Before the Hammer

I knew my wife was going to kill me because I'd already watched her do it 174 times.

Every vision ended the same way.

Clara standing over me.

Crying.

A hammer in her hand.

Then darkness.

I've been seeing the future since I was ten. Not predicting it, remembering it. A teacher collapsing in class. A gas leak. My father's heart attack.

Every memory came true.

Every single one.

That's why the hammer terrified me.

I tried everything.

Hotels.

Sleeping in my car.

But, every night, the same memory arrived.

Clara crying.

Hammer.

Darkness.

At first she was concerned.

Then she became frightened.

Not frightened for me.

Frightened of me.

I noticed the way she'd flinch when I entered a room unexpectedly.

The way she'd hide her phone screen.

The way she'd lock the bedroom door when she thought I was asleep.

I knew what she was planning.

The future had already shown me.

"You need help," she said one night.

I laughed. "I know exactly what's going to happen."

Her face fell.

Like I'd confirmed something.

After that, she started making calls behind closed doors.

I stopped sleeping.

If the future came in my sleep, then sleep was the problem.

Three days. Then four.

By the sixth day, I was seeing things.

A little girl standing in the hallway.

A man sitting at my kitchen table.

Faces I didn't recognize.

Except somehow I did.

They looked terrified of me.

On the seventh night, Clara found me sitting on the floor with a knife.

"I won't let you do it," I told her.

She started crying immediately.

Not angry tears.

Defeated tears.

The same tears from the vision.

My stomach dropped.

For a moment, I wondered if I'd misunderstood something.

Then another memory surfaced.

Not tomorrow.

Yesterday.

Me screaming at Clara while she backed into a corner.

Another.

A nurse with bruises on her wrist.

Another.

Two men holding me down while I fought them.

The memories kept coming.

Not future memories.

Past ones.

Hundreds of them.

Every time I started seeing the future.

Every time I became obsessed.

Every time I stopped sleeping.

Every time I became convinced someone was trying to kill me.

The hammer.

The darkness.

The fear.

It had happened before.

Not once.

Dozens of times.

A sound came from behind Clara.

Two men stepped into the hallway.

Orderlies.

I knew them.

Or rather, I remembered them.

Clara's voice was shaking.

"Please."

The hammer trembled in her hand.

And suddenly I realized something that the visions had never shown me.

She wasn't holding the hammer like a weapon.

She was holding it like a frightened person holds the only thing between themselves and a dangerous animal.

One of the orderlies took a cautious step forward.

"Sir, we're going to help you."

I tightened my grip on the knife.

And that's when the final memory arrived.

The one thing the future had been trying to show me all along.

Not Clara killing me.

Not my death.

Just the last thing I saw every time before I attacked someone.

Clara looked at the knife.

Then at me.

And in a voice that sounded exhausted from saying it over and over again, she whispered:

"Don't make us do this again."