James was tired. He had just finished two back-to-back twelve hour shifts, and his day still wasn’t done. He still had to go buy a card for his niece’s birthday. If any shops were open at this time of night.
He bundled himself up tighter. His jacket did little to block the late February wind that came whistling down the streets. His vision was getting a little fuzzy, but he kept pushing forward. He could sleep when he got home. Not out in the freezing cold.
He saw a convenience store open, and quickly rushed to get inside. Closing the door behind him, he let out a sigh as the warm air greeted him. He looked around to see if there were birthday cards for sale here, and, indeed there were.
Browsing through them for a bit, he grabbed one with a cartoon dog on the front. He went up to the counter, paid, and left. The hints of a grin forming on his face were quickly dashed as soon as he was back out in the cold. He wasn’t as tired anymore. Interaction and a faceful of cold could do that.
Now slightly more awake, he started the slow trudge back to his apartment. A bit of his caution had vanished, what with how late at night it was. It was probably because of this that he didn’t bother waiting for the crosswalk light to give him the green light.
He stepped off the curb, and started across the street. His eyesight was going fuzzy again, his brain slowing down. It was only too late that he noticed the sports car barreling down at him.
Just mere moments later, and his world was nothing but blinding pain. He was pretty sure his legs were broken, among other bones, and, if how he was having difficulty breathing was any indication, he’d say his lungs might’ve been punctured. Well, that or his windpipe was crushed. Probably the windpipe. He wasn’t coughing up blood, after all.
His sleep addled, slowly dying brain turned to the first thing he could think of: the card in his hands. He wouldn’t be able to drop it off tomorrow after all. Well, it was close to midnight. It should be fine if he wished her a happy birthday now, right?
Happy birthday, my little niece. His thoughts were growing quieter and quieter. He could no longer hear the car that had hit him. He wasn’t sure if that was because it had driven off, or if the driver had stopped the car and got out.
He drew in one last shuddering breath, before he stilled. Right as he stilled, the world stuttered. He bolted upright, all the pain he should have been experiencing gone. His tiredness was also gone, as well as the biting cold. He looked around, but everything looked exactly how it should.
He glanced down at himself, and was greeted with one of the weirdest sights he had ever seen. It looked like his body had doubled. There was still overlap, but where one was completely destroyed, the other was completely fine.
He tried moving his legs, and the set that was fine moved. The broken legs stayed in place. He stood up, and took in the whole of his double on the ground. It didn’t take long for him to realize what he was looking at. Laying at his feet was his own corpse.
“Well, fuck. I think I died.” He chuckled a bit. Something about this scenario just seemed funny to him. His chuckle tapered off into a sigh, and he stared up at the night sky. He couldn’t make out anything through the cloud cover, but he kept staring anyway.
“Well. I’m dead,” he reiterated. “What do I do now?” He glanced down at his body again, and noticed the birthday card was still in his corpse’s hand. Gingerly, he reached down, and, to his surprise, picked it up.
“Huh. You’d think that as a ghost, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Well, anyway, I know what I’m going to do today.” He knew he didn’t have a pen on him, so he wandered off. He wound up back in the convenience store from earlier, grabbed a pen from the shelf, and quickly scribbled down a message.
Happy birthday! Man, can’t believe you’re already turning nine. What an accomplishment. I planned on dropping this off in person, but things have come up. I probably won’t be able to see you for a while. So, I guess I should go ahead and wish you happy birthday for all those birthdays I’m gonna miss. I’m going to miss you (more than your father, but don’t tell him I said that).
Love, Uncle James
There was still the chance that this was all a cosmic prank, but should that be the case, he can just buy a new birthday card and write a different message. With the card written, he marched off to his brother’s apartment. He had a card to drop off.
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He walked for quite a while before he realized something. It was silent. At first, he hadn’t noticed because he had been preoccupied, but now that he was wandering around, it became quite noticeable.
Granted, it was the middle of the night, but he couldn’t even hear the hum of machinery keeping people warm, or the occasional car horn off in the distance. The only noise he could hear was from the wind.
He pushed it to the back of his mind though. He didn’t know how the afterlife worked. This could’ve been normal for all he knew. He just kept trudging onwards.
He eventually reached the apartment complex his brother and his family lived in. He climbed the stairs, and tried to buzz his brother. Yes, it was the middle of the night, but the doorbell-chime thing was pretty loud and his brother was a light sleeper.
After a solid minute without a response, James grew worried. He went around the side of the building and started climbing the emergency stairs. It took a bit of climbing and jumping just to reach the ladder, but he managed.
He stopped on the third floor and slowly pried the window open. His brother never locked it, no matter how many times James reminded him to do so. He climbed in, and glanced around. The lights were all out, and there wasn’t a noise.
He listened for a moment, and grew worried when he didn’t hear his brother snoring. Granted, he could have just been sleeping quietly, but after the silence outside, a lump of dread settled in his gut.
He set the card down on the table and went to investigate. When he entered his brother’s room, he didn’t see anyone. There wasn’t any sign of his brother or his wife, other than slightly disturbed sheets on the bed.
He stumbled back, and ran to his niece’s room. He was greeted with the same sight: slightly disturbed sheets, but no person. Panicking, he ran out the door and down the hallway. He started pounding on every door he passed, but there wasn’t a response.
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He gave up once he had reached the ground floor; not because he wanted to, but because he ran out of doors to bang on. Strangely, after all that running, he wasn’t even the slightest bit out of breath.
His panic had subsided slightly, but he still ran out of the building. He looked around, and everything started to click into place. Why he had yet to run into another person. Why everything was so quiet. He was alone.
He let that thought sink in, before he thought about it more. He had obviously died. And now he was somewhere without people. Was this the afterlife? No, it couldn’t be the afterlife. There should have been other people here with him if that was the case.
He let out a sigh. He wasn’t getting anywhere with these thoughts. There wasn’t even anything he could do about it, even if he did know what had happened. Embracing his circumstances, he glanced around. He now had too much freetime on his hands.
You know, there were some book series he wanted to catch up on. With a goal now in mind, he made his way to a bookstore. He could read now.
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It had happened almost a day after he had died. He had been reading almost non-stop, as he didn’t need to eat, sleep, or relieve himself anymore. He had a stack of books surrounding him on the ground.
He had finished the last book in the stack, and leaned back, massaging his head. While he might not have to sleep, he still had the beginnings of a headache. Strange how that worked. Was it all psychological, and he only had a headache because his body thought he needed one?
He went to grab another book, and accidentally knocked the stack over. In a moment of panic, he reached out with his mind. Not his arm, no, that was still reaching for a book. It felt like he grew another arm from his chest, and it grabbed the stack of books.
Suddenly, the stack of books was gone. He knew instinctively that he could bring them back out, but he was frozen in place, still trying to understand what he had just done. He pulled out one of the books he had just “stored.”
It reappeared in his hands. He reached out with his mind again and drew it within himself again, and it vanished. He chuckled. He was going insane. Now he could store things inside himself. What was going wrong with him?
His appetite for reading had vanished, and now he wanted to test out his new ability. He stood up, and started trailing his mental hand down the shelves of books, watching as they all disappeared inside of him.
He brushed up against a shelf by accident, and it vanished as well as all the books on it. James stopped at this revelation. A grin forming on his face, he started charging right at the shelves, mental arm out in front of him.
Shelf after shelf vanished as he charged through them. And then there were no more shelves. Just a window out to the street. He didn’t stop in time, and his mind hit the window.
The next thing he knew, he was falling. He didn’t fall all that far, seeing as how he had only been on the second floor. He face planted directly into the ground, and started laughing. He rolled over, and started laughing even harder.
The building was gone. It hadn’t been destroyed, it hadn’t turned invisible, no. It looked like someone carved it out of the ground and picked it up. There was just no more building there.
This just seemed hysterical to James. The mere thought that he could store entire buildings seemed ludicrous. He just laughed. That was fun. He stood, and started running down the street. He stretched his mental arm out as far as he could, before he grew another one.
He stretched those two arms out to his side, and ran down the middle of the street. Everytime one of his mental arms came in contact with a building, it vanished inside him, and he laughed even harder.
Any car that his arms passed through received the same treatment, vanishing within him. Even as he was doing this, he didn’t feel any strain whatsoever, despite the fact that entire buildings were apparently being stored inside of himself.
And that was how he passed the second day.
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He had absorbed quite a large chunk of the city before he grew tired of it. He had nothing better to do though, so he kept at it. Night had fallen once again, and he couldn’t see clearly enough to read.
It was around midnight when the world stuttered again. This time, however, there was a giant screeching sound that accompanied it. He crouched down and clutched at his ears. Vaguely, he noticed that the buildings he had just stored were back, though they were flickering quite violently.
Suddenly, everything got quiet. He glanced up and saw someone staring at him. He looked to be in his early twenties, and he was wearing clothing that was a better fit for warmer climates.
“Dude. I don’t know what you did, but you broke something. You haven’t even been dead all that long, maybe a few minutes, but now we’ve had to quarantine an entire section of the timeline.” He sounded exasperated.
James’ brain took a few moments for what he had said to register. And when it finally did, it didn’t understand much of anything. “There are many things weird with what you just said. Like, how do you quarantine a section of the timeline? And what do you mean minutes? It’s been almost two days.”
The guy stared at him. “Let’s put the matter of quarantining to the side for the moment. Did you just say days?”
“Yeah? Was I not supposed to?”
The guy stared at him for a moment, expression unreadable, before letting out a sigh. “Goddammit. I could have stopped this. I’m gonna be in huge trouble. Yeah, okay, come with me. This is too far outta my wheelhouse.”
With a wave of his hand, a portal opened up behind him and he stepped through. James followed, not knowing what else to do. They appeared in what looked to be a mansion, though it looked like there had been a party recently.
The guy he was following walked right up to another person, and started talking in a foreign language. James took that moment to look around more. There were a few people passed out, a few making out, and a few who were slowly cleaning everything up.
He was pulled back to himself when the second person walked up to him and held out a hand. “Howdy. Name’s Alrek. Now, Grim here tells me you were left alone for a few days? Mind telling me the story?”
James grabbed his hand and shook. “James. And, sure, I don’t see why not.” He then proceeded to tell everything that had happened since he died, starting with his death. When he finished, the guy who brought him here, Grim, had a pained expression on his face, while Alrek was trying not to laugh.
“Alright. That is just horrible luck you got there. So, I’m going to tell you what happened. You died, and by a series of coincidences and a little bit of luck, you went into what we call the Irro days. February 29th and 30th are Irro days. The Irro days are days that we’ve removed from the timeline, so as to give ourselves a break from our godly duties. After all, while we could work nonstop, for all of eternity, that’s not good for our mental health.
“Now, you altered the space inside the Irro days, but not the space outside of them. This led to reality trying to merge the two together when it’s not supposed to. We now have to amputate those Irro days, and recreate them, otherwise everything will break.
“The downside to this is that your body is now trapped in the Irro days. What that means is that we can’t repurpose it like we do with everyone else's. And without the energy we get from that, we can’t exactly give you a new body in your next life. You’re going to be stuck as a spiritual life form for quite a while, possibly forever. Questions?”
James took a moment to digest everything that had been thrown at him. There was one sticking point for him. “So, everything that I did is going to be undone?”
Alrek nodded. “After all, if it wasn’t, some buildings would just vanish.”
“Is there any way for you to make an exception for an item? It’s my niece’s birthday, and I dropped a birthday card off for her.” That was really all that James was worried about.
Alrek grinned. “As long as it’s just a birthday card, then sure, I don’t see a problem.” James felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulder. Family was really all he cared about.
“Now, as with all souls, you’re gonna head off to your next life. Before you say anything, you won’t really have a ‘body,’ per sé. That’s the downside of not being able to use your corpse. You might get lucky, and still be able to interact with the world, or you might get stuck as a ghost, and be cursed to forever wander the world. All luck of the draw, really.
“And with that, I’m gonna send you off. I need to have some words with Grim here. Prepare for a lot of stinging.”
“Wait, what?” Those were the last words James uttered before he was surrounded with a blinding light. And a lot of pain.