“These things always happen in threes,” She said, and wrung out the cloth mask, casting colored droplets into the sink. This mask was tie-dyed. Pink and purple splotches mixed in with a galaxy of green. Arnold wasn’t even sure it was the right kind of cloth. He hadn’t done the research and he knew damn well she hadn’t. His sister wasn’t the research type. She just flipped through her phone to see what everyone else was doing and then found some version of that which worked for her.
Arnold sat on what passed for a couch in what passed for a living room in the cramped studio apartment. He was trying to watch the broadcast of the latest BLM march that’d gone bad, but dammit if Shelley didn’t keep talking. He thought silence my buy him some piece but it never had before. It was better to just answer and get the stupid conversation over with. He said, “What is the 3rd shoe?”
“What?”
“You said these things come in threes, so what is the 3rd shoe?”
“Shoes come in pairs.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So a 3rd shoe doesn’t make any sense. This is not that. What I’m saying is bad things always happen in threes.”
He sighed, turning his attention back to the TV where a reporter (he could tell she was pretty even though he could only see her eyes through the mask and the hood she wore) talked about the march being largely peaceful but both mounted and riot police were feet away ready to ‘enforce the law’. He knew what that actually meant. His dad used to ‘enforce the law’ on him when he was little.
Shelley said, “What I’m trying to get at is something else is gonna happen. Something really big.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Covid-19 and Floyd’s death aren’t even related.”
“I think they are. I really think they are, but they don’t have to be related for a third bad thing to happen. It’s just how things go. Do you remember when Farah Fawcett died? Then Ed McMahon died? We were all just waiting for that 3rd death. I told you then it would be somebody huge and guess what?”
She snapped her fingers so close to his ear that he jumped out his seat. She smiled and said, “Just like that Micheal Jackson died.”
What he wanted to say was, why the fuck did you do that? What he said was, “huh.”
“Huh indeed. So I am waiting for the 3rd bad thing and I think it is gonna be China.”