Two bodies huddled in the dark as rage-filled screaming carried down the hall and through the walls. The smaller child clung to the older one, not recognizing then how thin the arms encircling her were, or how much her older brother clung to his little sister. She only knew he tried to make them both safe from the screaming demons that had taken over their parents.
The family hamster died not long ago, and the very concept of death had struck her hard. She flinched into her brother when something broke with the tinkling sound of glass.
"What if Mommy kills Daddy?" she asked.
"She won't," her brother told her.
"But what if she does?" she insisted, shivering.
"She won't," he insisted. "He's got his own temper. He'll fight back. And if either one of them kills the other, the police will take them away. I don't know what happens to us after that. But it's not that bad of a fight." Yet.
Her brother patted her shoulder and stroked his hand up and down her back. It soothed her.
"What if they kill us?" The question slipped out.
Her brother's voice grew rough in the dark. "Then we're dead. And we're not hamsters. I don't think we go to hamster Heaven. I don't know what kind of place we go to, but we'll go together."
"But what if they only kill one of us?"
"Then whoever dies first will wait for the other, and we'll go figure it out together." The tone of his voice left no room for more what-ifs or are-you-sures.
"If I die first, I don't want to be buried. I don't want my body forever stuck in the dark," she whispered. "What about you?"
"I don't care. If I die, I won't be in my body no more. I'll be watching out for you." Again, he said that with the kind of conviction that left no room for doubts.
More breaking sounds accompanied more screaming.
Then a door slammed shut, the weighty *bang* indicating that was the front door.
"And don't come back!" their mother screamed.
They stayed, hidden and huddled, in the closet, older brother guarding little sister.
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Many years later, the same brother and sister pair sat at a café table at a chain store coffee shop.
"How's the program going?" her brother asked.
She shrugged. "I don't think most of my classmates are going to make it through."
"Hey! A grade of C still passes!" he reminded her.
"And I have a lot of classmates who are wasting their money because they won't get that," she sighed. "Seriously, there's this one guy, if he gets anywhere near a patient, he's going to kill them. He's so convinced more is better that he'll overdose a patient and, bam! They won't need a doctor anymore! They'll need a mortician!"
"Aw, it can't be that bad!" he laughed.
She set down her cup and locked gazes with her brother.
He snorted. "Seriously?"
She just kept looking.
He blew out a breath. "Damn! That's ... kind of scary to think about."
She relaxed and sipped at her latte again, then, more casually, returned the cup to the table. "Yeah. I'm just stuck praying he doesn't make it through, because he might be arrogant, but he at least knows the difference between anterior and posterior. There is a lot of stuff we have to memorize, and it's not the easiest, but, you sit on your posterior."
Her brother snorted, but managed to suppress his laughter. "Sorry your--. Classmates are ... not up to your standards."
"Hey! This is the future of nursing! It's not a laughing matter! We're the people who are going to handle your daily care if you do end up hospitalized!"
"No, no! I'm taking this seriously. But--. You have a foam mustache. It's kind of funny."
"Ugh!" she groaned and licked her upper lip. "Seriously! What if you end up dead because of one of these guys?"
He shrugged. "I've told you a few times. I'll wait for you and we'll figure out whatever happens after life together."
"Still don't care what happens to your body?"
"Nah. Flesh is just the cloak of the soul." He fell into the cadence of long repetition. "Funerals are for the living, for people to have a ceremony that helps them anchor their grief. And if, for some gods awful reason, Mom ends up in charge of my death rites, let her spend however much of her own money on it as she wants, do whatever ostentatious thing pleases her. I'm just as happy with the idea of being dumped in the ocean as buried or burned up to ash. Hell, feed the buzzards; I don't care."
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He leaned forward and bopped a finger onto her nose. "Alive or dead, I'm always your big brother."
She rolled her eyes.
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"I should have gone for vet tech," she grumbled in her heart, but kept her mouth shut.
"Do you have any idea the liability you've exposed us to?" the admin mouth piece continued on.
She kept her mouth shut. It wasn't liability the administrator was wailing over; it was profit, pure and simple. Oh, they'd pretend, but it wasn't like she hadn't told the poor family anything wrong when she told them about the general procedures, surgical and non, to deal with back pain. She also hadn't told them what to do, or what would work for them. She had just answered general questions.
It wasn't her job, but she also hadn't been working. She had been riding the bus.
The mouth piece just kept talking and talking, and she sighed. She was done. She opened her mouth and let years of resentments she had just kept bottled up pour out in five simple words. "I'm not dealing with this," she said, interrupting the man's harangue. "You want me to quit? Fine. I quit. Do you want me to finish out my severance period?"
"Quit!? You can't quit!"
"I'm giving you notice. This whole place, the way you micromanage every minute of my life, I'm not letting you do that to me anymore. So. I. Quit."
"You'll never work in another hospital again!"
"Like I would want to! If I'm going to work for money sucking scumbags, I'll go be a paralegal or something!"
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"You quit, huh?"
"I haven't even said anything!" she exclaimed, flopping into the chair next to her brother at the café they met up at every Thursday.
"It's in the glow. You've really hated working at that place. Tell you what, I'm buying today."
"Too late. I mobile ordered," she said, smiling. Then she sighed. "I'm stuck working through my notice period, but I gotta figure out what I'm going to do next."
"No plan, huh? How's your lease looking?"
"End of the year." She grimaced. "I'm not even sure I want to work in nursing again, the business office burned me so bad."
"What happened?"
"I talked to a nice couple on the bus about what happens when you're getting checked out for back pain, and they told the doctor about it, which ended up getting over to admin, who decided to warn me about trying to treat patients. Did they ask for my side of the story? No. They just assumed, and went into C.Y.A. lecture mode. And it's far from the first time that they just assumed stuff without fact checking."
"That's a reason to leave the hospital, but to leave nursing?"
"I keep in touch with classmates, and all of them get the same 'shut up and pretend you're a rug' treatment. Not from the doctors, but from the business offices. Some of them even do it to the doctors."
He nodded. "Tell you what. Move in with me and sub-lease. Take the guest room. If you want a career change, go back to school, become a paralegal. I can set you up with a starting job, and you'll make enough to be debt free before forty. You were worrying about that with your nursing pay, right?"
She absently nodded while she considered it.
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Gaily dressed mourners collected their champagne glasses at the door.
"For the farewell toast," the ushers told them, and many of them smiled as they cried. "It's so him!" they said.
Only a few sticklers, the family that never really bothered to know him, and some professional acquaintances attending out of a sense of obligation, failed to understand.
She made it through to the final eulogy, which she stood up to give.
"My brother was always there for me. He sat through three commencement ceremonies when our parents couldn't even make it to one. He encouraged me to be better everyday than the day before it. When we were kids, and our hamster died, he promised if anything happened, he'd wait for me. And then he reminded me of that promise for the next twenty, thirty years. However long it's been."
More memories tripped off her tongue, words she didn't remember after she spoke them, though his friends told her they were beautiful. She reached the end and raised her glass. The other mourners raised theirs with her, and they shouted, "Salut!" before downing the purple fruit juice.
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She had a car, but she still took the bus to get to and from work. She was on the bus when the earth shook and the building around them began to sway and topple. She hadn't been a nurse for decades, but the impetus to help never left.
The bus, like all the rest of the traffic around them, braked to a stop. They waited until the shaking stopped, braced against it. She knew cell service would be out, so she didn't bother with that.
"Driver! First Aid kit! Where is it?" she ordered, taking charge. Someone had to.
He sputtered, but she just demanded again, "Where is the kit?" and he pointed to the drawer under his seat. She opened it, took charge of the kit and went through the bus passengers first. A few bumps and scrapes, but they were mostly more shocked than frightened.
Then she took the kit and went out among the other cars, treating people who needed the care and getting some other level headed people to create a triage zone, and to start organizing rescue digs. When she ran out of bandages, she improvised.
Then they needed people to assess who could be pulled from the wreckage and who needed to wait and hope for the professionals to arrive in time, so she went.
She was helping to get an older man out of rubble when an aftershock hit. The rubble closed in over them, and she had enough time to think, not for the first time, "I should have been a vet tech."
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Foreign soul detected. Soul is compatible with mana conditioning system. Foreign soul accepted. Applying divine boon: [Second Childhood]. Beginning acclamation process.
Welcome, Traveler, to your new life. You will be reborn into a compatible species and granted a period of time to acclimate to your new world without the preconceptions you may carry over from your prior life(s).
Once you receive a class under the World Mana Conditioning and Control System, you may experience flashbacks to particularly significant events in your prior lives. This is normal and indicates your soul is repairing whatever damage you sustained in the journey between worlds.
Welcome to your new life, may it be long and prosperous.
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Cerise, maybe four, maybe five years old, danced to satyr songs, the equine-bottomed men crowning her with flowers -- red, red flowers. Her older sister, eyes wide with fright, danced, too, grimacing more than smiling, and reaching down to a fallen man, who lay beside their parents. Sunlight flashed off the blade of the sword she pulled back.
"In Solaris' name!" invoked the older sister that Cerise now barely remembered. More sunlight filled the meadow, which was strange because it was night time, a full moon in the sky.
The satyr song stopped, and Cerise collapsed, exhausted. The last sight she had of her sister was the older girl chasing the braying satyrs into a fey ring.