[Medusa]

I was in Montreal, Canada back in 1998 and was looking in the window of a shop that had hand-blown glass items. There was a wind chime with a little mermaid on it that I immediately thought a friend that I worked with, Marion, would really like.

When I went and paid for it, the woman behind the counter said it was one of a kind. I kinda rolled my eyes and was like "whatever", thinking it was probably mass produced somewhere and she was just saying that.

When I got back home and arrived back to work, I came to find that Marion had been killed in a car accident while I was out on vacation. I ended up hanging on to the wind chime because it reminded me of her.

Six years later, I was working for the state of Arkansas at a medical university. We had a visiting professor from Boston that I became very friendly with. She had moved down to Arkansas for an extended stay to teach while her daughter (who was 11 at the time) received treatment for Leukemia at Children's hospital.

She brought her daughter into work after one of her chemo treatments and I got to meet her. She was a bubbly little baldy and was wearing a bright orange shirt with a mermaid on the front of it. I commented on how cute it was and could tell that her little girl was clearly very glittery when it came to mermaids.

That night, I went home and grabbed the mermaid wind chime that I had bought for Marion six years prior and dusted it and put it in a little sack.
I brought it to work the next day and handed it to Dr. T and asked her if she would give it to her daughter as a present.

Dr. T asked if she could looked at it and I was like "of course!". When she opened the sack, she GASPED and her face went sheet white.

She got all animated and was like "where did you get this? WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?"

When I told her I had gotten it at a little boutique in Montreal, she freaked the fuck out and was like "I saw this wind chime in a shop in Montreal and almost bought it for my daughter when she was five and I kicked myself for YEARS for not buying it for her!"

The next day, Dr. T brought in a photo album from her own Montreal trip and there, about halfway through the album, was a picture she had taken of the mermaid wind chime, the same mermaid wind chime that I had just given her for her daughter.

Freaky!