I have had this idea for a while and been working on it. Hope you all enjoy it.

The Sun Will Come Out
Prologue

When I was murdered it was not as I had always expected it to be.

I had always seen myself sprawled out on the kitchen floor in a stream of my own blood, the damn dog licking my cheek, my little girl in the corner waiting for the bad things to go away, and my spirit running, screaming its way, all the way to Heaven or Hell, whatever comes first. My husband would be finishing his dinner at the table less than five feet away.

Then again, I suppose this was because I had never expected anything extraordinary in my life and, likewise, did not expect much in death.

When the handsome young man from the second floor offered to help me with the groceries, I thought I had at last made a friend. I believed that there was someone close to home that I could send Lizzie to when Frank would become too drunk.

I thought for sure he was gay.

Once more, though, I proved to be a terrible judge of character as he brought me to my door, helped me in, and closed the door behind us. It would be the last time I would be entering my home and the picture of my loving daughter on the television would be the last thing I ever saw as my head was rammed through it.

Soon after, the only thing about my death suspicions that turned out to be correct was that my soul leaped from that house faster than I could think. I believe I was out of there before my final pulse.

I ran and ran through walls and stories until the numbness set in and I realized that I was nowhere.

My murder would remain unsolved and my daughter would take my place as both the object of my husband's undying adoration and scorning hatred. My murderer remained on the second floor with not a single finger pointed at him for my untimely death, and I was stuck in a three block radius yet again.

There was nothing to do, as before, but watch my family fall apart but remain together, like the fallen pieces of puzzle caught in a transparent bowl and clustered together but not as a whole.

Here I remained in Limbo for months, watching and waiting as my little girl looked out her bedroom window and stared into an abysmal plane of a city where her vision was only met by white walls. And, within me, some more of myself would die with her slowly. Ever so slowly.

I found in time that my spirit lingered in hopes for a release, for a realization, for a completion of some sort. There was so much I had left unfinished.

My unsolved murder, my daughter's unhappiness, the entrapment, it all became the chains that bound me to the living world.

At last, though, I learned that my chains could indeed reach further away from my apartment. Weakened but oddly adventurous while Lizzie made her way to school too far away for me to follow, I ventured to where my soul felt warmth.

This warmth was down below the streets and here I met a family which, despite all circumstance and all reason, was functional in the world of Hell's Kitchen.

The four children played in the filth of the sewers while a single parent watched idly by, alert to danger but secure in safety. They were youthful and enthusiastic. They were beyond all reality I had known in life and yet I felt something from them I had never felt before.

I felt Hope.

I saw Chance.

Soon my time without Lizzie became my time with the family which lived in the already shady and filled shadows of Hell's Kitchen. Their innocence and childlike mirrored the loss and maturity my daughter had experienced.

This was never truer in any of the green skinned boys than in the one called Michelangelo.

I knew that there would be something to save my earthbound spirit and the entrapped life of my daughter the very day that, as my withered soul followed the green children, Michelangelo stopped in midstride, turned around, and stared at me.

Not through me. At me.

He grinned and waved before carrying on.