Between Two Worlds

The rain was soft and the road was familiar and Serena was singing. Not well. Never well when she was alone, which was exactly the point. A song from years ago, something she hadn't thought about in a long time, and she had the volume low and the wipers going and her hands easy on the wheel and she was thinking about nothing in particular, the way you do when a road knows you better than you know it. Her phone lit up on the passenger seat. She looked at it. One second. Maybe less. When she looked back up the car ahead had stopped. She hit the brake and felt it go to the floor. Straight to the floor, nothing there, no resistance, just her foot pressing into air and the car not slowing and the barrier rushing up and she turned the wheel hard with both hands and the sound that came out of her had no word attached to it, just sound, just the body doing what it does at the end of understanding. Then the barrier. Then nothing. It all went quite.Then all of a sudden,she was there standing on the road. She didn't understand it at first. She was just standing there in the rain and the road was wet and dark beneath her feet and the smell of something burnt hung in the air. She looked around slowly the way you do when you wake somewhere unfamiliar, trying to locate yourself, trying to find the thing that explains the thing. The car was folded into the barrier ahead of her. Steam coming off the hood. One headlight still burning, pointing at the ground like it had given up. She took a step toward it and then stopped. Her foot had made no sound on the road. No footstep. No splash in the puddle she had stepped through. She looked down. The wet road showed through her feet. She stared at that for a long time. Then she walked to the car because something in her could not not walk to the car and when she got close enough to see through the shattered window she saw herself. Her own body. Lying across the seat with her head against the window and her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open and her hair stuck to her face in the rain coming in through the broken glass. Her left hand had fallen from the wheel and hung open at her side like she had simply let something go. Serena stood on the road and looked at her own face and something rose up inside her that started as confusion and became something much larger, much louder, and she opened her mouth and screamed. She screamed with everything she had. She screamed at the road and the rain and the burning headlight and the broken car and her own body lying there like it had nothing to do with her anymore. She screamed so hard the inside of her chest felt like it was coming apart. The rain fell through her. The road gave nothing back. No echo. No ripple. Not even the birds in the trees along the roadside stirred. The world continued completely, utterly indifferent to the sound pouring out of her, because the sound was pouring out of nothing, into nothing, and the night didn't even notice. She stopped screaming because there was no point to it. She stood there breathing, or doing whatever it was she was doing that felt like breathing, and she looked at her own still face through the broken glass and she thought I am not dead. She could see her chest moving. Barely, but moving. She was not dead. She just wasn't in there anymore. "It's a lot to take in." Serena spun around. A woman stood in the road behind her. Calm. Unhurried. Hands loose at her sides, rain falling through her exactly the way it fell through Serena, like they were both made of the same nothing. She looked to be somewhere in her fifties, or she looked like she had decided to stop counting at some point and simply stayed. There was something in her eyes that was very old and not unkind. "Who are you?" Serena said. "My name is Riley." "Where did you come from?" "The same place you're going." Riley looked at the car, at the body inside it, with the quiet expression of someone who has seen this before. Many times. "Are you ready?" Serena stared at her. "Ready for what?" "To go." "Go where?" Riley looked back at her then. Steady. Patient. Like she was choosing her next words carefully not because she didn't know them but because she knew exactly how they would land. "The afterlife," she said. The word hit Serena like cold water. "No," she said immediately. "Serena." "No. No, I'm not — look at me, I'm still here, I'm standing right here, and my body is right there and it's still breathing, I can see it breathing, so whatever you think is happening is not —" Riley stepped toward her. "It is time to go, my dear." Serena took a step back. "Go where?" "You know where." Riley's voice was not cruel. That almost made it worse. It was the voice of someone who had done this many times and had long stopped arguing with the inevitable. She extended her hand, open, patient, final. "Your time is up. Come." "No." Serena looked at her own body in the car. At the chest still moving. "I am still breathing. You can see that. I am right there and I am still breathing so my time is not up, it is not up, you do not get to stand there and tell me my time is up when I am right there." "Serena." "Don't." She backed away further, her transparent feet making nothing of the wet road beneath her. "Don't say my name like that. Don't say it like it's already over." Riley lowered her hand slowly. Something moved across her face. Not softness exactly. But she looked at Serena the way you look at someone you were not expecting to surprise you. "You cannot stay here," she said. "This is not a place for the living or the dead. You are in between and in between is not somewhere you can live, child. It will pull you apart." "Then let it pull me apart." Serena pressed her hand to the car window, her palm against the cold glass beside her own still face. "I am not leaving. I am not going anywhere. That is my body and I am not leaving it." "You don't have a choice." "Please." The word came out of her broken and enormous. "Please. I have people. I have my mother, she is sitting at home right now waiting for me to walk through her door, she is going to wait all night and I will not do that to her, I will not let her wait like that, please." Riley was quiet. "Please," Serena said again. Just that word. Again and again, smaller each time, until it was barely sound at all. Headlights swept across the road, then more, then the fractured howl of a siren cutting through the rain. A car screeched to a stop and a man was already out of it running, then another vehicle, then the blue and red of a police cruiser strobing everything in violent color. Voices multiplied. Someone was on the phone shouting an address. Someone else had a torch and was sweeping the wreck with it. A paramedic reached the car first and wrenched the door and leaned in and pressed two fingers to Serena's neck and the silence that followed lasted exactly one second. Then he turned back to the road and shouted at the top of his voice into the rain and the noise and the chaos and the blue and red light. "She is alive! She is still alive, I need a stretcher over here now!" Serena stood in the middle of it all, invisible, transparent, the rain falling through her, and she looked at Riley. Riley looked back at her. Neither of them moved