i. 

Gunshot. 

Loud, ringing, rattling the walls and the foundation of our little home. 

Smoke billows from the barrel of his pistol. 

And the world stops turning for a moment. 

I look down, and from my chest, a rose blooms. The blood soaks up my shirt, my skin, warm and wet. It doesn’t hurt, to my surprise; I acknowledge that I am in pain, intense pain, more pain than I’ve ever felt in my entire life, but the adrenaline takes over, and I simply feel like I’m floating, or falling. It’s quite serene, comfortable—the touch of death is not a frigid kiss, but a warm embrace. 

I hold my hand to the wound and look him in the eyes. 

The gun falls from his hand and clatters. 

“No…no, no, no, no, no.” He was once angry, just moments ago, but his blinding red rage had saturated into ghostly white, not quite an emotion, just a grim realization. “Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry. Blythe, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I’m not really listening to him. The echo of the gunshot is still pounding in my skull. But I can’t take my eyes off of him, the man that robbed me of the rest of my life. He’s running towards me now, frantic, catching me in his arms as my body sags to the floor. 

I cannot feel his hands on my skin. His touch is static, numb. The living room is spinning and blinking, phasing in and out of existence. The walls bleed their colors, the old paint dripping onto the carpet. Foggy splotches of black ink cloud my vision. His face is blurry, twisting, contorting, melting almost, like he’s made of muddy clay. I am the same way. Melting, slipping through his fingertips. 

Gone. In an instant. 

Time stands still, and I’m stranded in liminal space, walking the line between the real and the metaphysical. I cannot see—or rather, there is nothing for me to see. Just the void, a pitch black existence. My body does not exist, not anymore—I have escaped the confines of skin and bone, and only exist now as a thought, a shapeless sentience, drifting through this peripheral plane of oblivion. My consciousness is stagnant. It does not fade, it does not dim; it changes, shapes itself into something new, adapting to this void. I become more, and less; I become one with this emptiness, a fragment of this vacancy, and yet, this vacancy does not allow me to understand it as it truly is.

I understand that I am dead, but I cannot even begin to perceive what death is. Death is not a blinding white light at the end of the winding road. Death is not a fiery descent into the molten core of the Earth. Death is not dying. Death is waiting, waiting in silent patience for what remains of my conscious self to slip away, for my insomniac soul to lie down and rest, finally received by the reaper. 

I am comfortable, though. Overwhelmed with solace. I am asleep, in a bed, with a warm quilt wrapped around me—no aches, no pains, no muscles, no bones. Just rest in beautiful silence. I have never experienced quietude like this before, where not even the faint whisperings of my own mind can occupy me. I would like to stay here. I would like for this to be the end. But I know it isn’t. Because I still remain. But I would like to pretend, for a while, that this is where I am meant to stay, for the rest of this timeless existence.   

“God, no…” 

But I hear his voice—whose voice, I am already beginning to forget. It’s a whisper, gently carried through the void, the hum of its soft vibrations rippling through my shapeless body. A whisper that shatters the stagnance, stimulates my consciousness. My perception of time returns for three and a half seconds, the amount of time it takes for his two words to break the sound barrier and then fade back into silence, as though nothing had ever happened. 

I settle back into that comfortable state of oblivion, stretching out across this void endlessly, like a liquid—swelling, spilling, ebb and flow. I begin to forget, the sound of his voice, the words he spoke already lost to me, just a ghost now. A presence. A reminder. I try to let go of him. Let him fade from my consciousness. I cannot be using what little remnants of sentience I have left to muse over this person that took my life. No, I must move on. Forgive. Forget. Rest. Just rest. 

But he will not let the silence be. 

“I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Seven seconds. 

“Blythe.”

Evocation. A name—no, my name. 

“I’m sorry…come back, please.”

The void, suddenly stirred to life, pulsates, ripples like water. Shadowy tendrils, serpents curling and coiling around each other, weaving through me. I move in its rhythm. Rise and fall with the tides, pulled apart and squished together. Molding clay. Shaping shapelessness. 

Little pinpricks of light pierce through the dark, blinking in and out of existence. Like a bright sunrise bleeding through the curtains while I’m still trying to sleep. I do not want to look. I want to exist forever here, in this void. But the void pulls me towards these little pinpricks, and I am unable to fight. The lights expand, brighten—the void separates itself from me.

Stars. They must be stars. This must be it. The last step in this inevitable cycle. My final stop. I will be dispersed throughout the galaxy. Recycled into matter, into atoms. Remade. Repurposed. Reborn. 

This must be it. 

This must be death.

I am hurtled into the embrace of this blinding white light—neither flying nor falling—and it does not offer the same solace as the darkness had. No, this light is scorching fire, and although I have a body no longer, this blaze burns as though I do—a phantom sensation of becoming human again, only for my body to be taken away once more, skin and bones melted to nothing. 

Despite this mortal pain, I try to relax into the flow of the current. Lie still. Wait for the journey to end. Wait to be gone. Forever. I cannot experience grief anymore, too human for my grasp—maybe, in life, the thought of undergoing this eternal departure would have saddened me, but I have no such notions now. I simply accept. 

Rise and fall. Ebb and flow. 

I am almost there.

The light opens up, and I fall through. 

Reborn.

I am not scattered across the universe. I do not cease. I become. I am still shapeless, I am still liquid—but I am able to perceive. My sight is blurry at first, but I see color, I see shape. Then, slowly, the fog clears.  

And I see him. 

Sobbing over my dead body. 

ii.

He sits there for hours. I know this because I have been watching the old grandfather clock, counting every dull tick. He stopped crying forty minutes ago. He’s just catatonic now, paralyzed, unable to tear his eyes away as he watches the body decompose. A bloated, discolored body, bruised and blistered and soaked in blood. I do not recognize her, that rotting corpse, but I know she is me, because every now and then, he whispers my name, begs me to forgive him. 

He has stopped asking me to come back. 

The gun is on the floor. I remember it now, the clattering, the smoke, the echo, ringing in my ears. This memory is fresh, so fresh I can smell the sulfur just faintly lingering in the air. I cannot look back on these memories, but I can feel them, their vibrations, a low rumble of dread—it makes me human for a moment, this mortal feeling. The man, I feel nothing for. I see his face, see the dried tears staining his cheeks, and something deep within me wants to emerge, but cannot. In this moment, he is simply the man who took my life—nothing more, nothing less. 

“Blythe…” 

I am growing weary of hearing my own name, growing weary of having to watch and wait. However, I cannot move. I am confined to his orbit, unable to float, unable to expand. I am simply the space he occupies. The stuffy living room air he breathes. The aroma of rot burning his nostrils. Forced to witness the slow but brutal decay of my own cadaver. 

At the fifth hour, he finally stands, his legs trembling as though he has forgotten how to use them. He sways, staggers, backs into a wall, all the color drained from his face, like he will faint at any given moment. But he keeps staring. Even as he tries to shuffle out of the room, palming at the wall to keep himself upright. He cannot look away. 

Hopelessly waiting to wake up.

As he moves, I follow—or rather, I am pulled by an invisible leash, tethered to his presence. He slowly stumbles down the hall, into the bedroom, closing the door and letting out a gravelly moan. He cannot shed any more tears. I watch him try. He scrunches up his face, contorts it in ugly anguish, fingers ripping at the roots of his matted hair, wanting but not having the strength to scream. 

I am closer to him now, a cloud forming around his head. His foggy, bloodshot eyes stare right through me, his ragged breath stirring my form. He cannot feel me. I am right here, studying his subtlest movements, a specimen under my microscope—and he is none the wiser. He is in his own world, his own peril, oblivious to my ghost. 

He lingers by the door for a while, swaying back and forth, his footing unsteady. Shifting his weight from leg to leg. Touching his jaw, his mouth, his ears, his arms, his neck, his hair. Endlessly fidgeting, desperately searching for a distraction. It’s autonomous, lifeless—he has completely checked out of reality, dead behind the eyes.  

He looks at the cellphone sitting on the bedside table. 

I feel the vibrations of memory once more, humming through me like a thousand provoked bees—I grabbed that phone, and it was ripped from my fingertips. Then screaming, the distant echoes of argument still floating like particles of dust in the stale bedroom air. These memories, they tell me nothing. They tell me only what I’ve just forgotten, they tell me the person I was between the moment I grabbed the phone and the moment I was shot—they tell me nothing of who I was before my death.  

He approaches the nightstand and takes his phone in his shaky hands, just staring at the blackened screen for a while in anxious contemplation. Then, he unlocks it. I peer over his shoulder, and I am electrocuted, it seems. A violent static ripples through me, my energy clashing with the phone’s electromagnetic fields—and I, unable to pull away, push against it. And as I do so, the phone stutters a bit, lagging as he opens his contacts list. He does not seem to notice, but I do. 

After a few moments of struggle, I manage to escape the electric pulses, hover off to the side, a few feet away. He desperately dials a number and holds the phone to his ear. It rings five times, but to him, I can only imagine it feels like a million.

Someone then picks up. 

“Hey, man.”

There is a pause. A long, doomed pause. 

“I really fucked up…”

iii. 

He’s placed a blanket over my body. 

An old, knitted quilt. Saturated pink and frilly. 

He is crumbling. Antsy. Pacing. Sweating bullets. 

He’s peeking through the curtains. Staring up at the vents. Peering down the hallway every now and then. Paranoid, now. It’s almost as if he knows he’s being watched, though he is more likely searching for hidden cameras than he is searching for ghosts. 

There’s a knock at the door that almost makes him jump out of his own skin. 

He reaches for the doorknob, but stops. “Jasper?” he called out in a strained voice.

“Let me in, asshole. It’s pouring rain,” comes a disgruntled reply.

He opens the door, but blocks the threshold. “It’s been two hours.”

“Hey, don’t take that tone with me, shitbag. I drove all the way out here for your stupid ass, and I can just as easily drive myself all the way back home. You fuckin’ owe me.” The visitor shoves past him and steps into the living room with an air of confidence that instantly deflates the moment he lays eyes on the bloody cadaver wrapped up in a pink quilt. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. I don’t know what to do. I’m fucking screwed for life.”

“No. You’re not. You’ll be fine. We’ll just…get rid of it.”

I know that I knew Jasper somehow. He is familiar, but I cannot place that familiarity. These memories remain dark to me. But I prickle at his words, becoming sharp and jagged. Needled. 

Jasper passes right through me as he kneels down next to the body—and he slows a little, twitching, goosebumps flaring across his skin, the hairs on the nape of his neck standing upright. Just for a moment, he feels my presence, he feels the chilling touch of death crawl down his spine, but the moment is short lived. He swiftly regains composure and resumes his inspection of the cadaver. 

“I can’t go to prison, man. I wouldn’t survive. I just wouldn’t—”

“Just shut up for one fucking second.” Jasper stands aggressively. “No one’s going to prison, okay? You were at mine tonight. We were drunk, you crashed on my couch—you weren’t here, and neither was she.”

“But—”

“Hey, buddy, no buts. There’s a dead broad in your living room, and she’s starting to attract flies. Now, go get gloves and a trash bag. And, uh. Something to mop up that blood.”

I bristle again, becoming a knot of branches and thorns, coiling and curling, puncturing the thick fabric of the veil. The walls creak. The lights flicker. They startle and stare up at the ceiling, stare right through me, and I, for a moment, pretend they can see me, in my tangled mess, a wretched eye—unable to escape my judgment.  

“Old house…” he mutters. They tear their eyes away. 

I slowly unfurl, back into my voluminous state. Weak. Heavy. A little dazed. But enthralled, allured by the warm and fleeting touch of the living world. I still feel it, the lingering brush of its fingertips. I barely scratched the surface of the veil, and it, in turn, gave me everything. And still, it tempts me, tells me I need even more, more than everything. 

An inkling of uncertainty nibbles at my consciousness. 

It’s too convenient. Too easy. Too dangerously unknown. If I reach out into the living world, something may reach back. If I blur the lines between life and death too often, I may become forever stuck somewhere in between. 

I must refrain. I must see this through until the end, if there is an end at all.

Jasper is left as the other goes to fetch the needed items. The other—I still cannot remember his name, his story, his existence. Those memories are locked away in the dark recesses of my subconscious, and I have yet to find the key. My own killer, who cried for hours over my lifeless body, is nothing but a vaguely familiar face to me. 

I do not pity myself for these losses of memory. No, I am frustrated. I lost these memories the moment I passed, not a second late. I cannot even remember who I am, how I ended up behind the barrel of his pistol. My name is only my name because he spoke it into existence. My body is only my body because he made it so. I do not know if any images flashed before my eyes in my final moments of life, but I hope that, if I did get to witness my life played out in fragments, I got a moment to reflect on them, to really cherish them, for what they were. 

How could I have known they wouldn’t last.  

How could I have known I’d be stuck like this.

iv. 

In the pouring rain, they load the suspiciously lumpy trash bag into the trunk of a rather banged-up car. 

While they do so, I stretch out as far as I possibly can, into the trees and towards the night sky, weaving between water droplets, taking in as much freedom as I can possibly breathe before I am dragged into that car and taken to where they plan to dispose of my body. I am a bird, soaring on wings. I am unbound, just for now.

This house where I died is quite secluded, nothing but mountainous pine trees for as far as I can perceive. A cabin, with a firepit, a bench swing, and a wooden dock overlooking the lake—I explore every inch of the yard, peer through the windows, dip into the lake, trying to evoke just another tiny sliver of memory. But nothing stirs. Nothing at all. 

And for a change, I do not mind. I get to experience this world again, through a brand new set of eyes, and I get to experience it in a way no living person ever could. I get to feel the rain trickle through me, I get to float like a leaf through the current of the winds. I can touch the bottom of the lake and graze the top of a cloud in the same second. If fate is kind, I will stay like this for as long as this world still exists. 

But fate is never kind, especially to those destined to die on living room floors with a bullet in their chests. To those unfortunate few, fate was out to get them from the start.

Suddenly, I am pulled from the sky and hurled back down towards the earth, shoved into the backseat of a sticky, stained, trash-filled car, with Jasper behind the wheel and the killer in the passenger seat.

“There’s an old bridge forty miles down that road,” he whispers to Jasper, almost ashamed to admit this knowledge aloud. “It’s over a small channel that leads into the Kennebec river. No one ever goes there.”

“Good call, good call,” Jasper says, sounding, on the other hand, rather proud. Or, at the very least, excited. He jerks the car into reverse and whips the car out of the driveway, onto the asphalt road. From there, we drive slowly through the trees, towards the supposed bridge forty miles down. 

I feel cramped in this confined case. I cannot move beyond the walls of this little car, not even through the vents or the cracks in the windows. I am stuck, floating between the seats, waiting for this bridge, waiting to be let out into the world again. I do not remember how far forty miles even is. I hope it isn’t too long of a drive. 

I wonder if this is what needs to happen for my soul to be set free. To float away, back into the universe, my consciousness destroyed and turned into matter. Set adrift my physical body, down the river and out to sea, back into the arms of Mother Nature.

There is some sound, some song that crackles over the old, barely functioning radio, and neither of them are listening. The sound is turned down low, but the bass is cranked, rattling the doors. A familiar static ripples through me, more chaotic now that I’m enclosed in this small space—I ignore the feeling to the best of my ability, push against the vibrations, push against the temptations of the living world. 

The two are quiet for what, to me, feels like an eternity. Jasper is driving slowly, carefully, avoiding every crack and hole in the road. My unnamed assailant sits still and stares at his feet, blinking slowly, blinking heavily, not fully present in his head. I wonder what manic thoughts run through his mind, what he fears most, what he feels he deserves. I do not know this man. I do not know if he was ever worthy of redemption. 

I watch him start to nod off. The digital clock sitting just below the dashboard tells me that it is three o’clock in the morning, and Jasper is looking a little worn down as well. Still, I want to feel a little offended—how, after murdering me in cold blood and conspiring with his friend to dump me over the side of a bridge, is he tired? He doesn’t get to be tired. He doesn’t deserve the luxury of sleep. He doesn’t deserve the luxury of escaping his guilt. 

But he dozes off, not quite asleep but not quite awake, and something in the atmosphere shifts. Suddenly, I feel a slight pull—not the pull of my invisible tether to him, but the pull of a beckoning hand, a gentle wave, a casual suggestion. It does not tell me to follow; it asks me to follow, tells me I should follow. 

I have been given a choice, granted autonomy over myself. And I choose to follow. 

Slipping away with the tide, I am swept up in his orbit, even closer than before; I envelop his head, a crown that nobody can see, a halo he is not worthy of. Curling through his hair, wafting through his ears and mouth and eyes like tendrils of smoke. I drift through him for a while, feeling the rhythm of his breathing become soft and steady, feeling the slow pulsing of his heart. I see nothing, but feel everything. The inner workings of his body, the flow of blood, the slight shifting of bone, the expanding and deflating of his lungs with every whisper of breath brawn. 

I am human now. I am him. 

I lie here for a while, just remembering what it felt like to be human again. Pretending his breaths are my own, pretending this body is my own. Imagining that I am several hours into a long, cross-country car ride, dozing off in the front seat, surrounded by touristy memorabilia gathered from previous stops. Just me and my friends—friends that I do not remember having, and can only hope existed in some shape or form. 

The more I linger in his body, the more in-tune I become with his humanity. I can feel the seat belt strap resting against his throat, slightly pressing up against his Adam’s apple. The gentle draft of the warm air from the heater on his face. The leather seat against his ass. The mountain of beer cans resting at his ankles.

I am human again. I never knew how much I would miss this. I would cry if I could. 

I get a little confident, a little too sure of my newfound humanity. I want to experience everything again. Just once. Just one last time, and then I will be content with death for the rest of time. 

I wiggle a finger. His pinkie moves in accordance. I flex a muscle, and I feel his arm bulge beneath his shirt. 

I am human. Good God, I am human again. 

I pry open his eyelids, and can see the world from where he sits. The dashboard. The road. Jasper. Jasper, who is looking at me, but does not know he is looking at me. I draw a breath and almost gag. I can smell myself back there.

“Damien?”

The evocation of his name almost evades me, as I am too preoccupied with relearning how to pilot this machine of flesh and blood. Damien. After I finally register that I have been given my killer’s name, I linger on it for a while. Damien. He does not strike me as a Damien—but then again, I do not remember what being a Damien might entail. To me, it is simply a name, something to finally address this formerly nameless figure. Damien. I furrow his brow, scrunch his nose, purse his lips—completely aware that Jasper is still looking at me, still assuming I am the same person he was just minutes prior.

“You all right, man? Or, uh…you know what I mean.”

I open my mouth to respond, but all at once, I forget how to speak words into existence, how they are formed, shaped by the lips. So I just sit there, jaw slightly agape, hoping the moment passes in forgetful silence, so I can continue to prod and poke at this sack of flesh in relative peace. I am granted this peace in intervals of two to three seconds, as Jasper returns his sight to the road every now and then—but his inquisitive stare always returns, and I worry I will have to fumble through speaking, to reveal myself as an imposter, a parasite in Damien’s body.  

But I do not. Because Damien stirs awake. His breathing hitches, his muscles tense. In a panic, I try to sneak out undetected, but it is too late now. I feel him with me, two souls behind the same set of controls, both wanting to be the pilot, but neither daring to take hold of the steering wheel. 

Then, with a sudden push, I am forcefully evicted from his body. Thrown into the backseat. Discarded like trash. 

Damien blinks. He shakes his head like he’s trying to shake away the remnants of my presence. He looks at his hands and fingers. At his reflection in the rearview mirror, confirming that he is in fact still himself. Then at Jasper, who appears even more concerned now. I can see the cogs in Damien’s brain turning, a thousand thoughts flurrying through his head, a thousand words on the tip of his tongue, and the only thing he can mutter is, “Man, I just zoned out hard as fuck there. What were you saying?”

“You dozed off for a few minutes, then woke up looking confused as hell,” Jasper said. “Just wanted to make sure you weren’t, like, y’know…having some kind of episode or something.”

“No. Just a little freaked out. And exhausted.”

“I get that…” Jasper says, although he does not sound too sure of himself. “Do you want to…I don’t know, tell me what happened?” 

This piques my interest. I move in closer, hovering around the center console between the two of them. Damien’s hesitant silence, however, worries me. According to the digital clock, he sits there quietly for five and a half minutes, picking at a hangnail growing along the edge of his thumb. Jasper keeps stealing frequent and borderline desperate glances at him, also anticipating his response, maybe more than me.

A few more minutes pass. I accept defeat.

Then he speaks. 

“I never meant for this to happen,” he said, in a slow, drawn-out monotone. “I’m not a killer. I’m not. Yes, I pulled a gun on her, but I never meant to pull the trigger. I just wanted to scare her, I just wanted to…But I’ve never pulled a gun on someone, and my finger…my finger twitched a little. And just like that, she was gone.”

“Why the gun, though?” he asked. 

“I don’t know, I panicked. She went through my phone, saw my messages to all these other girls. Just screaming and crying and telling me how she loved me and telling me how she was gonna ruin my life. And I mean, I have a reputation to uphold. I can’t have the public knowing that I’m fucking slutty junkies on the downlow. The company’s been doing so well this year—this would have just ruined everything. But she was running for the door, and I just…wanted to scare her. Shut her up for a second so we could talk… ”

“Honest mistake,” says Jasper, waving his hand dismissively. “Now. The important question. How long do we have before people start looking for that whore? Like, are her parents the worrying type?

“No. Her parents don’t give a shit about her. Doesn’t have many relatives. And she and her friends were all massive pillheads, so…everyone will just assume, right?”

“Oh man, you’ve got, like, the golden ticket of murdering. Dude, you’ll get off scot-free, no problem. You won’t even have to get the lawyers involved. I don’t even know why you’re worrying. Fuck, you coulda let that corpse rot to the bone in your house and propped her skeleton up on the mantle, and nobody would’ve said shit.”  

“Don’t…don’t say that,” Damien mutters, mostly to himself. He is still looking at his hands, at the bleeding hangnail on his thumb. 

“C’mon, man, it’s fine. Lighten up a little. It’s not the end of the world. Y’know, every rich, successful man needs a dark side,” Jasper says with a lighthearted laugh. “If I were half as wealthy as you, I think I’d start killing people too. Or, like, start a Ponzi scheme. Just to feel something, y’know.”

“Jasper…” he warns. 

“Okay, okay, fine. We can’t joke about it now. Sooner or later, you’ll have a sense of humor about it.”

I have stopped listening to their back-and-forth, the words they say just distorted noise to me, because now, I am trying not to spiral back into that place I was before, that place that lingers a little too close to veil between life and death. I feel myself sharpen, harden. Even in life, I was disposable. Discarded. Brought into existence, just to be forgotten. No tombstone, no grave, no mourning. 

I feel the temptation. The siren song of the living world. I want to avenge myself, fight for the woman who will find no justice. I want to hurt them, both of them. I want them to look me in the eyes one final time, and I want them to know, as they draw their dying breaths, that it was me. I will not be forgotten. I will not be discarded. 

But I resist this feeling. I must stay a neutral force, because I cannot know what lies beyond that place. I cannot know what will become of me if I linger too long. Within Damien, I grazed that knowledge, found ecstasy in that knowledge, and I must not learn any more. It is too seductive, and too dangerously so. 

So for now, I just wait.

v.

The car is parked alongside the metal railing of the bridge. 

The rain is pouring harder now. Lightning splits the sky, and a boom of thunder rips through me like a bullet, its rumbling echo shattering my form. 

Jasper and Damien are picking large stones alongside the bay. And I, again, am free. But I do not feel free. Not anymore. I do not wander very far. I stay close to the bridge, close to my watery grave, the lapping tides of the river, rippling in the storm. It’s an old bridge, rusty and falling apart, tagged in smudged Sharpie and fading spray paint.  

They return to the bridge with handfuls of heavy rocks. Jasper pops the trunk and unveils her—me—to the pouring sky, dumping the stones into the trash bag. “There,” he says, tying the drawstrings shut. “Now she won’t float.”

“This is so fucked up…” Damien says.

“I know, right?” Jasper responds, a little too gleefully. 

Together, they hoist the trash bag out of the trunk, carrying it like a casket over their shoulders. I cannot remember what my corpse looked like, but I can see the outline of my face, the indent of my nose and lips. A foot. A hand. A couple stones. Mashed together in this makeshift body bag. 

“I feel like I should say something…” Damien murmurs, his soft words swept away in the turbulent wind the moment they leave his mouth. “Like. A few words or something, I don’t know.”

Jasper scoffs, “Sure, dude. Whatever you want, I guess.” The trash bag dips a little as he readjusts his grip; the stones clack together, and my arm sags. 

Damien is quiet for a moment, contemplating his choice of words. “Blythe…” he starts. “You, uh. You were a crazy bitch. But uh, you were a good one. I thought you were only with me for the money and the drugs, but…I guess I was wrong. You said you loved me, and…I fucked up. I really did. I just…hope that, wherever you are, you forgive me.”

There is a pause. A roar of thunder. 

He will never be forgiven. He knows this as much as I do.

“And um…yeah. That’s it, I guess. Rest easy, you psycho whore.”

“Great speech. Really touching, man,” Jasper says. “Can we dump the slut now?”

“Yeah…Yeah, let’s just get this over with.”

A piece of my soul is ripped away as they carelessly toss the trash bag over the edge. It hits the water with a hefty splash, and sinks right to the bottom. Gone. In an instant. Forever. Nothing but fish food now—discarded, disposable. I cannot look away.  

From the pocket of his jacket, Damien pulls the gun. The safety is on, and his finger is off the trigger—it is, most likely, a loaded gun. “Gonna…y’know, get rid of this too. I…I just can’t keep it in my house anymore. It’ll drive me mad.” 

“Ooh, I’ll take it,” Jasper offers, reaching for it—but Damien holds it over the edge.

“Nah. It needs to go. I don’t want this getting traced back to you somehow.”

“Ugh. Can’t have shit.”

He dangles the pistol over the ledge, but hesitates a bit. There was no hesitation when it came to dumping my body in the river, but for the gun, he gives himself a second to reconsider. A few seconds. A minute, actually. “Y’know, my grandpa gave me this gun,” he says. “On my eighteenth birthday. He used to take me shooting at the range all the time. It was my favorite thing to do with him. He got me this gun to remember him by. And he made me promise to only ever use it if someone was trying to hurt me. He made me promise, and I swore on it. I failed him. I failed my whole family.”

“Nah, man, you just…did what you had to do—”

“No, I didn’t.” He lowers his arm, the gun at his side, reaching his breaking point, his point of no return. He stares down Jasper with daggers for eyes, fire burning in his irises. “Man, just…just stop fucking defending me! Have some fucking sympathy for the dead! I killed someone. I murdered a girl in cold fucking blood!”

“Have some fucking sympathy? Says the man that helped toss the dead hooker into the river. You have some fucking sympathy.”

“Yes, I did. And I feel awful about it. You, on the other hand…you’re practically getting off to this! You’ve been having a fucking blast all night. I fucking killed someone, man. Don’t fucking praise me for it.”

“She threatened you, man! She was gonna run off and ruin your reputation, man. These fucking whores nowadays—you step out of line once, and they’re out for blood. They’re fucking animals. She was probably gonna make up some shit about rape and gaslighting and abuse, and rally the whole fucking country against you. You had to protect your business. You had to protect yourself.”

“There were other ways. Better ways. Ways that didn’t involve killing someone.”

“No. You need to get this through your head, because if you don’t, you’ll feel guilty about it for the rest of your life. Fuck, maybe you’ll feel so guilty, you’ll turn yourself in, and I’ll be a fucking accessory to murder. So just repeat after me. You. Did. What. You. Had. To. Do.”

“Stop. Saying. That.”

Damien pushes Jasper. Jasper pushes back. Damien drops the gun and decks Jasper in the jaw. Jasper, in retaliation, tackles Damien to the ground. And there, in the middle of this old, abandoned bridge, they fight like they’re fighting for their lives, a blur of flying fists and kicking feet, drawing blood, drawing tears, evoking vicious battle cries that are carried for miles across the river. Damien gets the upper hand. In a matter of minutes, Jasper is knocked to the ground, and Damien crouches over him. And he pummels every inch of his face, with no regard for his pleas, with no regard for his life. Beating on him until he falls silent and limp—still breathing, but just barely. 

Damien stands, gasping for air and wiping his bloody mouth with the back of his hand. And Jasper is knocked out cold, lying face down on the metal crossing, a small puddle of blood and rainwater pooling beneath his head. 

I feel the pull. The temptation. The luring. I become jagged, bristled. 

Rise and fall. Ebb and flow. 

Chaotic. Yearning. 

No. No. I cannot.

I don’t know what will happen. 

I don’t know what will become of me.

I…

I have to, don’t I?

This is why I was brought back, isn’t it? This very moment, this very opportunity. A perfect moment. A perfect chance. Retribution served on a silver platter, at my feet in a bloody heap. This is why I am here. This is why I still remain. Or am I being tested? Is the universe toying with me? Dangling this power before my eyes like a keyring before a toddler—am I supposed to reach out and grab it, or am I merely meant to sit back and watch? 

No.

If the universe is toying with me, then I will show the universe that I am not meant to be toyed with. I deserve more. I deserve better. 

I deserve vengeance. 

I deserve wrath.

I have to do this.

I will never have another choice. 

vi. 

I am tangled in veins and vessels. 

The heavy pulsing of his heart.

The blood pounding in his head. 

A snarl of rat tails. 

A cluster of spreading roots.

Circulating.  

Jasper is hard to grasp. Hard to become. I am a leech, but he is the quilled back of a rabid porcupine. Unconscious, but fighting. Pushing, pulling, wringing me out, ripping me apart. I feel him with me, his raised guard, his raging soul, kicking and screaming, still scrapping with Damien in his dazed dormancy.

He does not know what I am—or perhaps, by now, he has figured me out—but it’s as though he knows why I’m here. Though he does not have enough strength to eject me from his body, he resists my every attempt to gain control, almost impulsively, fighting tooth and nail in defense of his soul. 

I eventually stop pushing against him, and I, instead, become still, quiet. Light and gentle, a whisper of existence. And I wait. I wait for his rage to stagnate, for him to tire himself out, like a child. I wait, lingering in the dark corners of his subconscious, the deep recesses of memory and knowledge, where he will never find me.  

There is an eventual lull—he stops kicking for a moment, and though I still feel his rage and his wrath, his guard is down, his walls are lowered. I take this moment, latch myself onto him, sink my teeth, drink his essence. 

I envelop his bones like an extra layer of skin, hoping to seep into the marrow. 

I soak up his veins, becoming the gush of blood still pouring from his nose.

I take in his ragged gasps for air, as though breathing on my own.

I ease into his mind, take root in his skull, and I feel the echoes of sound and light. The river, the rain, the thunder. The blood on his knuckles, the sting of snapped cartilage. I am there. Behind his eyes. Struck down. Over and over. Head bashed into the pavement. 

Shatter. 

The taste of copper on the tongue, between the teeth. 

Down the throat. 

Circulating.

Jasper lets me in. 

And I take hold.

vii.

“Get up, asshole.”

A sharp kick to the ribs. I—Jasper—writhe miserably, the fresh bruises forming along his torso screaming out in pain. I am mortal again, for the sole purpose of experiencing this torment. 

“Get up. We need to go.”

I open my eyes to a great tear of lightning, splitting the sky in two. And I am blinded for a moment, pelted by heavy-falling raindrops. I sit up, barely remembering how to do so. Jasper’s body sways and sags and almost topples forward, but I catch myself before his head hits the pavement again. I take in everything, the ripple of thunder, the crash of tides breaking over the muddy shore, the dim glow of headlights in the dark, wet fog.

A hand reaches down. I stare for a moment before taking it in my grasp. His hands are warm. Warm and slightly damp, and rough to the touch. I had forgotten what warmth felt like. 

I stand like a puppet on strings, pulled to my feet in one swift, awkward movement. I am nearly swept away in the wind. Footing knocked unsteady, I almost topple over, but Damien places a firm hand on Jasper’s shoulder. “Fuck, I didn’t scramble your brains, did I? You concussed?” he asks. 

I just look at him for a moment. He can now see me—but he still doesn’t know it’s me. His eyes are dark and grim. I can almost hear the echo of the gunshot still ringing in his head, taunting him as it had taunted me. He waits for me to respond, but I don’t know how. I open his mouth and try to remember what words mean, how they’re shaped, how they’re spoken. “M’good,” I manage to slur, the syllables rolling sloppily off Jasper’s tongue. It hardly sounds like a word—more so a grunt, an animalistic moan. 

But to Damien, it makes more than enough sense. He claps Jasper’s shoulder, almost knocking me off balance again. “So we good, man? We had our spat, but now it’s all in the past now, right?” 

Slowly, I nod. But I’m not looking at him anymore. I’m looking down, just a few feet behind him, at the gun. The gun that he did not drop over the ledge, but, instead, dropped at his feet. The gun that is potentially loaded. 

The gun that took my life—the gun that will take his.

“C’mon, then,” he says. “Worst part’s out of the way. Let’s head to yours. Lay low for a little bit.” 

He limps towards the car.

But I stay behind. 

Carefully, while his back is turned, I reach down and grab the pistol, trying to hold it steady in my wavering hold. It’s heavy and does not quite fit the shape of my hands. But it feels right. It feels like fate. 

Damien turns around, a silhouette against the foggy halo of the headlights. His eyes widen a fraction. 

“Oh, right…I still need to throw that away.” There’s a nervous edge in his voice, an uncertainty in his lingering gaze. He takes a step forward and reaches his hand out, but I only grip the gun tighter. 

“Jasper…”

He takes another step forward, body stiff. I raise the gun. 

“Jasper, what are you doing?”

I slowly flick the safety off.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. I see in his eyes that, for a split moment in time, he considers charging at me, but after that moment passes, he decides against it and, rather, puts his hands up in meek surrender. “Look, I’m sorry, man. Whatever I did, I’m sorry. We beat each other up all the time—I didn’t think you’d take it to heart. You don’t have to do this, man. Please.” His voice is strangled, barely louder than a whisper. But his eyes are still cold and dark, an emotionless haze, clouded with memory.

Gunshots ringing in our heads. 

I cock back the hammer. 

“Jasper, please.”

“Not…Jasper…”

He falters for a moment in his own confusion, breaking his grim concentration to furrow his brow in thought. Then, he understands. Somehow, he understands. Realization dawns on him like a dying firelight, casting a horrified shadow upon his pale face. 

“Blythe?”

I bare Jasper’s teeth in a crooked smile. 

And he hangs his head.

Accepting his fate.

“Blythe, I’m…I’m sorry. I…I wish it didn’t have to end like this. For either of us. I know you have to do this, but…I’m…I’m just sorry.”

I almost want to pity him, this pathetic creature. But he knows just as well as I do that he has dug his own grave, and now he must lie in it. I must seek vengeance. I must have wrath. It is what it is.  

In my bones, I feel Jasper’s soul stirring aggressively, slowly starting to wake. Kicking, screaming, pushing against me. Stealing hold of the reins, Jasper jerks his arm back just as I lay my finger over the trigger. I pull forward, wrestling back control. I can’t lose him now. 

Quickly, I aim the barrel at Damien, the gun shaking wildly in my hands. Jasper keeps fighting, jerking his hand around while I try to keep it steady. 

Damien, in a moment of clarity, charges forward. 

But I am faster. 

In that split second, I fire.  

Damien folds over like a ragdoll, collapsing onto the hood of the car and into the dirt, bleeding from his chest. Choking, sputtering, the life quickly draining from his eyes. 

Gone. In an instant. 

As I stare, for a moment, I cannot even begin to process how I feel. It is not a mortal feeling, an emotion capable of being felt by man. It is ecstasy, pure and unbridled; it is regret, grim and understanding; it is pain, a rattling echo forever reverberating. It is everything all at once, building up and overflowing. 

I look at the gun in my hands. I unload the magazine. Count the bullets. 

A few more remain.  

But I am wrenched from Jasper’s body before I can take the gun to his head as well, tossed out into the open—and he crumples to the ground with a heavy thud, and awakens with a sputtering gasp. I do not try to take control again. I have had my vengeance. I need no more. 

“No,” he wails, throwing himself over his friend’s lifeless body. “No…Damien, no…Come back…Please…It wasn’t me…It wasn’t me…” 

But he does not. Or maybe he does. Maybe he’s floating somewhere in the soft, serene embrace of the void. Maybe he’s hurtling towards the light. Or maybe he’s here, already next to me, occupying the same space, the same air, the same existence.

Or maybe I’m finally alone now.

viii.

The passage of time is everflowing. Suns fall, moons rise. Cycle. Circulating. Collapse. Rebuild. Collapse again. It rains, then it snows, then the world burns away in a blaze of fire. The snake eats its tail, and all is reborn again. 

The passage of time is everflowing, but I remain. Wrath. Vengeance. Dark and heavy.

Trapped.

Eternally.