Initium (The Nocte Trilogy 2.50)

This is what it feels like, I realize.

To die.

It’s warm and soft and inviting.

It’s comforting, like home.

It doesn’t smell like embalming fluid and stargazers, the way it does in the funeral home. It smells like rain, like grass, like clouds.

The light surrounds me, and my throat doesn’t hurt anymore.

Nothing hurts.

I’m light as a feather.

I’m light as a cloud,

The light fills me up and makes me float.

I drift toward the ceiling, and I look down at myself, at my small body crumpled on the floor. My red hair spreads in a fan around me, like a pool of crimson blood and it fascinates me, the color. The endless color. The light distracts me though, shining as brightly as the sun from outside the house, glinting into my eyes. I suddenly realize that I’m ready to leave, I’m ready to let go, to drift away. I’m getting ready to glide

through the window to touch it, when I see my brother’s face.

He’s as white as death,

He’s terrified, and he’s screaming my name, clutching at my hand, pulling at my body sprawled on the floor.

I falter, my feet on the windowsill, even as the light reaches my toes.

I can’t

I can’t

I can’t leave him.

I can’t leave him alone.

First he left me, but it turned out he really didn’t. He would never leave me alone, and I can’t leave him either.

With a sigh, I step down from the sill, and slip back into my body, and when I open my eyes again, I’m in the hospital.

“You’re allergic to nuts,” the nurse tells me solemnly, and my mom and my brother are sitting on the bed with me.

“You can never eat nuts again,” my mother tells me, and her eyes are filled with terror.

“You died for a minute and a half,” Finn announces, and he no longer looks afraid, instead, he looks intrigued. Because I’m safe now. Because I was dead, and now I’m not.

I should feel different, but I don’t.

It intrigues me, too.

* * *