New Flash Fiction: "Forgetting Sagittarius"

Took a break from The Suspicious Room last night and popped this out instead. Based on a true story!

Forgetting Sagittarius

It was only an entry-level job at the major metro paper The Times, but Josephine was glad to have it. Seven years she had worked in Chico and Visalia to get up to this level. Her most important duty was checking the Entertainment Datebook and the daily crossword and horoscopes before they went to press at three in the morning.

She thought everything was there. She counted twelve entries. Twelve signs in the zodiac, right? She pressed the button to send it to composition. She didn’t know there was a special entry for If Today Is Your Birthday.

The calls started at 6 a.m. By the time Josephine got in at noon her boss had a list of people for her to call about the missing Sagittarius Horoscope for Today. Other papers were complaining, too. The Times syndicated its horoscopes in one hundred and eighteen cities.

"Get on it," said Josephine's boss, a wizened woman who smoked cigars. "Now. The first lady’s birthday is December 3 and she is hopping mad. Get on the phone and read Sagittarius to the White House press secretary. Now. Now. Now."

The sun had set, though, before the missing persons reports started to come in. Little by little, in every town and hamlet in America, people born between November 22 and December 21 weren't showing up at home, school, work. One by one, they were disappearing. Come to think of it, the First Lady hadn't been seen for hours.

Omaria, who wrote the horoscopes, sighed and said she had foreseen that something like this would happen today.

"What sign are you, dear?" she said to Josephine.

"Scorpio," answered Josephine. "November 21."

"Oh, no, dear!" said Omaria, looking concerned behind her beads and turban. "That's not Scorpio. That's on the cusp. You could go either way. In fact, dear, you seem more like a Sagittarius to me."

"Oh, no, I'm a Scorpio," Josephine opened her mouth to say, but before she finished half the sentence she found she couldn’t speak. Her tongue seemed to dissolve like chocolate in her mouth. She looked down but she couldn’t see her fingers. As Omaria calmly looked on, Josphine’s arms, then her legs, then the rest of her, slowly faded away, headed for whatever place the First Lady and the other Sagittarians had gone.