The Days After

Stage 1: Shock and Denial

It was 4:48am when he received the call that I had died. He would learn that his girlfriend of two years had been hit by a semi-truck a few hours ago and the New Years Eve fireworks had illuminated the asphalt that was stained crimson with her blood. Alex Reyes picked up the phone and there was nothing I could do.

I was dead. I never thought I would say that so soon. There should have been decades between now and my inevitable end but there wasn't. It had taken me awhile to figure it out, that I was gone. I was alive one moment, just crossing the road and then there was a flash of light and then nothing until I woke up in the middle of the road with the truck across me in a ditch.

I remember thinking what the hell? What happened? I felt no pain or discomfort and when I stood up my head did not swim. I had put my hands down to straighten out the front of my dress only for my hands to touch nothing. My dress was there, unwrinkled and so were my hands and they were touching the hem of the dress but my fingertips felt no fabric. I tried to take a breath but no air would fill my lungs. I grabbed at my throat but felt no skin. I started to scream when I saw a man stumble out of the truck and an empty bottle fell from the driver's seat to the ground. He was grabbing at what little hair he had left and mumbling incoherent words. He then looked towards me, except his eyes never met my own and he was gaping at what was beside my feet. I looked down. It was me, my body except my gray eyes were open and looking upwards with a still expression. I had never seen so much blood, so much red in my life. Everything was red.
Looking closer, it didn't take a genius to know that something had gone terribly wrong with my neck.

If I still could have, I might have thrown up when I looked closer at it. I figured I was in a coma, I hoped I was in a coma but there was a puddle of blood coming from beneath my head and not one bone in my body looked like it was angled right anymore.

I had then run into the ditch where I could no longer see the blood and I heard the man calling the paramedics. I remember the ambulance coming with its sirens and the flashing red and blue lights that matched the fireworks still going off in the distance. I was too horrified with the situation to realize I never got to kiss Alex under them.

No one had heard me scream from the side of the road as the paramedics pronounced me dead and covered my lifeless body with a crumpled, black sheet. No one saw me when I had dropped to the cement, a fall that should have bruised my knees but it didn't because I had no skin to bruise anymore. They did not care when I screamed and screamed since I could no longer cry. They cared only about the girl in the body bag. Were we different? Was this just some horrible dream? It felt like I was still living in a way. I could see, hear, smell, I could do everything I had been able to do only an hour ago but I could not feel, physically that is. I could touch something but it felt like nothing was there. Like now as I clutched Alex's sheets in my hands but my fingers made no wrinkles in the fabric. I could not feel the softness as I ran my fingertips over it. When I looked down at my body it looked the same. I was wearing the long dress I had worn to the New Years party. I looked alive. I don't feel alive, though. You are not alive anymore, Autumn, I had to remind myself.

I did not know what I was. A ghost? I had never believed in all that supernatural crap before but now I wasn't sure what to believe. I had seen my snapped neck tonight. I had seen a lot of things and suddenly the idea that I was a ghost now, that my spirit stayed behind, that I was just energy now, it all didn't seem that shocking.

I looked back at Alex. I knew he would not take it well, I mean how could he? He was about to find out that someone he loved had been killed by a drunk driver. I knew the drunk man was not entirely to blame. My mind had been foggy when I walked around the bend in the road. He felt guilty for what happened and I knew that. It had shown deep in his eyes when he looked over at my twisted neck from the confines of a cop car. I knew that sight would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would remember the reek of blood and the taste of the vomit that he spat out on the road. My mind had been foggy with thoughts and his had been foggy with liquor. That had been enough to kill me.