Chapter II

Chapter 2

Sean

I shivered in the cold as I watched Myra ride out of the lot on her fierce, gray motorcycle and barrel into the night. Mist closed in around her and dragged her into its secret depths as she drove farther and farther away, until she was only a presence of a girl, a feeling in the night. But I knew I could find her, wherever she was.

My fingers, tucked into the folds of my slacks, tightened around the scrap of paper in my hand. On it was written seven numbers in Myra’s messy, left-handed print with the potential to change my entire existence. I still couldn’t believe what was happening, but I wanted to so very much.

I began walking, a phantom of a boy. To where, I wasn’t sure. I just needed some way to pass the long hours between dusk and dawn. I thought about what I would do when I finally got my life back. I had always wanted to travel the world, and the peripatetic life seemed to suit me. I would visit the pyramids and the Sphinx, ride down the canals of Venice, and see the volcanoes of Hawaii the way birds did. I would climb Mount Vesuvius because Mount Everest is overrated, and go scuba diving in the Mariana Trench. I would look for lost things and get lost myself piloting a plane into the Bermuda Triangle. Who knows? I might even fall in love. Wouldn’t that be the greatest adventure of all?

I smiled in amusement. Love. Such a strange concept to me. Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case when I was young and naïve, but no one is the same after death.

I passed by a cemetery and a sense of nostalgia washed over me. I stopped and searched for an entrance. The gate was locked, and there was no way to scale over it. I finally found a tree with a branch hanging just within the perimeter of the cemetery. Scratching my palms on the rough bark of the tree, I climbed as high as I could and jumped down on the other side, a shock reverberating through my ankles.

I wandered among the headstones until I came upon the small gravestone of a boy with my name.

 

Sean Armstrong

1990 - 2000

Beloved son

 

            Sean Armstrong and I had nothing in common aside from our first names, but that was enough for me to forge a connection. This grave could have been mine. As far as I was concerned, it was.

            I fell down on the turned-up dirt. Only ten, I thought. So young. I’d been seventeen when I died, barely a month away from eighteen. At least I got to feel the tang of alcohol on my lips and the warmth of another skin against mine. I closed my eyes as the memory washed over me, as fresh as peppermint and winter.

            Sleeping, a bang, a scream so loud and piercing I wake from my slumber.

            I opened my eyes, but the memory projected from my mind to the bleak setting of the graveyard. I saw my death played out before me like a play.

Seventeen-year-old me slid out of his cozy bed as a crash sounded from down the hall. He called out, “Mom!”

            “Run!” came back the voice of his - no - our mother. Then, a crash. She had been thrown into a mirror and killed from a blow to the head. I hadn’t known that then.

            Young me shot down the hall with a wooden baseball bat in his hand. I wanted to remind him to be careful, that if he weren’t, he would lose his life. But you never think about death as an actual, tangible thing until you’re life is slipping out in crimson on the floor and the smell of iron is so strong in your nostrils you gag.

For the first time, I thought about how far the gap between me now and me from my memories had grown. Despite the overall paling effect of death, he and I looked exactly the same, but on the inside we were so different. I guess dying did that, made you see the world in a different way: with the shadow death at the heart of every life.

Young me arrived in the cozy, little living room, and the first thing he saw was our mother on the floor. Even now, the sight of her sent me into shock and loss and longing. I closed my eyes, but the amber burn of her hair haunted my vision, and the kind set of her smile closed my throat up. Her lullabies sang out in the memory, a thread of pale gold that wrapped me in a comforting embrace.

Then, just as soon as it came, it was gone.

I opened my eyes.

            Back into the memory. Back into the cold.

            There was a man in the corner of the room, but young me didn’t know that then. Just add that to the never-ending list of things I didn’t learn until I died.

Like a little boy, young me asked, “Mom?” Then, he saw a figure move and flicker, a shadow. A long mirror shard, broken by our mother’s head, lay on the floor, but there was no light for it to catch. That night was a new moon. The boy took it in his hand and gripped it so hard blood welled in his palm, but the adrenaline made him forget. I still couldn’t remember the bite of the glass in my hand, but I had the scar to show for it.

            He and the dark figure grappled, their legs stepping through gravestones in this real-world production of a nightmare. First it was he with the advantage, him drawing blood. Then, the man shoved him into our mother’s prone form and he stumbled and fell over her, flat onto his back. The man’s tall form loomed over him, taking up all he saw. He raised his hand, a knife sheathed in darkness.

            Here was when it happened.

            I closed my eyes, reluctant to relive this part. The part when he died. The part when I died. This was the moment before my blood pooled out and the life slipped from my eyes. I shook my head, but when I opened them again, the vision was still there. That’s when I knew something was wrong.

            While my death was played out before me, I pulled out a pocketknife and, without hesitation, slashed through the skin of my arm. Pain shot through me, muted but sufficient for my needs, and the vision dissipated.

            I sat in the cemetery, panting. The memory was gone, but it had taken some part of me with it.

            Then, a new voice said, “You have death on your skin, yet you are not one of us.”

            I wasn’t.

            I turned.