The idea is to die young as late as possible - Ashley Montagu

  Am I alive?

  That was the first thought I had as my eyes fought to crack themselves open from the gunk that had sealed them shut. It was quite the struggle, but I got them open. My mind was still only barely online as I looked around and realized that I was on the floor of my bathroom.

  Ow, not exactly the best position for my back.

  Groaning, I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position, feeling like I had the worst hangover ever despite the fact that I had only ever drunk once in my life, and it certainly wasn’t last night.

  What . . . what happened?!

  I didn’t know, and the bleary images my mind was supplying made no sense. It was like I’d had the world’s most vivid nightmare, and I knew I’d had a nightmare, but my mind was so traumatized that it was refusing to bring up the details.

  It took quite a bit of effort, but I slowly peeled myself off the floor. It was a rather arduous process, but I eventually managed to stand up and look at myself in the mirror.

  Ooof, I looked rough. Worse than the week where I’d worked doubles every single day and ended with a triple on the weekend.

  “Honestly, I’m surprised you survived at all.”

  “What in the world?!” I cried, nearly jumping out of my skin at the foreign voice. Despite the way my head still ached, I spun this way and that, looking for the source of the speaker. “Who’s there?!”

  “What are you looking around for? Does it sound like I’m coming from another room?”

  I ignored the rather sarcastic barb and continued to look around for someone who could possibly say that or some sort of hidden device that could be spoken through. But the truth was, the voice didn’t sound like it was coming from anywhere else at all.

  It sounded like it was coming from inside my head.

  But that was impossible! My head was where my own thoughts were supposed to live. And there wasn’t exactly room in there for two.

  “Get out of my head!”

  “Hey! Not so loud! I’m as new to this as you are.”

  That . . . that didn’t seem good. “Who is . . . ‘you’?” I asked, ignoring the small part of my mind that harped that this was terrible grammar. I was pretty sure I was excused considering the situation.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I cried out, looking in the mirror like it was my reflection that was talking to me.

  Oh gods, am I going crazy?

  I was pretty sure that I was going crazy! Not only was I hearing a voice in my head that was not my own, but I was responding to it like it was real! I needed to get to the hospital because it was pretty clear that somehow, some way, I had either bashed my head and was having a pretty traumatic response to it, or I’d suddenly had a very unamiable divorce with reality.

  “I mean I don’t know. I remember . . .” The strange voice trailed off as if it were really trying to recall something. It was strange; there was no tone to it, no gender, and yet I could still feel the tone it was trying to convey. Or maybe it wasn’t even purposely trying, and this was only a part of the whole process that I couldn’t stop. “I remember that someone was hunting my old body.”

  “Old body?!”

  “Hey, what did I say about the volume thing? Please, I’ve only been here for a short while. My head is pounding.”

  “Your head is pounding? You don’t have a head! Because if you did, you wouldn’t be inside mine!”

  “. . . alright, you may have a point there.”

  But then my mind latched on to what else the voice had said. “Your old body? Wait, were you the woman in the alley?”

  “Woman in the . . . Oh, yes! I Remember now. That was me. I was dying.” My eyes went even wider for a moment, and I was not sure what to say, but then the voice seemed to have its own realization. “Actually, I died, didn’t I?”

  “I think so,” I answered honestly but cautiously. It wasn’t every day that I had to inform someone of their rather violent passing.

  “You THINK so? I would think that would be something you’d be pretty sure of.”

  “Yeah, you would think, but it didn’t exactly go down like death is supposed to, unless you know multiple people who just crumble to ash! I’m pretty sure I inhaled some of you!”

  I am definitely going crazy, I determined. No two ways about it. I was having an argument with a voice that wasn’t there, defending myself against not being 100 percent certain that they had passed on.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “But you’re in my head, so are you technically dead?”

  It was a valid question. And although I was terrified of the idea that I had some old lady somehow squirreled away in my brain, it still seemed like possibly a nicer option than dying in an alley after being grievously wounded by something terrifying.

  “I . . . I don’t think I am alive, so yes, I am probably dead. I . . .” The voice faded out completely, going from a soft, almost wistful sound to nothing at all.

  “Oh, hello? Are you there?”

  There was no answer, just my own shocked, bewildered stare reflected back at me from the mirror.

  I couldn’t say how long I stayed like that, just standing there, but eventually, I remembered I did essentially have corpse protein powder in my mouth, so I rather enthusiastically set about brushing my teeth.

  For about ten minutes.

  My gums were not happy with me, and I definitely went through about a third of my mouthwash, but I was beginning to feel a little less thoroughly disgusted by the time I took the last gargle.

  “. . . not sentient. More like a very determined echo that came with the transfer.”

  I made several unflattering sounds as the mouthwash nearly went right down my trachia, and once again found myself retching, although this time, I actually did it in a sink.

  “Dude, you nearly made me choke on my mouthwash! Give a girl some warning, will you?!” I couldn’t tell if the disembodied voice was going to answer or not because my mind was already rolling over to the next question. “And what do you mean, transfer? What transfer?”

  “You know, the whole transfer-of-power thing?”

  “If I knew, do you think I would be asking?”

  “Did my old body really tell you nothing?”

  “Yes! Just some very paranoia-inducing comments, and that was it!”

  “Ah, well, I suppose this is the point where I should warn you to look down.”

  “Look do . . .” I trailed off as my gaze tilted downwards and landed on a very particular marking that definitely hadn’t been on my wrist before. It was a small, dark circle about the size of the head of a pin and then a larger outline of a circle, perhaps an inch and a half out. Two lines cut through it, with a star above and a moon below.

  “Oh no, no, no, no!” I cried, trying to wash it off with water. But it didn’t budge. Mostly because it didn’t seem like something sitting on top of my skin but like my skin itself held the color.

  Like I was tattooed.

  “Dude, all three of my jobs have weirdly specific rules about visible tattoos!” Gods, I could see it so clearly in my head. Eventually, my managers spotting it, asking me when I had got it done, and demanding I either cover it up or go home. I couldn’t afford to lose any shifts, and I certainly couldn’t afford a tattoo removal service. Didn’t those take a bunch of sessions anyways?

  “Do you have any idea how much this is gonna mess me up?”

  I suppose that I should have been more shocked about how I got a tattoo in the first place, considering that I hadn’t ever walked to a tattoo shop in my entire life, but none of the crazy, possibly delusional stuff that was happening mattered if I couldn’t pay my bills.

  “Probably not any more than having the echoes of someone else in your head.”

  . . . actually, fair point.

  “This can’t be real, it just can’t be,” I muttered to myself, stalking out of my bathroom like that would somehow stop everything from happening. But strangely enough, it seemed to work, as the voice didn’t say anything else.

  That made it easier, and I wondered if maybe I had experienced some sort of sleep paralysis hallucination. That made more sense than anything else. It didn’t quite explain what had happened last night, but I wanted to lean toward the idea—the hope—that nothing had happened at all.

  I remembered reading plenty of books where I was always so frustrated that the main character tried to deny what they so obviously witnessed, but now I got it. Because there was just no reasonable explanation for what I thought happened. So that had to mean that it didn’t happen at all.

  Right?

  I was pretty sure that was how that worked.

  Well, either way, I had things to do. Hurriedly, I got dressed, power walking out the door like that would allow me to speed away from whatever was going on with me. The voice did indeed disappear for my entire trip to the pharmacy to buy bandages to slap on my wrist and all the way back. In fact, it stayed quiet for hours until I really began to think that I had just had a very short brush with insanity. I sat down in the oversized chair in my living room that I’d been thrilled to find while thrifting, and before I knew it, I was nodding off.

  The shrill sound of my alarm stirred me awake, and I blearily looked at my phone, realizing it was my second alarm that was going off, meaning I’d slept through my first.

  I was confused for a moment, however, because I hadn’t set any alarms. I’d definitely not meant to fall asleep. After a couple of slow blinks at my still-ringing phone, I realized that they were still set from yesterday, as I hadn’t gone through my normal nightly ritual of making sure I was all organized for the next day.

  Not for the first time, I was very happy that I always set multiple alarms. Part of the price of being chronically overtired was that once I did get good rest, it was really hard to pull myself out of it.

  But then I noticed something else on my phone. A missed call from my barista job. There was only ever one reason they called me outside of work, and yet I called them back anyway.

  “Hello, this is Bridges,” I said, wincing at how worn down I sounded. I really needed a vacation. Not that I could ever afford one.

  “Oh, hey, Bridgette—”

  “Bridges.” I corrected rather futilely. Cassandra Wyll had been my manager for three years, and she never got my name right. It was like she’d seen my hiring paper with my legal name and refused to ever learn anything different. I didn’t know if she resented nicknames or chosen names or what, but there was a reason I preferred to be called Bridges, and I wished she would just respect it.

  “Benny called in sick and I almost managed to get it fully covered, but Melissa has school until eleven and needs time to get here, so I was wondering if you’d be willing to come in for a half shift? Just ten to noon. I would be sooo grateful.”

  I should have said no. I knew that I should say no. But I also knew that tattoo removal was incredibly expensive, and I was on the verge of having my phone shut off. “I’d need breakfast.”

  “Pardon me?”

  I didn’t know where I got the gall, but I supposed watching a woman die in my arms, crumble to ash, and waking up with her not-quite-alive voice in my head had emboldened me to be a bit riskier than usual.

  “It’s almost nine now, and I need to get dressed, pack my stuff for my diner shift, and rush to you. I won’t have time to cook food, so I need you to provide me with a breakfast sandwich and a drink.”

  Cassandra’s tone instantly grew offended at the idea that I needed food to function. “You’re being awfully entitled right now.”

  “I’m just being practical. I’m willing to do the work, but customers wouldn’t really like it if I passed out at the end of my shift. I haven’t been able to eat since the start of my server shift last night, so it’s been more than twelve hours already. I’m more than happy to work for you until noon, but I have to be honest about my needs.”

  “Fine. Whatever, Bridgette—”

  “Bridges.”

  “—just get in here.”

  “Alright then, see you soon!”

  Not exactly a great way to build good will with my employer, but whatever. If I was coming in to help her on my day off, the least she could do was help me.

  But I needed to get a move on.