and beautiful that it calmed his raging heart.
He slowly opened his eyes. He looked up, and his gaze laid on the face of a beauty unlike anything he had seen before. A face as white as pearls, silver hair that seemed like a treasure.
Wearing a gown as black as night that covered everything aside from her fair hands and face. Jake looked at her with eyes of a lost puppy.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I'm Karma, Fate, the holder of balance as you know it, and also the one responsible for all you went through," she said. Her eyes fell to the ground as a wave of guilt washed over her face.
"What do you mean the one that is responsible for what happened to me?" Jake asked.
"That's because I made a mistake the day you were born. In every world, one person who is extremely evil all their life is chosen to bear the majority of all the bad luck of that world.
Those people are called conduits, and they bear the bad luck of the world, because bad luck in a world always overshadows the good luck and good karma. And so once in every hundred years, that person is chosen to take it all to keep the balance.
That person was in the same hospital as you that day, but something went wrong, and you became the conduit." Her voice faltering.