The first moments after the boy's death pass for him in a confused and weighty blur. He is dimly
aware of pain, but mostly of a tremendous fatigue, as if he has been covered in layer upon layer of
impossibly heavy blankets. He struggles against them, blindly, his thrashing increasing as he panics
(again) at the invisible ropes that seem to bind him.
His mind isn't clear. It races and throbs like the worst kind of fever, and he is unaware of even
thinking. It's more some kind of wild, dying instinct, a terror of what's to come, a terror of what's
happened.
A terror of his death.
As if he can still struggle against it, still outrun it.
He even has a distant sensation of momentum, his body continuing its fight against the waves even
though that fight has already been lost. He feels a sudden rushing, a surge of terror hurtling him
forward, forward, forward, but he must be free of his body somehow because his shoulder no longer
hurts as he struggles blindly through the dark, unable to feel anything, it seems, except a terrified
urgency to move –
And then there is a coolness on his face. Almost as of a breeze, though such a thing seems
impossible for so many reasons. It's this coolness that causes his consciousness – His soul? His
spirit? Who's to say? – to pause in its fevered spin.
For an instant, he is still.
There's a change in the murk before his eyes. A lightness. A lightness he can enter, somehow, and
he can feel himself leaning toward it, his body – so weak, so nearly incapable beneath him – reaching
for the growing light.
He falls. Falls onto solidity. The coolness rises from it, and he allows himself to sink into it, let it
envelop him.
He is still. He gives up his struggle. He lets oblivion overtake him.
Oblivion is purgatorial and gray. He is passably conscious, not asleep but not quite awake either, as
if disconnected from everything, unable to move or think or receive input, able only to exist.
An impossible amount of time passes, a day, a year, maybe even an eternity, there is no way he can
know. Finally, in the distance, the light begins to slowly, almost imperceptibly change. A grayness
emerges, then a lighter grayness, and he starts to come back to himself.
His first thought, more vaguely sensed than actually articulated, is that it feels as though he's
pressed against a cement block. He's dimly aware of how cool it is under him, how solid it feels, like
he's clinging to it lest he fly off into space. He hovers around the thought for an indeterminate amount
of time, letting it clarify, letting it connect to his body, to other thoughts –
The word morgue suddenly flashes somewhere deep inside him – for where else are you laid out
on cool, solid blocks – and in rising horror, he opens his eyes, unaware they were even closed. He
tries to call out that they must not bury him, they must not cut him open, that there's been a terrible,
terrible mistake. But his throat rebels against the formation of words, as if it hasn't been used for
years, and he's coughing and sitting up in terror, his eyes muddled and foggy, like he's looking at the
world from behind many thick layers of dirty glass.
He blinks repeatedly, trying to see. The vague shapes around him slowly fall into place. He sees
that he is not on the cold slab of a morgue –
He is –
He is –
Where is he?
Confused, he squints painfully into what now seems to be rising daylight. He looks around, trying to
take it in, trying to see it, make sense of it all.
He seems to be lying on a concrete path that runs through the front yard of a house, stretching from
the sidewalk to a front door behind him.
The house is not his own.
And there's more wrong than just that.
He breathes for a moment, heavily, almost panting, his mind groggy, his vision slowly becoming a
little clearer. He feels himself shaking from the chill and pulls his arms around himself, sensing a
dampness covering his –
Not his clothes.
He looks down at them, his physical reaction slower than the thought that ordered it. He squints
again, trying to see them clearly. They don't seem to really be clothes at all, just strips of white cloth
that barely fit the name trousers or shirt, stuck closely around him more like bandages than things to
wear. And all along one side, they're wet with –
He stops.
They're not wet with seawater, not with the soaking, briny cold of the ocean he was just –
(drowning in)
And only half of him is wet anyway. The other half, the half that was against the ground, is cool, but
quite dry.
He looks around, more confused than ever. Because he can only be wet with dew. The sun is low in
the sky, and it seems as if it must be morning. Underneath him, he can even make out a dry outline of
where he was lying.
As if he had lain there all night.
But that can't be. He remembers the brutal, winter coldness of the water, the dark freezing gray of
the sky overhead that would never have let him survive a night out in it –
But that isn't this sky. He lifts his face to it. This sky isn't even winter. The chill is merely the chill
of morning, of possibly a warm day to come, of possibly a summer day. Nothing at all like the bitter
wind of the beach. Nothing at all like when he –
When he died.
He takes another moment to breathe, to just do that, if he can. There is only quiet around him, only
the sounds he himself is making.
He turns slowly to look at the house again. It resolves itself more and more as his eyes get used to
the light, used – it almost seems – to seeing again.
And then, through the fog and confusion, he feels a soft tremor in his blanketed mind.
A brush, a hint, a featherweight of –
Of –
Is it familiarity?