Soul Splitters

Terrestrial

The tears had started to crust on Autumns drawn face. She let out long, painful, groan from the pit of her stomach like a wolf howling to the moon. She had stopped retching when nothing came up but a sore throat, she pulled down the toilet lid and crawled over to the cabinet sink. Lifting herself over and running the water onto her face. She wondered where the water came from. She drank some to soothe her raw throat. Charlotte was still sitting outside the bathroom, Autumn could the incessant drumming of her fingers on the door. She didn't want to believe it, she kept telling herself she wasn't dead. The only problem was she felt dead. She could feel the numbness in her senses, the coldness of her skin, the stiffness of her joints, the sluggishness of her mind. She felt like she was no longer a person but just meat on bones. She looked at herself in the chipped mirror and didn't recognise the face staring back, the dark circles hugging her eyes, her once voluminous hair reduced to a limp, damp mop, her skin a deathly white and the balls of her eyes cracked red. She was dead.

"Autumn. Please." Charlotte's voice was muffled through the locked old wooden door.

Autumn felt the corners of her lip sag, the pounding was getting less frequent. She turned away from the mirror and slid down the cabinet, she pulled her knees up and rested her head on them, leaning back against the cabinet sink. She stared across the room her tears blurring her vision, creating a translucent twin to all the items in the room that danced and quivered. These same eyes that had widened in disbelief were now swollen and red from crying. She racked her brain for answers but there was nothing there. She was empty and stupid. Make sense of it all, she told herself. The house, it was the only house around, surrounded by grassy nothingness. OK, that was not normal. She knew that normally there would be other houses too. Her thoughts moved to the train station, the bleak darkness and wispy atmosphere. It wasn't a normal train station, there was no announcer whose tinny voice would resonate throughout the station and there were no ticket machines to take her money and spit out permissions to ride the trains. She remembered the flood of people that had streamed past her, they must all be dead too. They were in paradise right now.

Autumn had suspected there was something strange going on, you'd have to be a fool not to notice. She had never suspected her own death.

Charlotte called this place 'Plateau'. Autumn replayed the last ten minutes, Charlotte grabbing her arms as she tried to run, brushing away the insults that flew at her, she had stayed calm - unlike Autumn. Charlotte spoke of a train station, a place where all the dead gather after crossing the bridge into Plateau to wait for the train that led to the afterlife. She had told her that she had struggled, questioned what was happening to her. That's when she had seen Josh and as soon as she had seen him the train closed its doors to her and she was stuck. She was tainted and no longer welcome in the afterlife. Autumn sat and remembered the first words Josh had said to her -"I'm sorry." - her nostrils flared with anger, the sickening remorse in his tone, the pitying gaze. She suddenly felt nauseous and rushed out of the door, colliding with a waiting Josh.

Josh directed Autumn to a seat, it was on the far end of the table. Charlotte followed in with a tray of glasses filled with water. They sat next to each other, Josh and Charlotte. The uneasy tension between them showed in the distance from their chairs.

"Why do we have drinks?" Autumn made a calculated move, she felt like this was a game of chess and she intended to get her answers. She didn't mean for it to come out as coldly as it had. Charlotte looked thrown off guard, she had expected to be able to ease Autumn into this, she didn't know all the answers either.

"Josh, why is there water?" Check.

Josh blinked blindly for a second before registering this new revelation. "I never told you my name." He looked down to Charlotte but she just shook her head, Josh took a breath and shrugged it off for dealing with later. "Ok, I take it Charlotte explained the situation."