Chapter 1 - The three stages of rebirth.
Stage 1 - I died
I knew the minute it happened, I was going to die. Damn it, it had been such a nice day until then.
It didn’t take long for my mind to become fuzzy and for the pain from the bite on my leg to intensify. It felt like someone was pouring lava into my veins. I tried to remember what I had read about Funnel Web Spider bites, but all I could recall was that they killed you quickly. You had to get the antidote more or less immediately. At the most, I had 20 minutes...well, 10 now.
There was no hope for me. I was on a difficult trail used only by experienced hikers, so it wasn’t likely anyone was going to miraculously happen by carrying Funnel Web antidote. It will be a while before my body is found. I feel sorry for the person who finds me. As they turn that last sharp bend on the track, looking forward to reaching the summit and the popular lookout, they will find me slumped against a tree. It’s not going to be a pretty sight. It’s Summer, hot and humid, and I will be well on the way to decomposing and not looking my best. I just hope I don’t end up in bits, nibbled on by animals. What an undignified ending to my uneventful life.
The weird thing was, I didn’t feel afraid of dying. I thought I would go screaming and ranting into that dark night. Instead, I felt calm, which was fascinating because I would describe myself as a panicker.
My main concern was the agonising burning sensation as the venom dissolved the veins in my leg. I could see the bite was a livid red, and the skin around it raised and mottled purple and black. The one bit of satisfaction I had was that when I got bitten, my first reaction was to jump. When the spider fell off my calf, I’d put the thick heel of my hiking boot down on my murderer and squished it into pulp. I was dying, but it went first.
My brain function was fading, the heartbeat slowing, and I probably only had minutes left. It peeved me that the last moments of my life were so painful. My life had been peaceful, calm, and uneventful; even so, I had been content being a nerd.
My only regret was dying a virgin. A 22-year-old female with almost zero experience in sex, apart from what I read online and movies. I had only just started to seriously date a nice guy, it had been going well, and I thought he might be the one. I was going to die as pure as the day I was born....boring.
I had to laugh at the stuff running through my mind. For example, I wondered if I was going to turn into one of those demon virgin ghosts I read about, taking out my revenge on the world for my lack of nooky.
OMG, I imagined my parents at the funeral. They would make an epic show of it. They’d tell everyone how I wasted the last four years on a useless natural therapy course when I could have been a real therapist (definitely their words), a real physiotherapist, or a real nurse.
Maybe I should haunt them and scream out, “I was a real therapist parents.” in the middle of the night and scare the crap out of them.
Damn, I really, really wished I’d had sex.
I suspected that it was the fact that the pain had gone, and I felt incredibly tired, that my mind wandered to such stupid things.
I hadn’t even seen my boyfriend naked. I was back to that again. I had a one-track mind even when I was about to meet my maker.
I think I was delirious. I just had a funny thought. What if my version of Heaven is like Norse mythology, the perfect day over and over again? In my case, it would be sex 24/7 with a gorgeous hunk. Plus, I could eat all I want and still have a firm arse and toned thighs. That would be bliss.
It was around then that I realised. Technically, I died a few minutes earlier, and the last few desperate neurons were firing in my brain before all consciousness ceased completely.
I looked up at the sky, a perfect cloudless blue. The beauty of the lookout was faithful to all the descriptions I’d read about it. The horizon was a faded blue-green line against the crisp blue sky, and the valley below was a patchwork of colour on either side of the river that disappeared into the distance. The last still shot of my life was beautiful, and I was grateful for that.
Well, here I go, I thought when I knew it was the end. It felt like a gentle wave picked me up and took me out to an endless sea, the sky above me a single perfect shade of blue. I was about to find out what millions of other humans had before me. What happens next, if anything? I faded away.
Stage 2 - “The Powers that Be”
TWO...Why did you do that? Why did you pull her out? We have very specific protocols. I checked, and she was meant to live until she was 82. Along the way, she was supposed to get married, divorced, married again, have two kids, be a good mother, an average wife, and a workaholic. Ultimately, she was meant to die from a heart attack while arguing with a cashier at her local grocery store.
Apart from the waste of 60-odd years of her expanding the universe, think of the endless repercussions of cutting her life short. All her descendants have to be deleted for one thing. Shit, as if my workload isn’t bad enough as it is.
It’s always my people who have to clean up the mess you create. Thousands of lives have to be edited so they can fit neatly in the big picture, because she no longer exists in her proper timeline.
Do you know how many people one person affects throughout their life, thousands upon thousands?
TWO was annoyed.
TWO...Three told you, you have to stop doing this. He’ll be furious when he finds out you’ve done it again. This is all because you read that stupid transmigration story on Wattpad, isn’t it? That’s when all this started. You’re supposed to be the nice one out of the three of us.
I wish I could go back in time and get rid of Wattpad. It confirmed how weird humans are, and what weird shit goes on in their heads. We never should have given them imaginations, another one of those things you insisted they needed to be happy and productive. Look at the trouble imagination has gotten the human race into.
ONE...I was bored. She was bored. Can you remember the last original thought one of them had? Jules Verne, maybe or Newton? And even then, I had to throw that apple at him. They’re in a rut.
TWO slapped his forehead.
TWO...That apple was my idea, thank you very much. You wanted to rain down thunderbolts, remember? I had to talk you out of it.
Just because they haven't turned out the way you wanted them to be, you can’t keep mucking up the order of things.
ONE...Why not? I am an omnipotent being.
ONE was playing marbles.
TWO...Where have you sent this one, as if I didn’t know?
ONE....The usual place. She was smart but cowardly. I thought I would throw her in the deep end and see how she copes. I hope she lasts longer than the last one.
ONE managed to lose all his marbles. Even more bored than he was before, he got up and disappeared in a flash of light.
TWO sighed in frustration and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Stage 3 - Life is a flickering light bulb
I was totally relaxed as I floated on the boundless ocean. Perhaps peaceful wasn’t the right word because life was absent, no sadness or joy, nothing.
I was a blank slate.
All I did was watch the sky above me, as unchanging as the sea. I couldn’t tell you if I went around in circles or travelled a long distance. I couldn’t tell you if I was there for a blink of an eye or a lifetime. The only thing that was certain was that I was alone, completely alone.
Then I felt my first heartbeat. A sudden hard thud in my chest, as if my heart grudgingly restarted. It happened as a cloud appeared in the perfect blue sky. It was a small wispy thing that suddenly entered my line of vision. Its appearance was a momentous event in the unremitting sameness. As unexpected as the cloud’s appearance was, the sudden awareness of myself was.
Snap...everything went black, and my senses were assaulted from all sides. Dreadful smells and loud noises that I couldn’t understand spun around me in the darkness. For a moment, the still shot of the moment I died appeared in my mind’s eye, a pair of legs stretched out in front of me, a couple of meters beyond that, the cliff edge dropping away to a magnificent view.
Snap...silence, and I was looking up at the cloud that had fixed itself to a spot directly above me. It changed shape. I watched. What was previously peaceful was now unsettling. The cloud had brought with it awareness and thoughts. The first of those thoughts was, this couldn’t be all there is to the afterlife. Boring.
Snap...I was back in the darkness. Or was this the afterlife? If so, it smelled dreadful. I tried to remember what the disgusting smell was, racked my muddled memory for that information. It was vile, but it struck a chord, and I felt I should know. The different noises that moved around me were familiar, but I couldn’t differentiate one from another. They were a cacophonous soup.
Then one sound separated itself from the rest. Bells. I heard the tinny sound of small bells. I felt myself roll onto my side. Yes, my body, as useless and limp as it felt, flopped over like a bag of wet laundry. The smell grew worse, and I recognised the stench of stale urine and feces.
Snap...unrelenting blue sky, and the single small cloud was holding firm to its spot, centre stage above me. I was still floating gently, silently. The sea was becalmed and as smooth as glass. The cloud watched me, and I watched the cloud.
Snap...the noises that waxed and waned. The darkness, which had been solid, was now a layer of gauze between me and the light. I thought I saw shadows and movement. An unsettled, dissatisfied feeling grew within me.
The snaps back and forth were getting faster.
Snap...blue sky. The cloud. I felt like the cloud had started to judge me.
Snap...darkness. There were holes in the gauze, and light and shadows were seeping through.
Snap...the previously endless blue sky above my head was now mostly filled with clouds. Was the sky falling?
Snap...the darkness had gaping holes, clear-cut like windows. Shapes and faded colours framed in black. The bells had stopped tinkling.
Snap...the clouds had dropped and blocked out the blue sky.
The snaps grew shorter and flipped faster still.
Snap...the darkness was dissolving quickly, and something else was replacing it that I didn’t understand.
Snap...the clouds settled on me. They felt like a warm heaviness covering me like a blanket.
SNAP
