Reborn

Description
After nearly dying from a car crash, Kelly is spoken to by a reaper about what to do with the rest of her life, and how long that might be.

1

I opened my eyes, and whirled around, trying to make sense of my surroundings. As I spun around, I came to the quick visual conclusion that everything around me was a white nothingness. However, I had a sense of up, down, and physically standing on something. What the surface I stood atop was, I don't know.

I stopped turning, then took a few steps forward. I walked around the nothing, looking for something. I didn't really have a sense of time passing, but after a I walked around for a little while, a dark shimmer appeared in front of me.

At first it was simply a thin silhouette, but it quickly expanded into a tall skeleton wearing dark robes and holding a large scythe which they leaned on. The empty skull seemed to smile at me, and the bone which gripped the long handle of the weapon twitched slightly.

"Hello, Kelly."

My eyes widened as it spoke in its voice a deep, yet soothing, tone. I was most surprised that the thing could talk at all with only a skull atop its shoulders.

"Where am I?" I asked after listening to several faint echoes of the greeting bounce around the bright white nothingness. "Who are you?"

The creature brought its arms out to either side, shrugged slightly, then dropped them saying, "I'm a reaper, and you're in limbo."

"What?" I stared at it, confused. Limbo?

"Tell me. Tell me the last thing you remember." The reaper commanded.

"I don't-" before I could finish the sentence, my thoughts were bombarded with images of blood and twisted metal. I could hear screams, and only recognized one as my own. They continued for what seemed to be an eternity but was probably just seconds. "What happened?"

The reaper tilted its head, looking at me curiously. Its eye sockets seemed to change shape in an unnatural attempt at emotions. "You were in a car crash."

"Am I dead?" It was a stupid question, but I asked it anyway. Of course I was dead.

Surprisingly, the reaper's answer was, "No."

"What am I then?" I inquired carefully.

"You are unconscious. Your physical body is lying in a coma in a hospital room. I am here to tell the options you have been given." It explained.

"Options?" I echoed.

"Yes. You should be considered very lucky." It pointed at me. "The chance of you getting to make this decision one in a million."

"Really?" I said skeptically.

"Yes." It nodded. "Its hard to find a death where the conditions are this perfect and get to them in time. When you crashed, medics got to you fast enough. Right now, they think that its their simple little machines that are keeping you alive. Its not."

The reaper seemed to stop there, so I asked, "What are my options then?"

"I was getting to that." If it had eyes, I feel that the creature would have rolled them at that moment. "One you simply die and go to whatever your predetermined afterlife is, or two. You wake up-"

"Wait. What do you mean by 'predetermined afterlife?'" I interrupted.

The reaper seemed to sigh with its whole body in frustration after my question. "You should have gone to a different place - one where your afterlife would be decided based on cause of death. Your consciousness has been intercepted and I am giving you a choice. Now will you shut up until I finish?"

I nodded, trying to wrap my head around all this information. I was technically dead. I was talking to a skeleton. I wasn't even supposed to be here. This is insane.

"If you chose to wake up, they you will change and all your personal memories will be gone. You will be essentially be changed in a way that you can spread misery and misfortune to the human world. You will be a source of chaos. You will meet others like you to balance out the good and evil in the world. As time passes, your memories will gradually return." It explained. It waited awhile, watching me as I thought. "Now, what is your decision? Wake up? Or stay asleep forever?"

I looked up from the area on the bright floor where I'd been staring and said, "Wake up."

The words had barely passed though my lips before suddenly I had a feeling of falling and everything in my vision turned to black.

2

I fell into my body, which jerked upward into a sitting position. I looked around to see that I was in a hospital room. Sitting to the right of me was a semi-familiar woman in a blue flannel shirt. Upon seeing me sit up she stood up and walked over to me, happiness and shock on her face.

I stared at her, trying to figure out who she was, but the more I tried to remember, the less I could. I tried to say something, but realized that there was something on my face. I realized that there was a plastic device on my face. I reached up, pulled it off, and tossed it over to the side.

"No, don't do that." She reached for the mask, trying to put it back on my face, but I swatted her arm away and shook my head. She retracted her arm her arm, and said nothing as she looked at me anxiously.

I looked down at my arms to see that there were countless needles and tubes sticking out of them and hooked up to unfamiliar devices around me. Before the woman could say anything, I ripped out as many as I could.

"Kell, stop it." Tears started to gather in her soft brown eyes at she stared at the bloody tears in my arms. She walked towards the door yelling, "Doctor?"

While her back was turned, I climbed out of the hospital bed, falling onto the floor. I groaned out in pain as I struggled to stand up, grabbing onto the thin mattress to pull myself up. Once I was standing, I turned to see the woman looking at me again.

"Kell-"

"How do you know my name?" I looked down at my arms to see the broken skin rapidly repairing itself. Within seconds, my arms were perfectly smooth save for the slowly drying blood coating the areas which previously housed cuts.

She opened her mouth to say something, then squinted at me, looking me over. "Do you remember who I am?" She asked me slowly.

I shook my head.

"Well for loss of a better phrase, that sucks." She looked down sadly.

"Probably." I shrugged, and walked towards the door.

"Wait." She moved in front of me, holding out her hands to stop me. "Where are you going?"

"Away," I answered, trying to walk around her.

"Where?" She retorted, moving back in front of me.

"I can't tell you." I refused to answer her question.

"Will you at least come come before you go away?" She begged.

I considered this for a moment, then said, "Sure."

Roughly an hour later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the woman's car wearing the old ripped clothes I'd had on when I died. She'd spent a long time arguing with doctors, but we hadn't had the opportunity to talk.

"What's your name?" was the first thing I asked after a few minutes of silence in the car.

She glanced over at me. "Hailey."

I nodded, then looked out the window. "How long was I asleep?" I asked, referring to the coma.

"A little over a week." She took a minute before responding.

"Longer than I thought." I muttered under my breath.

"What?"

"Nothing."

The rest of the ride went without any further conversation, and I simply watched out the window, not fully paying attention to the world scrolling by. Once we reached the house which I assumed belonged to Hailey, I could feel a slight pain in my back. As we went inside, though I didn't voice it, the pain grew.

"Why are you like this?" Hailey asked to me once she locked the door behind her.

"What do you mean by that?" I inquired, my voice flat and my face expressionless as I looked around the room.

"You were in a car crash. A big one. You were in a coma. For two weeks. Now you're fine. The doctors couldn't believe it and I had to talk them out of keeping you there to run tests to see how you survived. Why don't you know who I am? And why aren't you reacting to anything?" She was distraught and spoke her words while holding back tears. She stood in front of me, her expression desperate but I couldn't tell why.

"Which question would you like me to answer?" was all I could come up with to ask.

"What?" Before I could repeat my statement, she demanded, "Why aren't you reacting to anything?"

"I am reacting." I stated, confused by the question.

"No. No you're not. You're just... standing there." She said. "Its like you've lost all emotion."

"That statement is mostly correct, but even if it wasn't so, I have suffered from severe head trauma and I am confused as to why this is not something that you are considering."

3

I ended up in an alleyway. At the end of it, there was a door and I felt some kind of instinct telling me to go through it. I did, and on the other side, I found a small, mostly empty bar. One thing that stood out to me about the patrons, was that none of them were human. There were wings and tails, furry faces and fangs. It might have seemed odd so some, but after what just happened to me, I wasn't one to talk.

I walked up to the bar, and sat down. I was there for a while, no-one seemed to notice me, and I was ok with that. At one point, I was approached by a strange person. They were tall and slim with a purple suit and pointed ears.

"Another one with the wrong choice," they said, shaking their head. "You shall come with me."

"What?" I asked intelligently.