Georgia Hart was nearly eight months pregnant when word began to spread of the King’s Prophecy. It’s just an ugly rumor, she thought the first time she caught it by ear at the local grocery store. She was in line at the time, perusing periodicals and smacking the tiny hands of her eldest child, Henry, whose love for candy was just beginning to show as he eyed the many assortments of chocolate, chewing gum, and other sticky candies his mother would never get out of the living room carpeting if he were to drop it.
The town’s gossip, big-mouthed Tanya Danes, wasn’t even attempting to keep quiet as she spoke to a fellow customer in the cereal aisle just a couple dozen feet from the cash register Georgia stood at, awaiting her turn behind a frail old woman with shaky hands and nearly fifty cans of cat food and creamed spinach. Each.
“Have you heard?” she asked the poor soul who’d made the mistake of turning down her aisle. Her thick Texan accident (obviously she was not from around here) always seemed to irk Georgia, especially when she began her sentences with those three specific words. Georgia attempted to dodge them at each turn, never making the mistake of passing Tanya on the streets and looking before entering a store or the cereal aisle of the supermarket. “There’s been a prophecy!” Tanya practically squealed like a small schoolgirl when she said this. Georgia rolled her eyes. There were always rumors of prophecies being made. Usually by some hack, pretending to have inherited psychic powers from the Elders; but usually just lunatics desperate for attention. “Now, it’s not one of those crazy Daisies’ prophecies, either. This one was made by Arlan herself. Mmhmm! You heard me! Arlan LeFleur! The only God-honest psychic we have left in this God forsaken little country!”
Georgia scowled at the magazine in her hands. Gremich was a fairly new country, just under two hundred years old since it was found by the famous explorer, Lawrence Gremich (unfortunate name for such a lovely man, and a much lovelier country), but it was definitely not “God forsaken”. It was perfectly adequate. They had elected a wonderful King and a sort of Parliament and the country was an established Democracy, where immigrants were welcomed and encouraged. The country was a little less than one thousand miles off the West Coast of California, and Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans alike all immigrated there, as well as Europeans, like Georgia herself, hailed from the UK, and those from other continents.
Some called Gremich Little America; in affection rather than jest. Georgia found it fitting, since there were many things she found similar to America, which she had visited frequently with her husband, whose family lives in the state of New York. Such as the rich city life and the many fast food locations, and certainly the gossip queens who ruled the cereal aisles.
“Anyway,” Tanya was saying to the poor woman currently juggling three different boxes of sugared cereal and a small child who kept placing them back in her cart, “Arlan has predicted that a group of children, known as The Chosen are to be born this year, each baring a specific kind of birth mark.”
There was silence for a moment and Georgia knew that Tanya was waiting for the woman to ask, “What?” before she went any further.
She did and Tanya continued. Meanwhile, one of the old lady’s cans’ barcode was refusing to scan.
“Nobody knows. She didn’t explain further than that. She just said the group had already been conceived and that there would be a hundred of them, but only one of them would be chosen.”
“Chosen for what?” the woman asked, getting fed up with the child and forcing him to sit in the cart while she put every box of cereal back on the shelf and picked up a bland box of Corn Flakes, making the child cross his arms and pout.
Tanya leaned in as if to whisper the next part, but barely lowered the volume as she responded. “Chosen to overthrow King James.” Her smile couldn’t be more conspiratorial, most likely because ol’ Texan Tanya herself was expecting a child herself and would probably like nothing more than to birth “The Chosen” who overthrew the King and became Gremich’s new ruler.
Georgia rolled her eyes; nothing like that could ever happen, especially since there was no way anybody would want to overthrow King James, unless they were pure evil. The man was a lovely ruler and proved so every chance he got. He’d only been King for a few years since his mother, Queen Julia, passed away, but he’d proven to be very good at it, and very compatible with the current Parliament. There was no need for change and anybody who thought so deserved to be thrown out of this country by the scruff of their neck and the seat of their pants.
“Your total comes to Twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents, Ma’am,” the pimple-faced teenager said to the little old woman as he finally bagged her last grocery. The old woman nodded and handed him her credit card. The boy scanned it in a flash and handed both it and the receipt back to the woman, before calling one of his coworkers to help her out to the car with it.
Finally, it was Georgia’s turn. She shook all thoughts of prophecies and chosen ones from her mind, swatted Henry’s hand once more and pushed the cart forward, allowing the attendant to remove her groceries and place them on the conveyer belt.
As Georgia Hart fished through her purse for her wallet, she scoffed at the idea of such a foolish prophecy. A “Chosen One” born with a birthmark that would determine his or her fate as ruler of Gremich was simply laughable.
