Post-Its

You can tell by the post-its. Thousands of them, all carefully stuck to the wall, so close that the intention might have been to mimic wallpaper in a drab yellow sheen. And on each post-it, a name. Carefully written in black, firm block capitals. And every so often along that wall, a hole. A space where faded blue accented with grey patterns show through.

Jacky Adetokunbo couldn't have known about the tiny hole that had opened in her aorta. It felt like heartburn, a condition that Windhoek's temperature and local cuisine made common. She paused by the old bus, pressing her hand to her chest and taking a deep breath, hoping to relieve the discomfort before getting back to her desk. Each beat of her heart, ripped the hole a little wider, until the pressure took over, and the rent opened the near length of the artery. She had only a second to consider something might be wrong, before her lifeless body crashed against the dirty billboard and slid down to crumple beside the bus.

Aharon Sabag was having a good day. He'd only just received the bonus he'd been hoping for, and was walking past the Victoria House on Hayarkon Street musing about the laptop he'd picked out last week. It was a slimline model, so thin that the saleman had bragged that he could slide it between the pages of the siddur without ruffling them. He hadn't decided on the bag though. The look of the black leather was professional, but he took a certain comfort in the more rugged sporty looking one, with the white rubber bumpers and the faux climber hooks. When the car jumped the curb, it caught him between the wall and a streetbox, driving the metal cube through his legs first, before the heavy grill cracked the back of his skull like an egg.

Margaret Mah liked the cat sewn on the front of her jumpers. It had trianglar white ears and a little pink semi-circle of a tongue that she kept poking. Her mother admonished her every time that she plucked at the stitching, but was content to let her pet the fabric face, so long as she didn't tear it off. There was a yellow tom that liked to sneak into their garden from over the wall. Her father said it was a dirty stray, but Margaret secretly snuck out bits of her breakfast to feed it, and laughed when it licked her fingers. The noises made her look up from her cat, and she cried when her mother grabbed her by the arm and pulled her roughly from the chair. Thick smoke was curling from under the door, and the adults were yelling and pushing as they tried to get out into the hallway. One man tried to help make things orderly, but too many forced into the stairwell, trying to escape the blaze on the top two floors. The man in front of her mother slipped, and Margaret lost her grip as they both fell. The crowd behind tried to blindly shove over the obstacle, the pressure snapping her sternum and pushing her ribcage hard against her legs, the cat pressing down until no air was left.

Three post-its came off the wall, and were carefully discarded into a recycling bin. She'd take it out later, once it was a little more full. New slips were being written up by her sister already, working off of the notes that the third furiously compiled on her laptop. They always could be such slobs, if it wasn't for her making sure things got tidied up right away.

That really was the problem with sisters.