The cement steps leading up to the front door of my grandma’s home are growing cold. The sky has gone dark enough that I can see the stars through the gaps in the canopy of grape vines. My parents are running late.

They’d said they were making a last-minute shopping run to get us some watermelons. I’m not sure why we need them for tomorrow’s trip, but if they don’t come back soon we’ll have to set out in this darkness, drive through the night and neither of them will make it to work on time.

What’s taking them so long? Those things are in season so surely there should have been… some… left…

Oh.

I’d overheard them talking with grandma about extending my stay at her home for the rest of the Summer and picking me up in Fall.

But I’d interrupted them at that point and pleaded to go back with them, because while grandma’s home was great, I hadn’t seen either mom or dad since the start of Spring. I’d wanted to go with them even if it meant having to deal with dad’s parents, siblings, and my older cousins.

They’d only been here for three days and they’d promised—

I tuck my legs up against my chest and rest my chin on my knees, swallowing back the familiar bitterness that wants to claw up my throat. My head hurts and my chest feels tight.

They’d lied, hadn’t they?

*****

I wake up feeling sweaty and cold, shivering even while tucked under a thick blanket. There’s a faint smell of vinegar in the air and a cool damp weight on my brow.

When I pry my eyes open, I’m greeted by the familiar furnishings of the guest bedroom of grandma’s home. The only difference from the norm is that the desk chair has been moved next to the bed instead.

A young boy is sitting in it, hunched over a book. His sharp eyes flick back and forth over the page’s contents as he mouths the words to himself. His short dark hair is an unruly mess. There are healing scrapes on his knees and elbows, grass stains on his shorts, and faint bruises on his knuckles.

The sight of him sparks a bit of warmth in the haze of numbness and pressure sitting in my chest.

“Wh-what happened?” I ask and wince as my voice comes out dry and rasping.

“You’re awake!” the boy says, looking up and smiling in relief. “You fell asleep on the stairs and then came down with a fever,” he answers, then adds more softly, “It’s Tuesday.”

When he sets the book on the bed, I glimpse the slim columns of words on the pages. Ah, I should have known it would be poetry. He’s been steadily working his way through grandma’s collection of books on it this past year.

“Oh,” I say, as it sinks in that I’ve been out for a day, “I’m sorry I couldn’t visit.” He’d wanted to show me something at his grandmother’s home, hadn’t he?

“Don’t worry about it,” the boy tells me, waving the apology away, “It’s not your fault you got sick.” He stands up to fetch a bottle of water from the bedside table and helps me sit up to drink from it.

“But it is,” I deny once I’m done, feeling the unpleasant tightness in my chest worsen, “I can’t believe I fell for that excuse. I’m supposed to be smarter than that.”

My eyes sting but I refuse to cry, hands curling into fists as I grip the blanket. Crying has never made anything better.

“It’s not wrong to want to believe your parents,” the boy says. “They are the ones that messed up.” He looks upset on my behalf.

“Do you know if they got home all right?” I ask, unwilling to argue further. My head still hurts.

“They’re fine,” he answers. “I overheard your gran giving them an earful for what they pulled when they called,” he then adds with a small satisfied smile.

“Sounds like her,” I say, trying and failing to return the expression. “I wish they’d just told me instead of lying,” I admit quietly.

The boy doesn’t say anything, but the hand he rests on my clenched fist is warm.

*****

It’s hot. The air is dry and burns my throat. The smell of acrid smoke makes me choke as I breathe it in.

I groggily open my eyes and try to roll over as I cough, only to fall off the bed. The pain from the landing jolts me into wakefulness and suddenly I’m sharply aware that the bedroom is on fire, though the flames haven’t spread to the bed yet.

I scramble to my feet and rush to the window, only to find that it’s jammed and see that the garden is burning too. Even the sky is red and hazy with smoke. There are flames in the hallway, but it’s the only way out.

I venture out of the room, trying to keep my shirt over my nose and mouth, skirting around the hottest flames, and head for the front door. Grandma’s bedroom is on the way and when I can’t find her there, I head outside, calling for her as loudly as I can manage.

My words die in my throat when I open the door and see the yard. For a long few moments, the sight of so much blood and the mangled body parts does not compute.

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It’s not like I’ve never seen blood before. Grandma keeps hens and ducks, and no one has tried to prevent me from being present when they are butchered for meat. There has been the occasional spill when one of the dead birds was hung up to drain the blood, but nothing like this.

There are pieces of grandma’s two dogs spread around the cement, some of them missing parts like they’d been bitten off by a large maw. Unfamiliar and strange-looking prints litter the ground, alongside a trail of blood.

I feel a pit of dread as I follow it toward the outdoor kitchen. It’s where grandma likes to cook during the Summer months. The house and the surrounding neighborhood are strangely quiet. I can’t hear the birds, no neighbors milling about or shouting, and no sirens of fire engines, only the roar and crackle of the fires.

There’s no animal or person in the burning ruins of the outdoor kitchen, only a torn-up body. The scraps of cloth left scattered about are damningly familiar, however.

Nausea rips through me and I retch, but nothing comes up. Eventually, I force myself to stop and turn around, blinking away the tears that try to blur my vision.

My body feels distant and clumsy as I search for my sneakers and put them on my bloodied feet once I find them. My head is pounding now. The tightness in my ribcage feels almost unbearable. I feel like I can’t catch my breath.

I… I have to get out of here and find some help.

A familiar voice calls my name from the front gate and I jerk around to find my friend stepping into the yard.

He looks like he’s been through hell, clothes torn and caked with grime. There’s soot and oddly colored splatters of fluid on his skin. His eyes dart all over the yard, searching for something, before falling on me.

“Is your gran…?” he asks, clearly already dreading the answer.

I shake my head, unable to give voice to it. The pressure against my skull and ribcage worsens.

“What happened out there?” I ask as I walk over to him.

“…monsters,” he answers with a grimace, followed by a shudder.

“Monsters?” I echo, struggling to wrap my mind around that idea.

“Yeah. I don’t get how, but there’s a bunch of really weird-looking things running arou—”

He cuts himself off in favor of picking me up and dragging me through the air in an impossibly fast maneuver. It’s just in time to avoid being crushed by a strange twisted form that crashes through the gate.

We land on the roof of grandma’s home, which is starting to leak smoke, and looking at the thing from here it’s clear that this monster with too many eyes, mouths, and spikes is almost as large as the building.

“We need to run,” my friend says, fear clear in his voice as he swings me onto his back. “Hold on,” he says as he jumps into the air once more.

I cling on as best as I can without strangling him, biting back a question about when he’d gotten superpowers. There are more things I want to ask, but there’s no time. The large monster is chasing us and more of its kind (though smaller ones) are joining in the further we go.

My friend spits out a few sharp curses when I inform him of that but doesn’t seem to have any better options.

Then several small and fast streaks come flying at us from the sides. My friend dodges the first couple, but not the third or fourth.

I cry out as we smash through a wall, more in fear than in pain, before the breath is knocked out of me. The first thing I see when I pry my eyes open is that my friend has taken the brunt of the earlier impacts. He’s dazed, injured, and in no state to move. The second is that we are surrounded by the monsters.

I don’t want my friend to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to keep being too small and insignificant to affect anything or protect anyone I care about. Just this once, I want to reach out and make all these things vanish—

The pressure building inside my skull and ribcage reaches a tipping point and something breaks.

Only… instead of my body blowing up, it’s my awareness that expands out into the world.

And my thoughts are given form.

******

I found myself back in a dead woman’s body, touching the strange tree with one of its hands as abruptly as I’d been plunged into those memories.

That had been… disturbing.

One of the many things I didn’t recall from my original life was my maternal grandmother’s old home. It was a place where I’d purportedly spent much of my childhood, but I’d lost all recollection of being there. For the longest time, it had been a gap given shape by the memories that referenced it.

I only knew that there had been grape trees and a canopy net for them to grow over from the retellings of others. Mom and her siblings had reminisced about the garden and the hens that they'd gotten fresh eggs from. Grandma had been the one to tell me that her friend’s grandson and I had been close friends before we’d fallen out of contact.

The first two memories I’d relived lined up with everything else I’d known about myself at around that age. The body had felt right. The setting had been more vivid than I’d expected. The events could even explain why I’d had some lingering distaste for watermelons throughout my life.

But the rest? That didn’t fit with what I remembered of my original world. The place had remained mundane and monster-invasion-free up until I’d died, that much I was sure of. My maternal grandmother had outlived me and I most certainly hadn’t had any superpowers.

Wispy tendrils of light had risen off the surface of the tree while I’d been having the vision, but the energy that made them up didn’t try to do anything else. The strange conflicting urges had faded but called up an old bitterness instead.

Having a taste of what I’d lost felt like a taunt.

I turned back to ask Alexander a few questions about the tree but paused when I saw the man’s astonished expression. It was probably fair to conclude that something about my interaction with this object had been unusual.

“Does it always send people on visions down memory lane?” I asked through a new bit of light-writing.

The man blinked and shook his surprise off. “No,” he said, gaze straying back to where I was still touching the tree.

“Was something else supposed to happen?” I wrote out.

“Simply standing this close would have burned you out of Helen’s body if you were using it without permission,” the man answered. “I didn’t expect you to try to touch the tree, let alone succeed,” he admitted with a shrug.

“Is that unusual?” I changed the projection to say.

“That would be putting it mildly,” Alexander answered with a tired little chuckle, noticeably less tense in my presence now. “I suggest you keep it to yourself unless you want a lot of attention.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Hopefully, he was exaggerating, but I’d have to be careful just in case he wasn’t.

I pulled the borrowed body’s hand away from the trunk, waited for a few heartbeats for the wisps of energy to dissipate, and then touched the bark again once they’d been reabsorbed.

There was no new vision, nor a blip in the hum of its power, just those wisps rising up to brush against the borrowed body’s hand. They didn't even try to dig deeper to touch my spiritual form.

Without being drawn into another vision, I could focus my senses and examine the effects the tree-like object was having on its surroundings. It was fascinating to observe how it anchored the layers of reality and extended through multiple dimensions. What was visible here in the form of a tree was only a small part of a much larger whole.

Perhaps that was something to explore later.

“I imagine you need to get back and help with the aftermath of all the fighting,” I wrote, “So would it be more or less convenient if I vacate this body now?”

“The former,” Alexander replied after a moment’s thought, “It would serve as better proof of your earlier claims.” He studied me for a moment, then added, “Are you sure about this course of action? It’s not safe for non-corporeal beings to wander around. You will be mistaken for a malicious spirit again and there are those that specialize in hunting them.”

That wasn’t a bad point. I didn’t know how high the local scale of power went and it would suck to get booted back into my afterlife or sealed in some artifact or worse, eaten by some power-hungry entity.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to craft a form to inhabit,” I conceded, “Finding a donor for the starter tissue sample might be difficult, however.”

Then, with the flip of a mental switch, I finally cut the tethers tying me to the borrowed body.