"Third hypothesis. I am dead."
The words sat in the open air between me and the oak tree, and I did not immediately move past them the way I had been moving past everything else. I let them stay there.
The pickup truck had been moving fast. I had not moved. I had just watched it come, half a second of complete stillness where a functional human being would have yanked the wheel or hit the gas or done literally anything. And then it had hit the passenger door, and the world had gone sideways, and the last thing I had seen was a notification light blinking on my phone like a tiny heartbeat.
If I was dead, then nobody had called Mom yet. Or maybe they had, and she was sitting in the kitchen right now with a mug of tea going cold in her hands, and I was standing in a meadow arguing with tre
