The afterlife was not as I thought it might be. I could hear people talk about how I was an angel and part of me wanted to laugh. I was a very giving person, because my mom raised me that way. But I was by no means an angel. Not implying I did horrible things, I just wasn't as saintly as the people had painted me as. I had an attitude. I had a temper. I would break a kid's nose if he pissed me off for whatever reason.
I was mostly hung up on how ironic what I had done was. I pulled my dad, turned him around right as he pulled the trigger to save a vampire. A vampire, who probably would have not flinched as the bullet shards bounced off their skin. Yet I pulled him and turned him right as he squeezed the trigger and ended up with a hole in my right side.
I didn't hate my father for what he did. At the time I was pissed. He was trying to hurt the people I considered friends and instead he hurt me and my anger got the better of me. When I had hoped he would shoot himself in his head, I didn't think he would actually do it. I felt awful for being able to think such a way and now I was left with the rest of eternity to deal with these feelings.
Did I mention that the afterlife felt like being stuck in a box?
As time wore on and the darkness seemed to grow heavier, the voices began to fade away and I was left alone. I had been alone for a while before I heard them. Alice and Carlisle, talking like they were just a few feet away, but it was getting hard to understand what was being said. Then their voices left and something happened.
I can't say what or how, but my once dark afterlife was filled with agony. Perhaps I did not make my way into heaven, maybe this was what hell was like? The pain was like a thousand needles being jammed into my back and before I could realize what was happening, I was clawing my way up, through dirt until I could feel the chill of air on my skin.
That was when the pain had become so agonizing I could not handle it. The needles continued to be jammed into my back before I felt the skin crack open like dry skin cracking over a sunburn. I screamed so loud I was certain I would wake the rest of the dead, but I was found alone.
Suddenly there was weight upon my shoulders unlike anything I was use to. My body felt like it was shifting, the muscles beneath my skin were tightening, stretching, reforming and finally it had all stopped. When I had looked behind me, I did not expect what I saw.
Two massive wings, the same light brown color of my hair jutting behind me. They looked twice as long as I did, perhaps longer, and they brushed against the ground and I felt it. I felt the feathers push against the muscles. I felt them, they were there, on my back. I had been dead and now I was back, with wings.
I did the only logical thing I could think of. I did what anyone else in my situation would have done.
I screamed.
I screamed because I know I died. I screamed because I was buried. I screamed because my dad was dead. I screamed because the afterlife was supposed to be different than this. I screamed because I had two giant wings hanging limply from my back and I could feel them. I could make them twitch and move and it felt so natural, yet so unnatural. It was like suddenly growing thumbs. I would be able to see the thumbs, watch them move, make them move, but it wouldn't be right. Instead of growing another set of thumbs, I grew giant wings that were heavy and already I could feel the muscles in my back and chest strain from having to deal with their added weight.
Why had this happened to me? I was no angel. I wasn't even that religious, and yet I was here with wings. I had just crawled out of my own casket and I grew wings. I had died, I had been killed, I felt my mind leave and here I was, wings drooping behind me, and I was moving.
My screaming had finally stopped and I tried to understand what had happened. I saw in funeral attire. A fitting black dress, part of it hanging in tatters behind me from my wings, it was covered in dirt and mud, like the rest of me. The wings had a slight wet sheen to them and dripped with blood and the pain in my back was still there, but not nearly as agonizing. I knew I had to get away from the graveyard.
Walking was difficult. The muscles in my wings were straining as the wings hung limply from my back. The muscles connecting the wings to my back were both in my chest and in my shoulders and they were straining as well, but I needed to get out of here.
"It's interesting, isn't it?"
I jumped at the voice and sluggishly turned around to see a girl. A young girl, perhaps a few years younger than me with wings like my own, but hers were folded against her back.
"You're really not supposed to be here, you know?" She was smiling as she said this, her black eyes concentrating on my limp wings. "You're sort of in the afterlife, if you're wondering. When we die, we wake up in the next world, existing right along the world we use to be in. They can't see us, we can't see them, but we know they're there. Ghosts? Simply us managing to find a crack in the world. But you, you're still in the first world, somehow. How? Not sure. It was my job to come and get you to show the ropes, but you're stuck on this side of the veil, so to speak."
I stared at her, her lips moving as I tried to digest what she said. It… made sense in a way, and explained everything I had been familiar with, I guess. I was stuck in purgatory, it sounded like.
"So… I'm supposed to be in your world, which exists on this world, yet I'm still in my world. So is this like purgatory?" I stared up at her as she laughed and it sounded more like a cough. Her voice was strangely rough for looking so young.
"Purgatory doesn't exist, actually. Life cycles like this… There's the first world, where we all started out, then there's the next world, the one I'm from and you're supposed to be in. In this next world, I guess you can say we become like angels and nothing in the first world's life determines whether you get wings or not. Even the worst of us. In this… second world, we exist normally, live new lives or gather up the remains of our old ones. We aren't sure what the purpose of it all is, really. But in the second world you can have a choice after a while. Continue living here… err, there, or move back to the first world. Reincarnation, so to speak." I blinked and found what she said was crazy.
"So even Hitler got wings in the next life? Jeffrey Dahmer?" It seemed insane that just anyone could die and go onto the next life no matter what they did in life.
"Sadly, what might seem reprehensible to most here, aren't so reprehensible where I come from." Her words felt like someone had just shoved my head in a guillotine and just let the blade down over my head.
"So things like rape, murder, cannibalism, abuse, shit like that just flies right on by there?" I was disgusted. This is what everyone was destined to end up as when they died? "What about God? Where is he in this grand old plan? Religion? Does everyone get the luxury of wings, only to be doomed to watch over their shoulder? I don't want this!" I stared back at the wings on my back, I wanted them gone.
"I can't exactly answer those questions…" The girl grew eerily quiet and it took me a moment to realize she was gone. I let out a grunt and glared at my wings. I needed to get rid of them by any means necessary.
I had finally managed to get away from the cemetery and made it out to the forests around La Push and Forks. The only way I had known any time had past was because the sun was peeking into the sky and what I was planning to do was crazy at best.
I sat my ass down, my wings bending at painful and awkward angles as I gripped the base of my right wing. I was not going to go about existing as some weird creature. Scars and pain be damned. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to be dead right now, in the ground. my casket caved in and dirt filling the cracks between my fingers and toes as my skin rotted and my body decayed.
I breathed in and I tore as hard as I could. I had not expected to get any real damage done, but somehow the muscles in my arms and back were stronger than I had thought possible. The pain felt a lot like what I thought the shotgun shot felt like. I had been so numb at that time, but now I felt everything. I tore and tore until the wing hung in my hand, soon falling to the ground. I fell forward and groaned from the pain as the wounds on my back seemed to seal themselves.
Only to be replaced by the feeling of a thousand needles.