When You Were Young

Samantha felt something soft beneath her. A cloud? She wondered. She had always thought the notion of people sitting around on clouds playing harps to be corny, but maybe there was some truth in it. Then her hand scraped against the wooden surface of headboard.

She opened her eyes to stare up at the familiar headboard to Joseph's bed, a poster of the solar system tacked to the wall above. She flexed the hand touching the headboard, noting her long, thin teenaged fingers. She touched her straight hair and then rolled over to pat her firm stomach and breasts. Oh thank God, she thought.

As she lay on Joseph's bed, she ran through everything that had happened. Veronica had taken out the knife to stab Joseph. The blade instead plunged into Samantha's gut. She collapsed into Joseph's arms. Veronica drew another knife to finish Joseph off. With her last strength, Samantha pulled the knife from her stomach and jammed it between Veronica's ribs just as she had trained to do during her years in the Bureau.

And then she died, Joseph pleading with her to stay while the world grew dimmer and dimmer.

This must be the afterlife, she thought. How strange that it would be Joseph's bedroom. Is this Heaven or Hell? she wondered. Or it could be some kind of purgatory?

She crawled out of bed, stumbling over her adult-sized feet as if learning to walk for the first time. If this was the afterlife, then what about her parents? What about Andre? She pressed a hand to her stomach, thinking of the unborn child Veronica had killed in her womb. Would she be able to see the child here too?

There were so many things she needed to know, but first-She went around the bed to kneel down in front of Joseph. She peeled aside the covers to look at his face with its pimples and stray hairs the razor had missed. His lips were the ones she remembered kissing so many times before.

His eyes opened as she kissed him. To her surprise, he grabbed her around the waist and wrestled her into bed on top of him. He pressed her against his body hard enough to suck the air from her lungs. "Joe, stop it," she said.

"Oh my God," he said. "It's really you. I must be dreaming. I saw her…I saw her kill you. I held you as you died. But then-"

She squirmed free of his grasp to lie beside him. "Maybe we're both dead," she said. "Or maybe I'm making all this up."

"You mean that I'm some kind of illusion?" He pinched the skin on his arm. "I don't feel like an illusion."