Anybody who knew her would tell you what a truly nice person she was.
However, there was this singularly persistent weakness; this one fault, like a flaw in a diamond. She was, and always had been, truly naïve. This propensity to believe everything she was told or read had so often caused a problem. However, her personable nature together with her natural charm had always lessened the impact of it. This being the case, her tendency towards gullibility, had always been offset by those who knew her showing their understanding, and so the abnormal quirkiness was mostly allowed to pass with little comment.
On the day that it happened, she was sitting in her dentist’s waiting room, along with several others; they were obviously running behind. She was giving up part of her lunch break to get her regular check-up. Her boss was strict about timekeeping and she had to keep an eye on the clock. It was then that she read it. She had picked up a current copy of the local newspaper from the magazine table and to her great astonishment, found herself reading her obituary. There it was, as large as life in black and white, all correctly spelt, with the obligatory ‘untimely taken from us’, at the end, in a light script text. At first she simply sat in a daze.
After a spell of deep contemplation, she got up quietly, still clutching the paper, and left. Outside, she crossed over to the park and found that her favourite bench was unoccupied. She sat reading it again. At first glance, there was no mention of how she had died. She read through several entries before finding a second, lengthier description. According to this she had been hit and run down by a car in this very town. It took a long time and a lot of deliberation and logical analysis of the situation to make a decision; breaking with this habit of a lifetime, this hindering tendency of believing everything regardless.
She wasn’t dead. She obviously wasn’t dead. What the paper said was plain wrong. She said this softly to herself. In fact, she felt that the paper should be held accountable for printing these things without checking. Their office was only a block away. If she hurried, she could go there straight away and confront them with their mistake, and still return to the office in good time.
Naturally, it goes without saying, that she never saw the car coming…