Sebastian Pearce – Flash Fiction and Sports Betting. What can go wrong?

A story by Sebastian Pearce based on the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt:

You sit at your desk, pen hovering over the blank paper. The assignment seems simple enough: list ten things you know to be absolutely certain. Your therapist insists this exercise will help ground you after the accident, help you separate reality from the confusion that’s been plaguing you for weeks.

1. Your name is Sarah Chen.

You write this first, though something about seeing it on paper makes you pause. The letters look strange, foreign somehow. You’ve been having trouble with your handwriting lately—the doctors say it’s normal after head trauma.

2. You live at 847 Maple Street.

The address flows from your pen easily, muscle memory guiding your hand. You’ve lived there for three years, in the blue house with the white shutters. Though lately, you keep having dreams about a different house—red brick, with ivy climbing the walls. The dreams feel more real than your waking memories.

3. You work as a graphic designer at Brennan & Associates.

Do you? The office feels hazy in your mind, faces blurred. Your computer password keeps escaping you, and yesterday you couldn’t remember where you parked. Your boss has been patient, understanding about the recovery process.

4. You drive a silver Honda Civic.

Except the car in your driveway is blue. You stare at this contradiction, pen trembling. When did you get a blue car? The insurance paperwork says silver, but the vehicle outside is definitely blue. Your head begins to throb.

5. You have a cat named Winston.

Winston is gray and fat and sleeps on your windowsill. But when you got home yesterday, there was no cat food in the house, no litter box, no sign a cat had ever lived there. The neighbor mentioned she’d never seen you with a pet.

6. Your mother calls you every Sunday.

The phone records show no incoming calls for weeks. When you tried calling her number, it was disconnected. Directory assistance has no listing for anyone by her name in your hometown. This disturbs you most of all.

7. You were in a car accident three weeks ago.

The doctors confirmed this. The scar on your forehead is proof. The insurance claim is being processed. This, at least, feels solid. Real. The one thing you can hold onto when everything else shifts like sand.

8. You graduated from State University with a degree in fine arts.

But your diploma isn’t on the wall where you remember hanging it. A call to the registrar reveals no record of your enrollment. No Sarah Chen in their database, not in any year. How is that possible?

9. You’ve never been married.

Yet there’s a tan line on your ring finger, and sometimes you catch yourself setting the table for two. In your dresser drawer, you find a man’s watch—expensive, engraved with initials that aren’t yours. The inscription reads: “To David, with all my love – S.”

10. You are alive.

You write this last certainty with growing unease. Alive. Living. Breathing. Your heart beats in your chest, your lungs fill with air. This has to be true. This has to be the one thing you can count on.

But as you finish writing, your pen begins to fade. Your handwriting grows transparent, the words dissolving like sugar in rain. You look at your hands—they’re becoming translucent too, the desk visible through your palms.

The truth hits you like a second collision.

There was no recovery. No hospital stay. No therapist.

The car accident three weeks ago—that’s the only certainty on your list that’s actually true. You’ve been dead since the moment of impact, your consciousness clinging to fragments of a life that was never yours. The confusion, the missing memories, the contradictions—you’ve been assembling pieces from other people’s lives, other patients’ records, other stories overheard in the brief moments before your brain stopped functioning.

Sarah Chen was the name on the medical bracelet of the woman in the bed next to yours. 847 Maple Street was the address the paramedic kept repeating into his radio. The blue Honda, the job, the cat, the mother—all borrowed from the lives of the living, glimpsed in your final moments.

You were never Sarah Chen.

You can’t remember who you really were.

And now, even this borrowed existence is fading away, leaving you with only one true certainty: in a few moments, there will be nothing left of you at all.

The list crumbles to dust in your disappearing hands.