The Black Fortune

We found it when we were kids. The locket, heavy and warm no matter the temperature outside, was in a shoebox that contained several packets of ancient soy sauce, a newspaper article about the opening of a big box store in the late 1980s, and a toy dinosaur I vaguely recall pulling out of a Happy Meal. My parents weren't hoarders but they were sentimental and disorganized; I could picture them dumping out the contents of the junk drawer and putting them into another box just in case.

I never asked either of them if they knew where the locket came from. They weren't so disorganized that they would put something with actual monetary value in the no man's land of the attic, and my mother kept her necklaces in a tangled and chaotic heap in a souvenir jewelry box. Besides, I knew it didn't belong to my mother. If it had there would have been nicks and dents, and the chain would have knots, but beyond that, I just knew. I knew the heart-shaped locket with its intricate filigree and tiny jewels came from Elsewhere, as did the contents. There were no contents at that time, however. Those wouldn't come until much later.

We learned how the locket worked through trial and error. At first, it was just a wardrobe piece for sleepovers and tea parties, hung on the necks of dolls and stuffed animals. The oldest among us was 10, and we didn't think much of its peculiar and ever-present warmth. Maybe we were too heedless to care, or maybe we simply accepted it was magic. In hindsight, it was probably a little bit of both. I often wonder what would have happened if Melanie hadn't had it around her neck at midnight during a sleepover when it burned so hot against her chest she let out a yelp and quickly took it off. We had opened and closed the locket hundreds of times. It had always been empty, but Melanie said it felt heavy all of a sudden; significantly heavy, like a weight around her neck. At this point in our lives, it didn't seem unnatural, at least not in a bad way. A magical locket that burned hot at midnight was just about the coolest thing we could have imagined, and that it may contain something where there had only been empty space, something that came from Elsewhere, made the adventure that much sweeter. When Melanie opened the locket there was a tiny piece of red parchment about the size of a fortune cookie fortune but much finer in texture. It contained a website for our local museum and a name: Quincy Bones.

We all knew what it meant. Our little town was abuzz with an archaeological exhibit featuring dinosaur fossils that were slowly making their way throughout the United States (it's probably why my parents saved the toy dinosaur--the exhibit was a really big deal at the time), and there was a raffle attached to it. Name the biggest dinosaur, and appear on an episode of Scales and Tails, a popular educational television program for kids. With shaking hands, Melanie brought up the website and entered the name "Quincy Bones" into the online raffle. It was difficult for all of us to fall asleep that night, but life went on and we put the locket back in its place of honor around the neck of my teddy bear until the raffle drawing occurred and "Quincy Bones" was selected out of thousands of entries. Scales and Tails paid for Melanie's entire family to travel to Los Angeles and be part of a live audience. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the surprise vacation other than the name having been inspired by a magical locket, and while we kept our parents in the dark (who would have believed us even if we didn't?), it wasn't out of fear. We just knew grown-ups wouldn't understand.

After the Bones incident, we became obsessed with figuring out the locket. At first, we had another sleepover and opened it at midnight. Nothing. Then we tried to open it in conjunction with using an Ouija board, which resulted in an empty locket and the six of us staring at each other as the planchette stayed resolutely still. To this day we still don't know exactly how it works, though when it does work it is always at midnight, and it occurs more often during a period of heightened excitement, change, or crossroads. It does not seem to be affected by dates associated with mysticism like solstices or Halloween, but it will always deliver on a birthday. We came to understand that certain gifts were associated with certain colors--green parchment usually meant prosperity, like winning lottery numbers or the location of a missing object that came with a reward (I myself got $800 for the safe return of a cat). Red was usually something fun, generally related to a contest, and had our parents paid more attention they may have realized that our social circle won more than our fair share of trips to Disney and free concert tickets. Sometimes there was no paper at all; we were all surprised when we opened the locket on Anna's birthday and found a tiny pink pill. Anna was afraid to take it (who could blame her?) but at that point, the locket had never done us wrong, so she swallowed the pill and dreamed of riding a talking elephant through a pink jungle where she snacked on strange fruit and flew on the back of a great bird.

It was Sasha's 13th birthday when the locket burned hot around her neck at midnight. Our friendship was becoming strained due to attending separate schools, family upheavals, and growing pains, but we always made sure to be together when one of us had a birthday. Some fear had seeped in--we knew now how very unnatural the locket was--but it had never done us harm. I wish I knew if the first black fortune was a result of puberty or negative energy, or if we had been protected by our youth and innocence. All I can tell you is Sasha pulled the black parchment out of the locket and read 5-28-1997: Ovarian Cancer.

It was the first time the locket foretold a death. At first, we wondered if it meant we could give someone cancer on that date, an enemy perhaps. We were used to having to participate in order to reap the benefit of the lockets. In fact, when the green parchment was a small number, maybe the name of a scratch-off ticket with a $2 reward, we ignored it without any consequences (well, aside from missing out on $2). We all agreed that when May 28th came, no matter how much we hated someone, we would not inflict such a fate on them. Sasha was more solemn than her usual self for some time, but as the years went on and the locket issued no other black fortunes, she was able to compartmentalize that when she was 13-years-old she opened a magical locket and was given a death date. So good at it she was that when she began to experience symptoms of an illness, she hardly gave it any thought. Eventually, however, she could no longer ignore the mysterious "bug", and, well, you probably know what happened. We wanted to be with her at the end, but Sasha would have none of it. She had always been stoic; always had suffered in silence. When my phone rang on May 28th of 1997, I knew it was the call.

Sasha was 16 when she passed, and while she didn't leave a will, she left a long, handwritten list of wishes and envelopes for each of us containing the same instruction: "Don't use it. You don't want to know." I had been given something extra--the responsibility of keeping the locket, and Sasha's diary. We had all agreed to let Sasha hold onto it as the illness ravaged her body. You might think we wouldn't want to saddle her with a cursed object when she was already so sick, but you have to realize that until then, the necklace had always helped us. We were hopeful that it would give her a cure. Maybe the name of a medicine, or a doctor in another country. Unfortunately, as time went on we realized the black fortunes were irreversible.

After Sasha died, I became the unofficial keeper of the locket. Life happened, death happened, the passing of time happened, and the locket sat unworn and unused. I regarded it the way one may regard a bomb, which is why I had the responsibility of caring for it. Though the four of us kept the existence of the locket a secret, and though we tried our best to live our lives without it, we all had a gamble that was worth the risk. There were risky pregnancies, lost jobs, financial devastation, extramarital affairs, illnesses, and other crises.

I always got the locket back, and one way or another I knew it had worked it's strange magic. Melanie had borrowed it when the pandemic left her family on the brink of homelessness. When she gave it back, she was driving a luxury SUV. A lotto win, I thought, or an inheritance. Emily wasn't so lucky. She brought it back grim-faced and stopped communicating with us entirely. Months later, she committed suicide. A black fortune, then. Perhaps it foretold her own death, or the death of a loved one.

Perhaps it told her what it told me the last time it burned hot. Today's date, and five words: "Bomb. No survivors. The End." It would do me no good to fight it. I tried. I tried to end my life, as Emily had, but the gun jammed, the razor was dull, and the pills didn't work. I could have jumped from a building; hell, I could have set myself on fire, only to be left alive and in pain. The black fortunes are irreversible.

I sit in the living room with my cat, and I wait for the end, and let out a small whimper as I wait for the bang.