The Misadventures of Anna Cabbot

The Space Between Heartbeats

It was a room with no walls. There didn't seem to a be a ceiling, either, so it was an absolute mystery as to where the bright sporadic pools of light originated from. Each spotlight shone on a small grouping of different sized easels. The cello melody — the same one she'd heard in ICU — continued to play lowly, like background music.

Anna shuffled forward on bare feet and came to an abrupt halt when she looked down at herself — these were the clothes she'd worn to the hospital: jeans and her favorite Periodic Table of Elements t-shirt. Which was odd, since she'd been told she wasn't going to be able to wear t-shirts again for at least a month as she wasn't supposed to raise her arms above her shoulders.

Ignoring that, she continued on to the nearest batch of easels and found...herself. She looked about four or five. It was the first day of school, judging from her oversize backpack and the nametag around her neck. She was on the bus, though, and her mom hadn't taken any photos of when she'd been sat on the brown leather seat.

Also in that grouping was her face when she'd opened her early decision acceptance letter from RIT. She'd made damn sure she'd been alone when she'd opened it, since she hadn't wanted her parents to see her cry if it wasn't what she thought it was so there shouldn't be any photographic evidence of it and yet...

This was her life, she realized. This was all 22 years of her life spread out for her to look at and measure and —

— There was a woman in a black robe holding a ship's lantern.

The cello melody played on. The cello melody and the lantern and this was what had been outside her ICU room. This had been what she'd felt at the edge of her witchsense — the same witchsense that provided the scent of death and decay, of cold damp earth, and a timeless power.

Anna glanced to her right and saw herself at her college graduation, one face in a sea of hundreds. She'd been an unholy mix of excited and determined, proud of what she'd fought to accomplish and wondering where she'd go next.

With Death, apparently, four months after she'd received her diploma.

"No. No. This isn't happening. This isn't...no." Anna shook her head.

"It is. This is your reality."

This was her pre-surgical nightmare come to life and she wasn't about to go gentle into that good night. "Well it's a shitty reality."

"Overt, brazen defiance doesn't become you, Anna Cabbot, but I'm feeling indulgent. Convince me."

She inhaled sharply. "Seriously?"

"Convince me. Tell me why I should let you live."

Her inner child immediately yelled something to the effect of it's not fair and she ruthlessly clenched her jaw. What she said instead was, "I'm not finished yet. There's a number of things I want to do and a number of places I want to visit, and I am not finished living my life yet."

Death regarded her with pitch-black eyes. "Continue."

Well, shit. She'd kind of hoped that would be enough. Evidently it wasn't.

"There are people I haven't met yet or who haven't met me," Anna said. "Like, I don't want to say that I'm a life-changing kind of person, but, yeah, maybe to somebody I am. Maybe I'm somebody's love interest. I'm certainly someone's best friend. I'm a daughter and a sister and I'm a person who has more of this wide world to see and experience, and 22 years isn't damn near enough time to do it." She swallowed thickly, the middle of her chest aching fiercely. "I wasn't aware that my time limit was so much shorter than everybody else's."