Speak by Ruby Darling

Raven Monroe
I think I always knew I was going to die young. Like I had this… silent, invisible clock ticking down to my final moments plastered above my head. Maybe that’s why I was so reckless, crazy. Why I sought after adventure. Why nothing scared me… Except, there was always this… feeling I couldn’t shake that something was in the darkest parts of every corner, under every bed, closet, or room, like a ghost watching me. Waiting to take me. My own, personal reaper.
But it was always only during a lightning storm that I could see the outline of my reaper. No scythe. Just a tall, faceless shadow in a hood, staring at me in the dark…
That was the thing though. It was never the storm itself that scared me. Never the loud booming of thunder. Never the howling wind or the way the windows rattled. Never the sound of rain pounding against said windows. It was just that goddamn lightning.
Seems fitting, I suppose, that I’d die before my twentieth birthday during a freak lightning storm of the century… I just always thought I’d die while doing something dangerous – F*ck it. I’d even take a boring death like simply dying in my sleep from a brain aneurysm or even an early onset heart attack.
Anything.
I’d take any other way other than this…