A PREDICTION OF JANE — KEVIN BAKER
/There will be a girl. She’ll be called Jane. She’ll dream of being a dancer, and waitress to get by.
When she’s twenty-five, Jane will meet a boy. He’ll be called David. He’ll dream of becoming a rock star, and wash dishes to get by.
Jane will talk to David at his station. They’ll flirt a little and nearly get together at a Christmas party. For the next few months they’ll dance around the possibility, like Ross and Rachel from a show called Friends. (This show will be very popular – so popular that it will continue playing in a loop until the end of time.)
One day Jane will say to David:
“Old people love my hair. That’s two tables today who have said so. Do old people ever say that to you?”
(They will both have red hair, though Jane’s will be the reddest, tumbling like autumn from her head.)
“No,” David will say, “they normally just say, ‘Get off my lawn,’ or ‘Stop doing that to my dog.’”
Jane won’t say anything, and for the rest of the day David will be worried that he ruined his chances with a stupid joke.
Jane and David will marry two years later, then separate amicably in their mid-forties. David will be bald by then, and Jane will be turning grey.
Ross and Rachel will marry 1.2 million times before the sun explodes.
Kevin Baker is a writer and musician currently based in Korea. He's a regular contributor to the arts magazine Retroussage, and his work has appeared in Adbusters and The Island Review among others. He is currently working on a novel.
