The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  It sounds like a wild animal is stampeding down the path, crushing dead leaves and snapping twigs under its heavy hooves. Taylor cocks her head, listening, rearranging her face into a wide, innocent smile. I wait to see if it’s a bear or a moose, but no, it’s only Seth, surrounded by a murky red.

  “I figured it was you,” he snarls.

  “Hi…”

  “Where’s my phone?”

  “…Seth. Can we just talk for a minute, please?”

  “No! Give me my phone.”

  “Seth, please…” but Seth cuts her off.

  “Look! You stole my phone, you left that stupid note on my locker. Well, here I am. Give me my phone!”

  “I know it was wrong to take your phone, but I couldn’t think of another way to get you to talk to me. Can’t you at least give me a chance?”

  “A chance for what?”

  “I just…” she squirms where she sits, and the pinkness around her pales. “I want us to get to know each other better.”

  “I know you well enough,” Seth charges up to her and holds out his hand. “Give me my phone. Now!”

  She stands up slowly and, clutching the phone behind her, takes a step backwards. Her eyes are calculating.

  Seth makes a grab for her arm, but she scoots back three steps. She is just two steps away from the slippery edge, and the mist from the falls is coating her bare feet. Get away from the edge, you idiot! I shout at her even though she can’t hear me. If Rei were here, he would be having a heart attack.

  “Why don’t you like me?” Taylor demands to know.

  “Because I don’t.” Seth is eying the distance between them, and I cross my ethereal fingers he’s not stupid enough to do what I think he’s going to do.

  “Are you…” A nasty little smile narrows her eyes. “Do you like any girls?”

  It takes Seth a few seconds to process this question. I’m expecting a big, bad four letter reaction from him, but he surprises me with a short, bitter laugh. “You think because I’m not interested in a slut like you I must be gay…why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Her expression morphs into something sinister and underneath her murky pink aura, a layer of olive green rises up from her skin like a fog. Now I expect her to provide the four letter reaction, but she’s so furious that nothing but, “Fffffffffffff……” fizzles from her mouth. She winds up to hurl Seth’s phone into oblivion, but time slips into slow motion.

  She swings around too quickly and loses her footing on the slick stone. Her eyes and mouth pop open, arms pinwheel. As her feet slide off the ledge and gravity begins to suck her into the falls, Seth grabs the first part of Taylor he can reach. His right foot steps back hard to balance himself, and I can tell by the tightening of his mouth that he’s got her weight secured. The gauzy shirt he’s grabbed is not up to task, though, and silver buttons snap off in quick succession. As the last button pops free and her shirt splays wide open, she drops even further towards the rocks and screams bloody murder. All of her weight dangles from this one wet clump of fraying cloth in Seth’s fist. She swings like a pendulum, clawing frantically at Seth’s slippery arm. Her acrylic nails leave deep bloody gouges down his arm to his wrist.

  “Give me your other hand!”

  It looks like she’s trying, but her arm seems paralyzed. “I can’t!” she whimpers.

  Seth goes down on one knee, leaning back to give himself some leverage. He has no problem handling her weight; it’s the spray from the mist and the blood that he’s fighting against.

  “You wanna die? Give me your hand!” he yells harshly.

  Her bare feet backpedal against the side of the slippery rock, doing nothing more than loosening her grip on Seth’s wrist and his grip on her shirt.

  “Stop kicking! Give me your other hand!”

  But she can’t stop kicking. Some feral instinct has taken over and her feet are fighting for her life. Seth reaches out further with his other hand, careful not to get pulled in himself, but the slippery mist mixed with his blood make their hands slip, slide against each other, inch by inch.

  I feel so damn helpless! I try to grab her other hand, thinking maybe I can just lift it up enough for Seth to grab, but she just flails right through me.

  When their grip breaks, she screams and her eyes bulge wide as gravity sucks her down towards the rushing water. There is a terrible silence when her head hits the first rock. The bright colors of her skirt tumble merrily over flailing arms and legs as her body is flung erratically over the boulders by the rushing water. And then she’s gone, swallowed up by the river below.

  Time stops. Except for a sudden chilling breeze rustling through Seth’s hair, the omnipresent roar of the falls, and the ragged rattle of Seth’s breath, everything is static. The only witnesses to Taylor’s accident are the birds and the trees.

  And me.

  I wish I could remember what the symptoms of shock were. Seth’s skin has faded to the color of tapioca pudding, his pupils are huge, and his sweat suddenly smells like raw onions. All that murky red surrounding him is gone, replaced by a shadowy gray. Was that shock?

  I wish Rei was here. I’m mentally kicking myself now for talking him out of coming, because I know with all certainty that if Rei had come, none of this would have happened. Rei would have figured out a way to diffuse this. He would never have allowed Taylor to stand so close to the edge. He would have picked her up and carried her to a safe place if he had to. Yes, if I hadn’t talked Rei out of coming, Taylor would be alive right now and Seth would have his phone tucked safely in his pocket.

  Seth stands up shakily and looks downstream. The river elbows off to the right, and the view is obscured by newly sprouted leaves. I feel the familiar tug at my stomach, telling me it’s time to get back. The alarm clock must have gone off, but thankfully, the volume is low, so I buy a few extra seconds to look downstream for Taylor’s body. About a quarter mile past the bend, I find her body bobbing in a calm, shallow spot by the shore, her skirt caught fast on the branch of a fallen birch tree. I feel that tug again, more insistent this time, but I can’t stop staring. Her buttonless shirt undulates to the rhythm of the current, exposing her badly scraped torso. Her hair drifts on the surface like undrained spaghetti, framing a deep purple gouge just above her ear that has been washed clean by the moving water, revealing splinters of crushed skull and what can only be brain matter.

  Surprisingly, the rest of her face is unmarked. Her arms and legs are bent at unnatural angles, covered in deep slashes. Three of the acrylic fingernails on her right hand are bent backwards, no doubt from clawing onto Seth’s arm. All traces of make-up have been washed off her face, and she looks younger, more innocent than the Taylor I had known. I feel an overwhelming sadness for her. Nobody deserves such a brutal ending.

  I feel another, more insistent tug, but I just want to check on Seth before I go back.

  I wonder how many of her girlfriends knew she was meeting Seth here today. Probably all of them. I zip back to the ledge and find Seth flinging Taylor’s sandals into the falls, followed by a long string of swear words that end in one raw sob.

  Poor Seth. I’ve seen him rage, but I’ve never seen him cry before, not when he was a little kid or even when his mother left. I’m not sure if he’s crying because he’s genuinely sad that Taylor Gleason is dead or because he can read the graffiti on the rocks and it says, You are screwed, boy.

  One of the silver buttons from Taylor’s shirt catches the sunlight and winks up at me from a crack in the rock. Evidence. I summon up enough energy to flick it into the water.

  I hate to leave Seth like this, but I really have to get back. The tugging sensation seems to have given up on me, but my mom will be home soon, plus, I need to talk to Rei. I am the only human eyewitness. If Taylor’s girlfriends talk to the police, I am the only one who can vouch for his innocence. He tried to save her, he really did.

  He’s no longer crying, just sitting there surrounded by a despondent shade of gray. “Go home
, Seth,” I tell him, even though he can’t hear me.

  And then I head home to collect myself so I can break this bad news to Rei.

  Chapter 7

  Every religion has its own spin on life after death. The ancient Greeks had the Elysian Fields. Christians have heaven. Rei says the Buddhists believe souls are reincarnated until they reach a place of enlightenment called nirvana. Some people waste a lot of time worrying whether there’s something to look forward to when their bodies die besides eternal sleep.

  One thing I know for certain is that each of us possesses an energy that can exist outside our physical body. I am living proof, but why should anyone take my word for it…even textbook physics say that energy cannot be destroyed.

  And that light people talk about? A few years ago, I saw a cylinder of light beaming down from the ceiling in a room I walked past at my great-grandmother’s nursing home, and twenty minutes later, the patient was on her way out in a body bag. It’s real. But where does the light go? Is there some amazing place for people who are really, really good? Do the nine circles of hell actually exist? Is that light your ride to the greatest party ever or does it just suck up your soul like a vacuum?

  Well, that I don’t know.

  I careen into my room and stop short.

  Something’s wrong.

  Something’s missing!

  It takes me a few seconds of stunned confusion to realize that my bed is empty. The something missing is me. I’m not there! I look on the floor, no, I look under the bed, no, no, NO!

  Pure, raw panic rolls over me like a tsunami.

  Where the hell am I?

  This is the feeling people must get when they’ve jumped out of a plane and realize they’ve forgotten to strap on their parachute, when a scuba diver is deep in the ocean and realizes she’s run out of oxygen, when you wake up and realize you’ve been buried alive!

  I can’t get back into my body if I can’t find it. The cord that normally tethers me seems to be drifting loose, shriveling up as I think. This must be why the tugs I felt back at the waterfall were so insistent – my inner alarm was going off and stupid me was too busy gawking at Taylor’s dead body.

  Stop, Anna. Calm down and think!

  I look around the room and realize the chair is no longer wedged under the doorknob. The music from my alarm clock still plays softly. Maybe my mom came home, couldn’t wake me up and called an ambulance. But I felt the tug just minutes ago - there wasn’t enough time for that.

  Out in the living room, still sunk deep into the recliner, my father faces the television. He looks incapable of moving himself, much less someone else. I hear the toilet flush, and the sound of stumbling around before the bathroom door opens. And holy crap! There I am staggering from the bathroom, animated by some unknown force. What the hell? It’s my face, but the expression is something from out of a zombie movie, eyes wild, mouth drooling. Whatever is inside me grasps onto walls and doorjambs for leverage, making its way spasmodically back to my bedroom. It fumbles its way over to the desk and its knees try to bend several times before they are sure enough of themselves to lower itself onto the desk chair. It seems completely unaware of me as it reaches for my pink magnifying mirror, clawing at it several times before the fingers actually close on it. When it sees my face reflected in the mirror, it lets out an inhuman moan. It’s my voice, but there’s something different. The tone is mine, but the inflection is different, but somehow familiar…

  That bitch!!!

  That’s Taylor in there!

  But how? Unless she saw me at the falls somehow. She probably died as soon as her head hit that first rock. If she separated from her body then, she could have seen me there, watching the action unfold in all my ethereal glory. But I should have seen her, too …if I had been paying attention to something other than watching her body wash downstream.

  I can freak out later. What matters now is to get her the hell out of my body. I float up close and look hard into her eyes. Taylor, through my own dazed eyes, looks right through me. I reach out, tentatively, to slide my hand into my flesh hand.

  The reaction is immediate. Taylor yanks my flesh hand away, violently enough to lose her balance. The wobbly desk chair tips, pitching her headfirst against the edge of my desk. The crack! is audible, amplified through my own extreme senses. Still, I am going to have one hell of a headache as soon as I get her out of there!

  All the sympathy I felt for Taylor at the falls evaporates as I rear back, ready to charge full force back into my body. Slam! It feels like I’m bouncing off a wall. Slam! A very solid brick wall. SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!

  This is getting me nowhere.

  She writhes on the floor, whimpering.

  I slam her again for good measure, but I bounce off like a racquetball in play. It’s too quiet for Taylor to notice, but I hear the front door close.

  “Helloooo,” mom calls as she peeks into my room, only to find Taylor struggling on the floor like an overturned beetle. “Anna? Oh, my God, honey, what happened?”

  My mom dials 911 with shaky hands. There’s nothing wrong with Taylor that an Advil, a little time and a whole lot of stretching won’t cure. The last thing my mom needs after two days at a real estate convention is to come home to all this drama. My father hasn’t moved except to reach for the remote and turn up the volume.

  I retreat to a corner of the room to wait for the ambulance and try to think over the sound of anxious motherisms.

  Why didn’t Taylor go into the light? I was so busy watching her body wash downstream, I wasn’t looking for a light. Did I miss it? Maybe the sun was too bright and I couldn’t see it. If she changes her mind, will the light come back for her?

  Or maybe she wasn’t invited. What if there was no light for her? What if the light doesn’t shine for people who steal cell phones and throw them into waterfalls? Where do those people go when they die if there’s no light?

  Obviously, she goes to my house to hijack my body.

  I have figured out there are a few different dimensions. There is the earthly dimension, right here where we all live. There’s an astral dimension, where I consider myself a traveler whenever I leave my body. And there’s probably at least one other dimension where the dead go by way of the light, but I’m not dead so I haven’t been there.

  When I leave my body on purpose and travel in this astral dimension, I remember what I see and do. Every now and then, I see other people floating around in this dimension, but most of them are not dead. It’s pretty common for people slip out of their bodies while they dream. They don’t have a purpose, they aren’t rationale. They meet up with other people having other dreams and everything blends together into chaos they will later remember as a very vivid dream, or they don’t remember it at all. I’ve had people at school tell me, “Oh my God, Anna, I had the weirdest dream last night and you were in it,” and I say, “Wow, that is weird.”

  Except I remember too, and it wasn’t a dream.

  Every once in a while, though, I bump into a dead someone who is rationale, but who decided not to go into the light. The dead have auras, too, just not as strong as the living. I don’t like to get into conversations with the dead. Especially if their color is off.

  Taylor and my mom are at the hospital. They’ve run diagnostic tests, a CAT scan, blood tests, but there are no tests to diagnose an extraneous soul possessing one’s body. The doctor concludes it’s a concussion, which is oushikuso, as Rei would say. Taylor is getting better control over my body, and her speech and movements are slow, but more normal. They send her home with my mom, some prescription painkillers, and instructions for my mom to wake her up every few hours.

  My mom followed the ambulance to the hospital in her own car, so she drives Taylor home. During the ride, I hover in the backseat, listening to my mom’s worried questions and Taylor’s evasive murmurs. My mom must think Taylor is foggy because of the concussion, but I wonder how she’ll manage later. How will she work around the obvious fact that she knows s
o little about me? I don’t think she even knows my last name. Does she expect she can just step right into my life and go from there? I try to picture myself in some of Taylor’s outfits and I almost laugh.

  Back at home, Mom sits on my bed, stroking my hair and making a huge fuss. Taylor still looks dazed through my eyes. She ignores my mom’s attention. She closes her eyes and wants to sleep. My mom covers her up with the blanket and it’s not long before I hear light snores. Since when do I snore?

  My mom looks so worried. If she even knew half of what’s going on, it would freak her out completely! She turns out the light and closes the bedroom door, leaving Taylor and me in relative darkness.

  I float over to the bed and watch the dark lump under the covers rise and fall. Now that she’s sleeping, maybe her guard is down and I can get past whatever barrier is keeping me out. I reach out with just one finger and tap gently on her cheek. She grimaces, but doesn’t wake up. I edge my way around her to the other side of the twin bed and sort of lie down, although I’m really floating about an inch off the mattress. I try to roll into her, but I’m met with a solid wall of flesh who grunts irritably.

  I lean very close to her ear. “Taylor Gleason.” I know she can’t hear me, but I say it anyway. “GO AWAY!”

  Snore.

  I spend the next half hour trying to inch, slide, push and then force my way back into my own body, but my efforts are for nothing. She is stubbornly impermeable and I am tired. Not physically tired, but I feel like a car running on fumes. There’s something about being here in my house, close to my worried mom and my drunken father that sucks my energy dry. And since I am one hundred percent energy, this is a problem.