Three Burgers got his food and left, and next up was a woman on her cell phone flanked by two small children – a boy and a girl, both about six years old.

Three Burgers would change anything about his life if he knew he’d be dead in a few years, but I did know that it wasn’t my place to interfere. Knowing when they’d die made it inconvenient to get invested, to say the least, and if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions. I didn’t allow myself to care about the people I was serving. But I had a simple solution to this moral dilemma: to ignore it in hopes that it’d eventually go away. Heart disease was the leading cause of death in America, and yet here I was, working at a fast food place on the outskirts of San Francisco, with the literal ability to see peoples’ age of death, and – in cases like this guy – helping make it happen.įrom a moral standpoint, that might’ve seemed wrong. I was what some might’ve called an enabler. “I’ll take three burgers with an extra order of fries and a large coke, please,” he said. Car wrecks were common, so that guess wasn’t particularly creative. I chewed at my lip, mentally running through potential causes of death. It always had to be the forehead, where I couldn’t avoid it.

No, it couldn’t be on his neck, or chest, or somewhere hidden by clothing. It certainly felt too big to avoid looking at, even as much as I hated seeing it. The number 45 rested there, etched into his skin just an inch from his left temple. Even as he began to give me his order, I couldn’t keep my gaze from darting to his forehead.

His eyes scanned the menu on the dirty wall behind my head as my hands hovered over the cash register in front of me. I feigned a smile at the overweight man who stood on the other side of the counter. “Welcome to Daily Fries, sir, what can I get for you?”

Colorblind by Siera Maley