AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“… HAS TO BE… MISTAKE…”
The words are far away. Or maybe underwater. It’s hard to tell because I am on a cloud.
A strange, sort of bouncy cloud, and it’s funny, really, because it’s not quite as fluffy as I thought a cloud might be. But maybe that’s what I get for living a mediocre life: a sad little cloud somewhere in a lonely part of the sky.
I drift.
Somewhere in my fog of consciousness, I remember that Jews don’t believe in the afterlife. Whatever this is, wherever I am… maybe there aren’t even words for it yet.
More muffled sounds, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters up here in Cloud World.
I roll to my side, trying to find a more comfortable position on this cloud of mine. When I reposition my body, a sharp pain shoots up my left side, from my shoulder to my wrist and then from my knee to my ankle.
With my other hand, I pat the cloud mattress beneath me, and slowly, slowly, the reality drips in.
“… talk out in the hall,” someone says, and the sound of the door shutting and something dropping to the floor is enough to rattle my brain inside my skull.
I am not dead.
No, I’m back in Hellmouth Hall, and my body is fucked.
I push up onto my arms as gingerly as I can, careful not to do anything that might cause more pain. Tonight Last night comes back to me in fragments that start with Miles and me arguing at Stanley Park and end with a truck splitting the windshield of our rental car.
We died.
And yet we didn’t.
This is the tattoo pain from I’ve-lost-track days ago multiplied by a thousand. This is my entire body having been fed through a wood chipper and then feasted on by a pack of wolves. I squeeze my eyes shut, scared to look down, and when I do, there’s a long bruise vaguely the shape of California sweeping from knee to hip. I didn’t think it was possible to look worse than I feel… but there it is.
An arctic, bone-deep chill runs through me. The relief should be stronger, but I’m stuck in the terror from those moments before the truck crashed into us. In some other timeline, did the authorities dig me out of the rubble and call my mom to identify my body? What would they have told her, and would she have believed them? Would she have known, deep down, that there was a reason her daughter was on the freeway between Vancouver and Seattle late on a Wednesday night?
Our timeline resets sometime before six a.m., and yet the car accident happened around midnight. And afterward, it was just… nothingness.
Waking up back here when I could have just as easily never woken up at all.
I swallow hard, aching for that version of my daughterless mom, a thought too horrible to linger on. I get my bearings again—patting the bed beneath me, wiggling my fingers and toes, holding a hand to my heart.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Alive.
In a sleepy panic, I reach not for my phone but for the Tylenol in the top drawer of my desk, downing a couple and praying they kick in fast. This didn’t used to happen, yesterday bleeding into today in a hazy, nightmarish blur. A million theories race through my mind. We’ve overstayed our welcome. We’ve pushed the limits of space-time too far. We’ve made a mistake, and the universe wants us to pay.
Don’t personify the universe, someone says in my head, and I don’t even have the energy to ask fake Miles to shut up.
Miles.
This time, I grab my phone. As if I’ve summoned it, a message is waiting for me.
I’m sorry for yesterday. Again. I’ll apologize every day we’re stuck, if it helps at all. And if it doesn’t, well, I’ll do it anyway, at least until you tell me I’m being annoying.
Please, Barrett. Tell me I’m annoying.
God, why are those words messing with my heart?
Every text I compose to him sounds thoroughly absurd.
Did we die last night?
