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Life after Death

By Amanda Flieder

www.amandaflieder.ca

Copyright © 2019 Amanda Flieder

Cover Art: Hospital image by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on www.unsplash.com, Shoe image by yoon1090 on pixaby.com

Dog featured on cover is Brocky Eeyore, an adoptable guest of Zoe’s Animal Rescue Society in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, at the time this cover was created.

About Brocky Eeyore: I'm a very sweet loveable 95lbs boy with large paws. I love my toys, sitting in the yard, and being curled up on the sofa. A slow paced walk is my favourite, but when I do run I am at full tilt for a short while!

Learn more at http://www.zoesanimalrescue.org

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. To perform any of the above is an infringement of copyright law.

1

Liam stepped out of the door and looked down at the scene, watching the hurried actions of the emergency responders, and shook his head. It felt like years had passed but every time his door came up, it had only been seconds. He’d really believed the last time he’d been through that it was the last time he was going to have to. And now, here he was again, getting ready to step over his own body and walk away.

He sighed in frustration. At this point, whoever or whatever was in control of the grey should have noticed that he wasn’t leaving because he didn’t want to. Every time the choice came up, he chose to stay.

The first time had been for Kaylynd. She’d been a little girl – all of ten and half years old – who’d nearly died from drowning. Then his door had come back when he was with that friend who’d called himself Track or Trek or something like that… Trock. He’d called himself Trock, and he’d been twenty-six and into his third year of dying of cancer. They’d hung out in his hospital room for hours, just talking, as Trock’s heart kept weakly beating and the machines around the bed pushed poisonous medicine and breath into his body. He’d wanted to know more about what happened after the grey, but Liam didn’t know any of that. They’d ended up skirting around the bed together and Trock had hung out in the grey for a couple of visitors (which is what Liam called everyone who came into the grey now). The emotional kicking of those few worst days had been rough and, when the hospital door came back around, Trock had decided on trying something new. He’d lain down and fell asleep on the floor beside the bed his body was wasting away on.

The third time had been when Liam was helping that kid in the wheelchair, who couldn’t speak due to whatever injury or disease he had, but there was a world of life in the kid’s eyes when Liam would ask him questions. There was a wealth of laughter in there, too, once Liam figured out the jokes that the kid thought were funny. Liam had had to cross over himself four times to get the kid and the wheelchair over to the other side so that they could get around Liam’s death scene and get on with getting the kid back to his parents. The kid even smiled, barely a twitch, and did a ‘blink once for yes’ when they got back to his room. His mom was crying hard as she cleared out the bit of food the kid had choked on, begging the dispatch operator over speakerphone for the ambulance to get to her house quicker because her son wasn’t breathing. Liam wheeled the kid up to himself and whooped a loud laugh as the scene faded, hearing as the kid’s mom started yelling wordlessly with Christmas morning levels of excitement.

After that, the door only showed up when he was alone, and for too many times to bother keeping track. The pull to get into himself didn’t come with a black-hole level of gravity anymore. The last time through, he’d done a tidy, hands-free vault over one of the responders working hard to save his life and then flipped a double-bird back at the scene after landing. He’d blown a kiss at the truck that had crunched his torso into mulch as he jogged to the open car door that would take him back to the grey.

There had been a lot of visitors since that last time, nearly a lifetime ago, and he still didn’t want to go back to living. In the grey, things were simple. There was the relief of no physical needs, as in no eating or breathing, no bathroom breaks, no sleep, no lasting pain, and none of the mental drain for worrying about how to afford all the necessities for staying alive. Emotions were what he got to keep, and for the first time in his life he had a really good handle on those. Time was different here, too. Like, really different. Liam was ninety-nine point nine percent certain that he’d been here in the grey for many, many years since the last time he’d been through the door leading to the street he was dying in the gutter of, but these emergency responders were maybe a minute into trying to save his life. He looked over the shoulder of the lady he’d seen a few times ago who was taking video on her phone; three seconds had passed since the last time he’d been here. He’d been standing here for probably all three. So that confirmed his suspicion that time only moved in this reality when he was in this reality. That made the decision to get out of here quick, before he took a forced nap into a slow fade, really easy to make. He didn’t bother getting fancy, just jumped over his body and ran for the door leading back to the grey.

After being so close to being alive again, the reminders of the living, breathing, messy creature he had been took a few minutes to shake off. The catwalk and visitor catches he had gotten used to seeing in sharp focus had dulled a little. He took a deep breath and calmed away the bustling pressure that living caused; his world here in the grey emerged clearly as he exhaled.

The grey had changed a lot since Liam had first woken up in one of the catches here… he paused and smiled at the thinking that it was the grey that had undergone the changes. A flicker of movement way above him caught his eye as he was looking around. There was another catwalk somewhere up there, complete with its own set of catches, but it was next to impossible to see due to the distance between where he was standing and – yup! – where whoever did the same job as him up there was exaggeratedly waving at him. Liam untied the torn remains of his jacket from around his waist and spun it over his head as a reply. The person up there changed their motion in answer. They were too far away to yell to, and there were no echoes in the grey, but Liam smiled up at them before he stopped waving his jacket and tied it back around his waist. They couldn’t see his face and he couldn’t see theirs, but they went through these lifetimes together and that stranger was the closest thing to a soul mate Liam had ever imagined.

He looked down after the motion above stopped to check if maybe now there were the tracings of a distant catwalk in the endless grey below and only saw more nothing. The grey expanding along all sides in the horizontal was also still empty. He knew that there were bound to be other catwalks because the one above him existed, which lead to an interesting pondering about the existence of the catwalks as a physical thing in time and space. Was such a thing was possible?

The loud shunk sounded and the grey abruptly turned off. Liam sat down, glad that he’d seen his overhead companion during this past cycle, and started counting down from three hundred and fourteen. He hid his eyes in the crook of his elbow as he counted past ten into single digits and made a gesture like flicking on a light switch as he hit zero, perfectly in time with the shunk that brought on the bright. Somewhere on his level, he could hear the pained whines of a very young animal (likely a dog, but his assumptions had been wrong before). He counted up to one hundred and fifty-nine, making a button-push motion as the shunk sounded for returning to the familiar grey.

The animal’s whining continued. Liam stood up and looked around to help determine the direction he needed to be going for getting closer to the cries. Forward this time. He’d taken three steps when the shunk came again and plunged everything into perfect blackness. He counted down from three hundred and fourteen and then up to one hundred and fifty nine.

2

“Who are you? What is this? What’s going on?” The voice was full of gravel and each question was more of a barked command. “Identify yourself!”

“Liam Crobb, sir,” Liam answered promptly, looking down at the elderly man in fraying pajamas. He was standing at the bottom of a set of stairs connecting the catwalk to the nearest catch. This wasn’t the first time Liam encountered someone from the military, but this was definitely the oldest soldier who’d visited.

“Why are you out of uniform?” The old man eyed Liam suspiciously.

“I’m on leave,” Liam said with a shrug.

The last soldier he’d met here had been a twenty-two year old woman who told him to call her Madge, and she’d been friendly enough until he’d helped her onto the catwalk. Then she’d taken him prisoner or hostage or whatever it was she’d done by pointing a gun at him and demanding to know where she was being held, not believing that the reality of the grey was real until she discharged a nine millimeter round into his chest at close range and it hadn’t done anything other than be really loud. This obviously retired soldier just seemed…

“What is this place? Where’s my room?” the old man asked. “Where’s Heltie?” he added, mostly to himself, turning his head to glare at his left hand as if it had recently betrayed him. Liam looked in the direction his senses told him was backwards and saw a plain, windowless door typical for inside a hospital only a few turnings away. “Where did I leave my glasses…?” the old man muttered, patting at his worn out pajamas as if they had pockets.

“I think you left them in your room?” Liam offered the question kindly. The old man’s head snapped up and his eyes squinted into a glare.

“Who’re you?” he demanded, the question barked roughly.

“My name’s Liam. I’m visiting here,” Liam introduced himself again.

“Here?” the old man looked around again, squinting harder, before looking down to pick at his pajamas as if having forgotten he was wearing them. “Where did I leave my glasses…?” he mumbled again.

“Did you want me to help you find your glasses, sir?” Liam offered. The old man blinked up at him as if seeing him for the first time.

“What a nice young man,” he said, smiling. “Yes. Help would be good. I can’t seem to remember…”

“Where your glasses are,” Liam said, returning the smile.

“Yes. My glasses,” the old man repeated. “Have you seen them?”

“I haven’t seen your glasses, but I’ll help you look.”

“I’d really appreciate that.”

The old man smiled vaguely in the direction Liam was standing, but then his eyes glassed over and he just stood there at the bottom of the stairs. Liam hummed a song he remembered the tune of, but not the words for, and walked down the steps.

“My name’s Liam. Can I help you find your glasses?”

“My glasses… yes. I’m having a hard time seeing today. Do you work here?”

“Yup. I’ve been here a while. This is my first time seeing you, though.”

The vague answer and a gentle tug were enough to get the old man walking up the steps. Liam stayed to the side that dropped into the catch, keeping the old man close to the railing. Not sure what else to talk about, but understanding that he needed to stay talking so that he continued to be viewed as friendly and non-threatening, Liam talked about university and some of the classes he’d been taking. They shuffled slowly after reaching the catwalk and turned toward where a hospital door was waiting. Liam introduced himself a half-dozen more times, learning that the old man’s name was Davis.

“Like the last name, but I’m first,” Davis joked after introducing himself. Then his smile faded and his steps faltered to a stop. They were still a right turn away from reaching the door, but Davis hadn’t noticed it yet. Liam was pretty sure that was a good thing.

Davis stared around at the grey, his eyes squinting in a search for identifiable details. His free hand drifted up to wrap over where Liam’s fingers were holding his arm. Davis was larger than Liam by more than half a head in height, and his weathered frame had likely been double the younger man’s weight in the old soldier’s prime. A shudder ran through the bigger man’s body and he tucked closer to Liam’s side.

“It’s all right, Davis. I’ll help you,” Liam assured him quietly.

“Promise?” the old man asked, speaking out of some point in his childhood.

“I promise.”

Davis held onto Liam’s hand tighter as the younger of the two started leading the older toward the door again. After a few stuttered steps, Davis’s strides lengthened to the pacing of a man younger than the current count of years in his body. He glared suspiciously at the hand Liam was keeping on his arm but bit back any words he might’ve said, grinding his false teeth instead. They reached the plain, windowless hospital door quickly and Liam stopped to look up at Davis. The same soldier who’d barked questions at him earlier was staring back.

“I know you won’t believe me right now, but my name is Liam Crobb and I am here to help you,” Liam stated quietly. Davis only scoffed in silent reply. “I don’t know what’s on the other side of this door. It’s likely going to be something bad. I promise I won’t leave you behind.”

Davis’s gaze sharpened into alarm and confusion and then swept into anger. Liam barely had time to inhale to ask what was going on before he was slammed into the door and the half-breath he’d taken was knocked back out. His feet dangled uselessly above the catwalk as Davis held him at the larger man’s eye level by the younger man’s throat. Liam knew that Davis was trying to strangle him. He also knew that it was impossible to choke the life out of someone who wasn’t living and, because of how things worked in the grey, whatever pain he experienced from his throat being crushed would be fixed in a few moments once the cause was removed. The rage in Davis’s eyes was met only with the waiting to be set down in Liam’s.

“What are you?” Davis demanded, his grip flexing tighter.

Liam attempted to inhale so that he could answer, but his throat was completely choked off. He tapped at Davis’s hands with a finger and stared pointedly at the old man. Davis dropped him as if Liam had suddenly erupted into flames, stumbling back two steps and staring with mounting horror as Liam calmly waited the few moments for the pain to subside so that he’d be able to talk again.

“You’re having a near-death experience,” Liam stated once he could. “I’m here to help you get through it.”

“A near-death…?” Davis looked down at his clothes and picked at his pajamas as if never having seen them before. “I don’t…” he began, and then his voice faded as he started patting his torso. “Where did I leave my glasses?” he mumbled.

“Do you need some help?” Liam offered, keeping his tone friendly.

“I don’t know,” Davis admitted, his hands slowing as he squinted toward where Liam was standing. “I was looking for something, but I don’t... my memory isn’t what it used to be,” he said with a self-conscious smile, his tone full of apology. “Heltie will know what it is I’ve forgotten,” he said, his hands falling to hang slackly at his sides.

“Do you know where we can find her?”

“Heltie is… she’s…” Davis’s smile faded and his eyes dropped to glare at his left hand. The moment stretched out in silence.

“Hello, Davis,” Liam pulled the old man’s attention with a cheerful greeting. “Gone out for a walk?”

“I… yes… I think I…” he squinted at the grey, searching for familiar details in the broad nothing and only barely noticing the nearby door. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice uncertain as he squinted at Liam.

“I’m Liam. I work here.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.”

Davis nodded, fronting as if he recognized the younger man, and offered zero resistance when Liam took the older man’s arm in hand and led him toward the door. The handle clicked open smoothly under Liam’s hand, and then there was a second click when the door was half-way open.

“Down!” Davis roared, throwing himself and Liam to sprawl across the catwalk. Flames followed the burning heat that belched out around and above them, the sound of the explosion a physical impact that left only numbing silence.

3

Liam looked around at the scorched hallway and wounded men. The place this door had been in really had once been a hospital, if the abandoned and twisted gurneys could be believed. The younger Davis, recognizable to Liam only because of his eyes, crawled on his elbows to a wounded friend. Both of their mouths were moving, but sound hadn’t returned yet. The scene didn’t need sound. Liam watched Davis’s friend scream himself to death as the younger Davis tried everything he could in the thirty seconds he’d been given to save the life in front of him, and failed.

The old Davis reached out from where he was lying, tears running as freely over his wrinkled face as on the taut cheeks of his younger self. The few survivors collecting themselves and what they could, communicating through slaps and shoves and silent-movie yells to encourage and order themselves forward into the room ahead. Liam pulled Davis up, mirroring the soldier pulling the younger Davis to his feet, and stumbled after the survivors into… the grey.

The room they’d run into cracked and shattered like glass, dusting away before Liam could see anything about it in any detail. Only the after-effects of the bomb on their hearing and the clinging smell of burning plastic remained. Liam helped Davis crumple to the catwalk safely and held onto him as he cried, the returning ability to hear bringing only the broken sobs of an old man lost in a horrible worst day. Davis stopped crying sooner than Liam figured a memory like that deserved but, as with every other part of Davis’s visit so far, whatever had developed in his old age to steal his memories took this one away, too.

“Did I fall?” Davis asked, looking up at Liam.

“Just a stumble,” Liam assured him. “We landed together. Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Davis replied, sitting up straight and checking his limbs and torso. The checking motions quickly transitioned to searching pats, as if his pajamas had pockets, and Davis started looking around. “I’ve lost my glasses.”

“I’ll help you find them,” Liam answered. A new door only a few steps away had shiny, brass numbers and a window made of safety glass. Cheery sunlight was shining through the glass. “Maybe you left your glasses in your room?”

Davis looked at Liam as if only seeing him for the first time, and then squinted up at the door with the bright window. The tears staining his cheeks were completely forgotten.

“Oh. Yes. I must’ve left them there,” Davis muttered. Liam stood easily and then held down a hand to Davis.

“Can I help you up?”

“Oh, yes, thank you. What a nice young man,” Davis smiled and accepted the assistance.

Liam restarted talking about university on the short walk to Davis’s second door. Just like with the first door, sound and light burst around them as soon as Liam opened the second one; this time the hospital hallways that appeared were quietly in use and the urgent voices from the room were a hard contrast to the sunny day outside the large window facing outside. Davis followed Liam in, a nurse rushing just ahead of them and accounting for the door being opened here in reality. A woman near to Davis’s age was being restrained away from the bed by one nurse as other nurses and a doctor rushed their best to even out the erratic heart beat showing on the monitor.

“Goodness. He’s in bad shape,” Davis commented.

“Do you know him?” Liam asked.

“Nope,” Davis stated, looking at himself with a stranger’s pity.

The woman who was being restrained back attempted to reach around the nurse, stretching for the limp hand on the bed that she’d been holding, and ended up folded into a careful hug. Liam could see that she and the nurse were both crying.

“Please, just someone hold his hand so he knows he’s not alone,” the older woman pleaded before resting into the shoulder of the nurse supporting her.

“That’s… she’s… oh, Heltie…”

Liam turned his head to see Davis get sucker punched by a lucid moment. The older man backed out of the room, fresh tears on his face, and twisted away around the door to flee down a right-angled hallway before Liam could stop him. Liam skidded to a stop on his knees at the edge of the catwalk, his hand reaching in a sad parody of how Heltie had been only moments ago. Davis fell through the grey, growing smaller as he twisted and clawed at the nothing around him. The terrified expression on his face had been rendered invisible by distance when his shape dusted away.

Liam stared at the spot where Davis had been. In all his time here, in all the lives and deaths that had passed, Davis was the first visitor to fall. Liam sat on the catwalk and tried to process what had happened. He didn’t know how to feel.

The urgent voices of nurses and the unbroken tone of the heart monitor pulled his attention back to the hospital that was strangely still around him even though Davis was gone. Liam stood up and walked into the room. Heltie was sitting in the nearest chair to where she’d been standing, her hands wrapping her mouth and chin as tears poured over her cheeks to run down her wrists into her sleeves. After a few more minutes trying to bring Davis back, the doctor stopped his attempts, kissed Heltie’s head gently in wordless comfort, and then quietly left as the nurses began to turn off the machines and monitors. The same nurse that had hugged her before returned to hold the newly made widow.

Liam crossed the room and stood at the end of the bed so he was nearer to Heltie. He knew he could interact a small amount with reality, but didn’t know what to do because he could usually only touch objects; never people. She stopped the helpless crying with a sigh and a bow of her head, leaving the few errant tears waiting to fall only leaking and staining her features with sunlit grief. Liam watched as the nurse offered a brave smile and some tissues, the few words exchanged were too quick to hear well, and seemed to be the end of a familiar conversation between the two women. Nods, smiles, another hug and a few more tears were passed back and forth, and then the nurse returned to her shift and Liam was alone with Heltie.

She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, twisting up and ripping apart one of the tissues and then another. Her words didn’t seem to know what to do, either. Her mouth opened and closed a few times but the expected sounds never made it past her lips.

“We were supposed to do this part together,” she finally accused the room, staring at her lap as she started ripping up another tissue. “Getting old,” she stated, and then sighed. “Maybe we did and that’s why we’re here now,” she added, a few new tears adding to the etched paths on her face.

She reached out toward Davis without moving from the chair and Liam realized she’d been on the same side of the bed this whole time; on Davis’s left. He stopped her motion half way by folding her hand into his, the fact that he could feel her skin a surprise that brought tears to his eyes. The jolt shocked through her and she stared at the curve of her hand wrapping around fingers that she couldn’t see. She squeezed tighter and smiled.

Liam’s opposite hand lifted and was held. He stared at his fingers, the skin pressed by an invisible force matching the feel of Davis’s bigger hand, and squeezed gently tighter to Heltie’s hand to try and pass on the grip somehow. The room twinkled to dust, the grips on both Liam’s hands fading with the sunlight until he was alone in the grey.

4

He sat down to mourn Davis and worry about Heltie. He didn’t need to, he knew that, but he wanted to. Davis’s hospital room walls had been full of pictures addressed ‘To Grandpa’, and there was evidence of adult kids spending time there in the form of paper coffee cups and take-out containers filling the counter by the door or left neatly stacked on the side of the table because the garbage was full. Heltie had been exhausted, but supported. She would continue being supported, Liam didn’t have to convinced himself because it was something he knew. On a whim, he clasped his hands together and smiled as he fit the feel of her hand inside the feel of Davis’s.

The shunk sounded and turned off the grey. Liam sat in the dark with his hands clasped and counted down from three hundred and fourteen.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice yelled from a long distance away as Liam passed twenty.

“Cover your eyes!” Liam yelled back, separating each word so the yell would be clear.

“What?” she called.

He repeated the instruction at his top volume and then used the crook of his elbow to cover his eyes just in time for the shunk to turn on the bright. She yelled a few choice words in a combination creative enough that Liam chuckled. Once her words quieted to mumbles, he heard the painful cries of the young animal that he’d forgotten about while trying to help Davis.

“This will end soon!” Liam called to the woman once she was quiet enough to hear him.

The shunk bringing back the grey sounded and Liam stood up to get walking. His overhead companion was a moving spec, a second spec with them, when he glanced up. He never saw the dark and bright cycle up there, but theirs rarely aligned with his.

“Hello? Who’s there?” the woman’s voice yelled. “Why do I have to keep consciously thinking about breathing?” she demanded, the question broken in two due to inhaling. Liam laughed, said a final goodbye to the place where Davis and Heltie had been, and started jogging towards both new visitors.

The puppy was in one of the small, shallow catches that Liam hadn’t seen used before. He lay on his stomach and reached down to scoop up the fluffy potato with one hand. The crying the puppy was doing intensified – as expected – but once he sat up, some gentle rubs and a cuddle helped…? Liam flipped the puppy and checked and, cool, she was a she. He snugged her into his arms against his chest and held her close. She sniffed, nipped, and tickled at his fingers, her eyes barely open so her age still ridiculously young. It was impossible for Liam to guess what type of dog she was – he didn’t know much about dogs – but she looked mostly white and had a brown spot covering her right side that was roughly shaped like China. She was actually a pretty little pup. Liam let her chomp on his fingers a bit as he stood up and continued walking toward the new spec in the distance.

He’d been expecting a door for the puppy, but the shape waved madly and yelled for him to see her and start explaining what the hell was going on. He didn’t bother yelling back while he couldn’t see the woman’s facial features, mostly because he’d gotten the puppy calmed down and he didn’t want to scare her if he didn’t have to.

The woman was angry with his non-responses, but the anger looked more confusion- and fear-fueled than actually being mad-angry once Liam could see her face. She was dressed nicely and already standing up, although she didn’t look keen on moving, and her stare up at where Liam was casually walking let him know that – just like himself when he’d woken up here – she couldn’t see anything visible in the grey.

“What. The hell. Is going on.” She demanded when he was two turnings away.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Liam asked.

“Overdosing,” she stated.

“On purpose?”

“Does it matter?” She crossed her arms defensively.

“I got hit by a truck,” Liam informed her.

“What is this place?”

“Honestly? I really don’t know. I just think of it as ‘the grey’ and that suits well enough.”

“So who are you?”

“My name’s Liam,” he introduced himself.

“What are you walking on?”

“The same stuff you’re standing on.”

“Touché,” she rolled her eyes.

“I don’t know too much about this place. It seems to be some kind of in-between for second chances.”

“So you’re, like what, a mortality greeter who delivers puppies to the recently deceased?” she asked, staring at the puppy in his arms as if he’d asked her to change its diaper. Liam laughed at her and shook his head, stopping above the catch she was in.

“Nope. I’m just someone else who’s in the process of dying,” he shrugged. “The same as this wee girl.” He smiled at the puppy and rubbed her neck and ears gently. She growled at him in a tiny, whiny way that made him want to let her chew on all of his fingers forever. “Mostly, I don’t want to be dead and I don’t have much reason for being alive, so I just stay here and help people with whatever they need to do.”

“Meaning what? There are tests or trials to get into whatever happens when you’re dead?”

“I don’t know about that, but there’s a test to get back to your physical self, right now in the moments you’re dying in.”

She closed her eyes and threw her head back with a sigh, her jaw working as she ground her teeth together. When her head dropped forward, it was so that she could scrub her hands into her eyes in a tired show of frustration.

“Of course there’s a test,” she muttered, scoffing out a laugh. “So, what now? I have to prove worthy of being dead by facing off with seeing myself dying?” she asked Liam.

“No, not like that,” he answered. He walked over to the stairs into the catch she was in and walked down. Even after all the times he’d done this since being able to see the catwalk and catches, he still felt like a bit of an idiot for completely missing the stairs and leaping onto the catwalk when he’d first woken up in the grey. The woman’s eyes followed his progress, her brows scrunching together as he got closer to her. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she answered. His reply was interrupted before it could start by the puppy yawning.

“Okay,” he shrugged, shifting the puppy around so that she was jarred into staying awake. “I need to get this wee girl back to herself before she falls asleep here. That’s how you die out of this place,” he explained quickly. “Basically, here in the grey, you get to do the worst moment of your worst day again – but watching rather than participating – and that seems to be how you get back to yourself while you’re dying right now in your physical reality. If you choose to, you can go back to your life and try to survive through whatever is killing you.”

“What are my other options?” she asked.

5

“You can opt out any time and just lie down for a nap,” Liam informed her.

“And then?” she pressed, wanting to know more.

“I don’t know. I haven’t opted out.”

“How do you know all of this?” She glared at him, squinting suspiciously.

“I’ve been here a long time. Ouch!” The puppy growly-barked when he pulled his fingers back after a particularly hard chomp, her wobbly legs scrambling to propel her after his hand in spite of her body being completely high-centered on his forearm. He chuckled and booped her nose with his thumb before relenting to letting her gnaw on whatever bits of his hand she got her mouth around. “I got here, I guess, forever ago. There was a little kid here at the same time, and my worst day and return to realty came up before hers. I couldn’t just leave her here alone, she was scared and…” he smiled at the memory of Kaylynd. “I bypassed being either dead alive by stepping over myself and got her back to herself so she could stay living.”

“You want a hero cookie or something?”

“Not at all. Turns out I like helping, so I stick around here and help.”

“And the ones who don’t want your help?” She crossed her arms and smiled coldly, placing herself in the category she’d just mentioned.

“Most visitors who come here know if they want to be dead or not. The ones who don’t are usually relieved by having company as they figure it out.”

“Except you.”

“I like it here.”

“How nice for you.”

“If you want to come with me, you can hold onto one of the strips of what used to be my jacket,” he looked down as he spoke, popping one hip so she saw the loose ends hanging from around his waist. “I can tell by the way you’re looking around that you can’t see structures here, which is normal for most people and the way I was when I first got here, so hanging on is the easiest way for you to not fall off of anything. If you’re set on dying, then lie down and get comfortable and take a nap. But please be quick about deciding because I do want to get this wee girl back to herself before she falls asleep by accident. Animals usually only know if they’re ready to die once they see themselves dying.”

She stayed standing there, arms crossed, not moving except for how her eyes looked around. He smiled supportively when her glance landed back on him. There were a few people who hadn’t known what to do with the help he offered even though they’d accepted it, and some animals that had only slunk along after him because their trust was too broken, so Liam already knew it wasn’t his place to make any decisions for her. The decisions she needed to make weren’t his to even offer suggestions for.

She sighed, her shoulders sagging as she reached for one of the strips hanging down from his jacket, her fingers moving tentatively and her expression clearly showing that she didn’t want to.

“This isn’t a forever decision. You can make a new choice whenever you want to,” he assured her quietly.

“Can we just go?”

Liam nodded and started walking back toward the stairs. In all the catches, the stairs ran parallel to the walls for their short spans, but were only attached to the catwalk and the catch floors. He’d probably walked past the stairs in his own catch at least ten times.

“There’s a railing here on this side,” he told her, pointing with his elbow. “But it ends at the top of the stairs and there aren’t any on the catwalk. Try and stay within arm’s reach of me or else you can fall.”

“Fall into what?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted as he picked the right direction for where the puppy needed to go. He glanced up once they were in the middle of the catwalk but didn’t see his companion. When he looked in the direction he was walking, a door had appeared a few turnings away.

“You claimed to have been here for a really long time and you don’t know?”

“The visitor before you… he fell. He was the first one I’d seen that happen to. He just… kept falling and then he stopped being there. His door for his death stayed, though,” Liam tried to explain.

“His door?”

“Doors are how we go in and out of our moments. Do you recognize that one?” he asked. She looked around his shoulder and then stepped solidly behind him again so she was almost walking in his footsteps.

“No,” she replied.

“It must be for the pupper, then,” he smiled down and scratched at the puppy’s neck, rousing her from half-dozing so that she would keep playing for the few moments it would take to get to what had to be her door. The door looked like it was steel, and it had once been painted if the flaking, rust-streaked white was any clue, but it had been years since any maintenance had been done on it.

“Is that safe to touch?” the woman asked. Liam chuckled.

“We’re already mostly dead,” he answered, smiling over his shoulder at her as he opened the door and then stepped through.

On this side of the door, it was either very late at night or really early in the morning. Somewhere nearby but behind them, what sounded like a medium or large dog was furiously barking and slamming and scratching against something metal. Closer, under some kind of inner-city river’s bridge or overpass that the door was built into, two men around Liam’s age were drunkenly playing catch with the puppy that Liam was holding. Scattered around them were three other puppies from the same litter, but the others were already dead.

There was a loud clattering and then the scratching and slamming stopped. The man holding the puppy tossed her into the river shallows and the two of them ran screaming as the bitch charged into the area. She was a mutt, and definitely a stray, but she was big and she was mad. Maybe heartbroken was a better word, Liam corrected his thinking as she stopped and sniffed at the dead puppies. The whine that emitted from her as she checked over her lost litter made the little pup in Liam’s arm whimper in reply. The bitch spun around, ears cocked in Liam’s direction, eyes desperately searching for the invisible place where the sound had originated.

Liam glanced at the river and saw the puppy still floating nearby, hung up on some garbage. As always, the catwalk followed a direct route toward the body. The bitch whined again and the puppy in Liam’s arms answered, making the worried mom step forward tentatively and sniff the air hopefully. Liam started walking toward the river, his progress stopping when his jacket wasn’t moving. He’d expected the woman to be worried about not being able to see the catwalk through this reality because of how closely she’d been following him, but she was instead frozenly staring at the bitch and had tears coursing down her cheeks.

“We have to get to the puppy out in the river,” he told her.

The bitch immediately growled at the sound of his voice, but started whining again quickly when the puppy’s whimpering continued. The woman startled into looking at him, then stared around as if she was going to have a complete breakdown right here under the bridge. When Liam took another step, pulling her along due to the white-knuckled grip on the jacket strip in her hand, she stumbled forward after him. The bitch’s attention followed the sound of her puppy keenly, both ears pressed up in spite of the damage to her face from breaking out of wherever she’d been trapped.

They didn’t have to step far into the water before the bitch saw the fourth puppy and splashed out to rescue her. Liam waited until both mum and pup were back on dry land and then knelt beside the puppy. The bitch, smelling hard at her baby, growled harder when her muzzle passed close to Liam’s knee. The hackles of her short hair stood up in a spiky ridge down her spine as she snarled impressively, her whining turning confused as his smell mingled with the puppy’s.

6

He spoke soft nonsense as he gently lowered the puppy to herself, chuckling as all four of her small legs pinioned and her body wiggled in his hands. He leaned over and kissed the middle of her back.

“You be a good wee pup for your mum, now,” he advised her quietly. The bitch had stopped whining while he was talking, and she barked excitedly as Liam touched the puppy in his arms to the one on the pathway to transfer the happy wiggles into the still body. The bitch bowled him over in her enthusiasm and the scene evaporated with the feel of her whiskers tickling at his throat as she inhaled what felt like all of the air around him and the puppy. He was still laughing when the catwalk returned clearly in his view.

He looked up at the woman he was with, smiling at her to share the moment. She was still crying, but seeing that she was watched meant she now tried to hide it. She swiped at her cheeks hard and turned away.

“How can you be okay with those guys doing that?” she demanded, not turning back.

“I’m not,” Liam admitted. “But I can’t interact fully on that side of reality.”

She turned and stared at him, the accusations piling up on her face.

“Over there, we’re ghosts. We can move a few things, maybe say something that animals or sensitive people will notice, but we can’t bust into the scene as if we were there. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

He sighed and stood up. There had been so many times he’d tried to intervene in big ways, to alter a course… and failed. Most people who came into the grey were young, like him, and they weren’t in the best circumstances when they were dying. There was a lot of violence behind the doors and some horrible tragedies. The saying that nobody ever knows what’s going on inside someone else’s life just by looking at the person was never more accurate than in the grey. So now he did the small things he could – like leaving the door open in the grey so that the bitch wasn’t locked in anymore under the bridge – and he kept doing futile, big attempts when he couldn’t just stand there and watch.

“You could’ve tried to –”

“The bitch was behind us,” he interrupted before she could get really mad. “I usually can’t interfere with people, that’s not how this works.”

“The only thing behind us under the bridge was the door and the wall,” she accused, crossing her arms in front of her.

“You’re right. That’s why I left our door open.”

She opened her mouth to drop another accusation and then realization crashed across her features that their entrance into the puppy’s life-or-death moment had been what released the bitch to chase off the men. “Oh,” she said, looking away from him. Liam smiled at her.

“You’re not used to being out of control of anything, are you?” he asked. She laughed without any humor and blinked back a few more tears, a reply proving the opposite was true. “So you’re just fed up with everything being out of control?”

“Just, stop.” She held up one hand in a traffic-cop motion. “I do not need to be analyzed right now.”

“Then what do you need?”

“I need…” she started angrily and then stopped. “I need you to shut up,” she finished the statement coldly, the anger on her face erased from her voice as she re-crossed her arms.

Liam nodded silently and offered her a hand. She stared at it like he was holding out a venomous snake and then stepped around his hand to pick up the strip of his jacket that she’d been holding before. He set off in the same direction that they’d been going for getting the puppy home. There weren’t any doors yet, and he didn’t know when they’d see the first one for the woman, so he just kept walking in silence as she trailed along behind.

“I thought you said that visitors went through their own worst days and their death day,” she accused after a long while of just walking. “But the puppy only had one day.”

“For a lot of visitors, their worst days are their death days,” Liam replied simply.

“How many days for you?” she challenged.

“Two.”

“So I guess your death must be going pretty easily if you’ve had a worse day than that.”

Liam considered his physical form’s current situation of choking on bodily fluids, lying in a gutter after being hit by a jacked up pick-up truck, surrounded by a staring crowd of gawkers who were recording the happenings for whatever online media they were planning to post it to.

“I don’t think I’d say it was going easy,” he replied, remembering the efforts the emergency responders were putting into keeping him alive.

“Oh,” she said. She was quiet for a few most steps. “So if you had two days, then –”

Liam interrupted her with a chuckle. “Sorry,” he grinned over his shoulder at her and caught her glaring at the back of his head. “You’re just asking a lot of questions to the same person that you recently told to shut up.”

She flushed with anger and then blushed. “I don’t enjoy being around you, you know. I’m stuck with you at the moment.”

“I’d already used my exceptional powers of deduction and figured that part out,” he chided.

“You’re an asshole!” she yelled at him, flinging the strip of jacket and stomping to a stop in the middle of the catwalk.

The tears she’d been successfully controlling while they’d been walking spilled out and her temper snapped as the first drop crested her cheekbone. She yelled at him for not intervening enough with the men killing the puppies, and then at him about everything he’d admitted to not knowing about being in the grey or what came after. Then she branched off into things that he didn’t know what she was talking about but apparently had been sore spots for a really long time which culminated into an accusation that he was a really bad guardian angel because of how messed up her life had gotten so what was the point of helping her now when all of it was too late…?

He’d had a lot of these kinds of meltdowns when he’d been a teen. Something would happen to push everything up and it would all spin out onto whoever was standing there at the time. His brain’s defense was to create a disassociation disorder that had plagued him into his twenties. Then he’d been hit by a truck and taken on the open job position as an afterlife guardian here in the grey because a little girl who was only ten and a half needed an adult to help her and he was the only one around.

Somewhere toward the end of the rant he learned this woman’s name was Matilde because she started referring to herself in the third person; she was yelling at herself with some pretty heavy accusations about her self-perceived low intelligence and lack of social awareness or graces. It all ended with a scream born of rage and fear and then she collapsed to sitting in the middle of the catwalk, sobbing uncontrollably. Liam approached her slowly and knelt beside her. She turned from him, either to crawl away or just to hide her face, and her hand promptly dropped through the catwalk as her sleeve shoved up her arm. She cried harder after working herself up to sitting by using her elbows, then turned toward him and crashed into his chest. He wrapped her up tightly in his arms and rocked as she cried, holding her for the length of time needed for her tears to slow down.

She squeezed him tightly for a moment – or maybe it was for half a lifetime – and then pushed back so that she was sitting up on her own. She scrubbed at her face with her sleeves, then dug through the pockets in her jacket, visibly relieved when her fingers found a tissue she could use for blowing her nose. The pace of her fidgeting fingers increased at the same rate as the blush brightened on her face. She scoffed at some internal deprecation and then stared up at the grey nothing overhead as if there was supposed to be some kind of answer there for her to read.

7

“Well, that was humiliating,” she finally said after tucking the used tissue into the opposite pocket that she’d gotten it out of as clean. Liam tucked one hand into her hair and cradled the back of her head into his palm.

“You’re allowed to have emotions, Matilde. The bad ones are just as valid as the good ones,” he said quietly. She twisted her head to look at him, but kept her ear pressed into his palm. Clouded confusion filled her eyes and her brows pinched together slightly.

“Why do you put yourself through this?”

“Through what?”

“All of… this,” she gestured widely at the full expanse of the grey. “The messes that people make and the terrible things they do to themselves and each other. Why do that to yourself on endless repeat?”

“Because it feels important to me,” he answered honestly. “This is something important and good in the big ways that I never felt about anything while I was alive.”

She watched him for a moment, her eyes still confused. Suddenly she tipped toward him and kissed him. Her lips were soft and the pressure they presented was questioning, so he answered with returning the kiss and then breaking it off as she started to lean closer.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she reprimanded herself, taking his lack of action as a sign of rejection.

“I’m not complaining about it,” he said. “But you’re not really in a great emotional state, and I’m not a rubber stamp of approval that you’re okay. Especially when I honestly think that you’re not.”

“So I’m too screwed up to screw. Cool. Thanks.” She shoved away from him and positioned her legs so that she could stand up without using her hands.

“You’d prefer pity sex?” he asked.

The flatness of the question startled her into falling back onto her ass from the half standing position she’d been in. She squared off to yell at him purely out of wounded pride while she was still fighting to stop using her hands to catch herself because they kept dropping through the nothing of the catwalk. Liam arrested her struggles by wrapping one arm around her back, holding her up as if he’d just dipped her while they’d been dancing.

“You’ve said you don’t like me, and you’ve shown you don’t trust me,” he said, interrupting anything she might’ve tried to say. “You’ve just had a full blown meltdown and you feel vulnerable and embarrassed and so far out of control that you’re terrified you’ll never get back to your own normal. I can tell you’ve used this recovery route before, so it’s an easy confession that I have too. We both know the sex doesn’t help. It’s just a temporary control that’ll make you feel cheap after. You’re already valid, Matilde. I don’t have to screw you to prove it.”

She opened her mouth a couple of times to attempt a reply, but both times nothing came out and she simply closed her mouth without saying anything. Instead she slapped him, rolled out of his arms, and started crying again. After a few moments alone, she leaned into the hug he offered and cried on his shoulder one more time.

Matilde told him about her chain of exes once the tears stopped. How things had spiraled for her since her mom had passed away and the way that work and finances just kept piling up to the negative until she’d started needing sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication just to get through the week. Mixing up her prescriptions and overdosing by accident was what had brought her into the grey. He recounted his own incident with the truck while he’d been skipping classes, and then about his failed attempts at relationships. They commiserated over the strains of university when all the years of school were stacking up under mounds of loans and debts that the offered wages in the job market just didn’t meet at the point of a livable situation. Her happy childhood was a stark contrast to his broken one, but they were both able to laugh at the good stories they each had. Somewhere along the flow of the conversation, they ended up lying down together and staring up at the grey overhead as if there were stars in it. Matilde marveled at Liam’s ability to interact with the catwalk and structures, and he made her giggle by dropping a coin to the catwalk above where her palm was sunken below the surface of it.

“How long do you think we’ve been lying here?” she asked, the back of her head resting on his stomach so that she didn’t have to hold it up.

“Anywhere from an hour to a lifetime,” Liam shrugged. “Time isn’t linear here.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how it’s possible that I’m not aching after lying on something as hard as concrete for this long.”

Liam laughed at her comment. “This isn’t your physical body, remember?”

“Ouch,” she said after pinching herself. “Feels real, though, doesn’t it?”

“It’s still real. It’s just not physically happening,” he explained. She sighed and shook her head and then rolled over to rest on her elbows and look at his face.

“You see something up there, don’t you?”

“There’s another catwalk,” he answered, his eyes tracing the thin line until he saw the wavering dot that meant his companion was on the move. “It’s almost too far away to see, but it’s there.”

“Does it look the same at this one?”

“It’s transparent like this one, because I can see the visitors up there through it, but that one seems to have rounded corners for the catwalk and square catches. This one has squared corners and round catches. There’s someone else like me up there, too. Sometimes we can wave to each other.”

“Are there more catwalks?” she asked, twisting to be able to squint up and try to see what he was looking at.

“I figure there must be. I haven’t seen any others yet, though.”

“Huh.” She squinted up for a long time, then shook her head and looked back at Liam. “I don’t see anything.”

“You also can’t touch the catwalk with bare skin or you fall through,” he reminded her.

“That’s true,” she agreed, shrugging.

She kissed him again, shifting close, her inner dialogue running negative the moment he broke off the kiss and she scoffed angrily at herself. “I told you: you’re already valid. You don’t have to prove it. Besides,” he stole a kiss as he copped a feel, the teenager-level obviousness making her giggle hard enough to break the kiss. “I’ll stick around until you start to feel better if you just want to stay here. We don’t have to look for your door unless you decide you want to.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“I have lots of hugs if you want them?” he offered. She laughed and then snuggled against his chest.

They talked about everything and anything they knew about until all those words were exhausted, and then they theorized about whatever came to mind at the time. Along the way, Liam noticed that he was starting to sound like some of his counselors and then Matilde was crying again because she was having either another meltdown or maybe a breakthrough. She threw away her jacket at some point, just to watch it fall until the fluttering dusted away. Lifetimes spun away into the grey and after a long and comfortable silence, she put her hand down on her lap as she thought of something else to talk about and realized she was leaning weight on her other hand on the catwalk.

“I can see it!” she exclaimed. Liam laughed at her, the sound familiar from the life they’d had together while lounging in this one spot.

“I was wondering when you’d notice,” he chided. He laced his fingers into hers and pulled her down for a kiss. She broke the kiss and smiled at him, then scooted away and – biting her bottom lip out of anticipated excitement – lay down and rolled onto her back. She whooped out a laugh that her head and bare arms stayed comfortably resting on the surface, and then sighed contentedly at the perfectly peaceful way her mind felt here in the grey.

“I’m going to die if I find my door and go back,” she said.

8

“What?” Liam rolled up to an elbow, the startled question bursting out louder than he’d intended it to be.

“I live alone and I booked this week away from work to have some time off. I don’t have plans with anyone for the whole week. Even if I do decide to go back, I’m still dying. Nobody will even think to check up on me until I don’t come in to work on Monday.”

“I’m sure we can figure out a way to alert a neighbor if you do decide to go back,” he stated. “There’s also the option of staying here?” he asked, reaching over to play with her hair. She smiled at him and then shook her head to the negative.

“I can’t do what you do. We’ve talked about this, Liam, for me it’s either go back or take a nap. Staying here, I’d either care too much or not enough and both of those won’t help anyone else.”

“But both of the other options you think you have feel like losing you,” he said quietly.

She stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers. He caught her hand and flipped it over to press a kiss into her palm. She pushed with her feet, shoving herself along the catwalk until the top of her head bumped into the elbow he was leaning on.

“Everybody dies at some point,” she told him. He chuckled at the long-standing joke between them, gathering her closer as she wiggled around to lie beside him. “How much longer do you think we could stay?”

“How long do you want to?”

Lifetimes spun out between them as they held their place in the grey. Sometimes as lovers, sometimes as friends, and always staying in place in the catwalk so that seconds, minutes and hours couldn’t catch up to the living they were doing outside of standard time, surprisingly uninterrupted by any more visitors. They grew old together, unchanged, trying to figure out any way that they could bring what they were in the grey back into their lives. And trying to figure out how to stop Matilde from dying if she did find her door and then decided to go back.

After a long pause within the pause they’d created, she yawned, and the realization that their time was up added weight to the silence they’d just been resting comfortably in. They dressed reluctantly, the long ago discarded clothing strange and binding, and chose to walk barefoot in the direction that felt forward, carrying their shoes.

Matilde’s bedroom door appeared only one turning away; boding either her death or a particularly bad day with one of her exes just after her mother had died. Liam held her hand and they walked through together. There was no yelling or fighting. Matilde was in the middle of the floor where she’d fallen after passing out. Her body had already vomited out the contents of her stomach, the half-dissolved and accidental overdose of pills clear to see.

“You fell on a rug,” Liam noted, a hopeful smile spreading over his face.

“So?” Matilde looked up at him, unsure what he was thinking.

“Can you open your pill bottle and the balcony door?” he asked.

“I…” she stepped closer to herself and her voice trailed off. Liam wrapped her in a hug to pull her out of the gravity her body was exerting on her. “I can, yes,” she confirmed.

Working fast, she opened the balcony door first and then came back to open the pill bottle second. Liam got a hold of the rug and pulled so that she was half-way outside and her hand dangled out between the railing spindles. The edge of the catwalk aligned perfectly with the drop down to the street.

“You said your downstairs neighbor is a nosy widow, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll hang off the catwalk and drop the open bottle onto her balcony. She’ll hear it, and look up to see your hand. She’ll call an ambulance for you.”

Liam kissed Matilde and took the pills out of her hand. He stepped over her body quickly and climbed over the railing. Matilde didn’t say anything. He looked back and saw her already reaching toward herself, the call of being alive drowning out everything else. He dropped down and grabbed the edge of the catwalk, tossing the pills as soon as he was certain that the bottle would hit the downstairs balcony.

The clatter of the plastic bottle on tile was accompanied by the scattering of pills and an angry voice yelling to know who was outside as the building evaporated. Liam looked up through the catwalk and saw Matilde’s shoes sitting neatly right beside his.

They’d saved her. They had to have saved her. But how to know?

Technology and information proved that every visitor he’d met came from the same time as him. They were from all over the world, but not all over in time. He’d realized long ago that each visitor was dying in the same moment he was; they all only came here at different intervals.

He climbed up and sat alone, laughing and crying at the same time, holding onto her shoes. When he looked, the same car door as every time before was hanging open a few steps away; waiting for him. He held onto one of Matilde’s shoes and slid through the car and into the street behind the woman who was filming him as he died. One of the emergency responders was openly swearing at Liam for not reacting to their attempts so far.

“Come on kid,” the medic begged. “You’re not old enough to just give up like this.”

“You’re right,” Liam agreed from beside him. The responder’s head spun to look at the empty spot that Liam was filling. “In case I don’t get the chance later, thank you for not giving up on me.”

The emergency responder paled four skin tones, but Liam didn’t see it because he was already immersed in the worst pain he’d ever experienced. He didn’t hear the responders determinedly and quietly cheering him – and each other – as they finally got the results they’d been fighting for these past two minutes: an independent pulse. They got Liam onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, nobody noticing until he was stripped for surgery that he was clutching a woman’s shoe in one hand.

In the grey, Anson happened to be looking down and watched as the distant catwalk below hers glimmered, taking the round catches with it as it sparkled out of existence. She didn’t know what had happened down there, but her catwalk seemed okay, and the one way above with the triangle catches and straight catwalk was still there when she looked up. Both had been there the whole time she’d been on hers. She sighed and shook her head, relieved that she was still here and her catwalk didn’t appear to be fading away from under her. It was silly to think that anything in the grey would stay; this place was all about changes. She took a few steps and what was becoming the familiar shunk of the grey being turned off sounded. She started counting, trying to keep her numbers even to see if this time the black would last as long as the other two times she’d counted, but then there was a growl and she got distracted by wondering what kind of passer-through she’d be helping this time around.