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If you want to know what death feels like, you have to take it from the dead.

You fall. There’s no end in sight for the longest time, and the cliche of your life flashing before your eyes happens there. It happens in between screams as you fear death again, after whatever agony you suffered.

My death was peaceful, even if I was being insulted by a family member right before it. I was not as keen on my life and very little made it fulfilling. I left behind my son and my fiancé, who had to watch, but thought mostly about the former. My dearest Marco, the son I wondered if I’d ever have. He had a girlfriend that I didn’t think he was in love with, and the rest of the family was wary of him for even existing.

Marco and I were both born into a house of daemons that we weren’t allowed to leave. I at least never questioned the rule. As much as I loved my mum, Eva, I blame her for it. She was naive and having second guesses about marrying my dad. So she took a daemon’s word on having a haven for her and a child while under their wing.

Mum and dad made up, but that mistake would last for generations.

They could hate me all they wanted to, even if that still hurt. I think it’s what killed me like a horn rammed through my chest. For Vega Ironstar, the old grey daemon acting like my parent and captor all at once, it was a sudden change. Once my own mother died, any of Vega’s love for me died too. And I wondered if she faked it all along.

But it was probably about Vega’s son, Screwtape. The grey man who should have been my fiancé even more, who should have fathered my son, who promised so much and gave so little back.

He kissed me before and I felt his fangs on my tongue. He even said he loved me, he implied he was trapped in a loveless marriage, but nothing changed either. He still stayed with his wife and never talked about it again.

We may have partied too hard the night before.

At best, he set me up with my actual fiancé, Heath. Heath reached into lonely places within me. But no matter how much he gave, I couldn’t repay the favor because I was obsessed with another man for the rest of my life.

But before I could make peace with any of it, I hit water and plunged to unknown depths. That was where everything changed. Water didn’t fill my lungs, though it wouldn’t have made a difference. I didn’t expect rescue but a pair of hands hoisted me up anyways.

I grabbed them. They were lotion-soft and smelled like wild cherries.

I expected Charon himself, because I read Greek mythology like any good high school student (still failed it though). But I hit my head on the motor of a speed boat on my way up. I had so many questions for Charon.

Or who it really was.

Although she hid behind a hood and wore thigh high boots (she’d never!), I recognized her almost immediately. If Screwtape was my first love, then she was the first one to love me back before Heath was even even born. Or so I wondered was the case. It was something I was scared to bring up again to anyone.

And it all started in the same place. We all grew up in Twinbrook together, or just outside of town…

We had prom in the school’s gym. They didn’t even put away the basketball hoops so we had to make it special in our own way. I only wanted a dance with Screwtape. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He didn’t have a prom date. He didn’t even have a male friend to be his wingman. It was just the two of us, the world’s most unpopular teenagers.

Screwtape never got my hints.

And I gave no hints to Cara Lyffe, which is because I didn’t know her well. She was a year older than me, ruddy-skinned, and her dad was a social worker. That was used to threaten some of us into behaving, but not by Cara.

She wrapped her arms around me for a dance, no questions asked. Even if she asked, I knew I wouldn’t say no either. I almost never felt the warmth of someone else. My mum often stayed in her own world.

I would have guessed that Cara was the opposite of whatever species Vega was. The way she stared into my soul was full of tenderness. It reached out to me like my father’s embrace. Did I mention that he passed away right before prom? She couldn’t have known.

Maybe Cara knew all along.

For years I treated Screwtape as the one who got away. Because we lived together anyways, it was always so close to me. He and his wife had the room right next to mine, so I saw and heard everything that I was missing.

Cara disappeared more subtly. Although high school was nice, we graduated and went to different universities. I didn’t answer the RSVP to her wedding, feeling fire in my cheeks when I thought about it and not knowing why. Our kids were too far apart for playdates. Finally, around the time her daughter grew up, no one picked up the phone again.

I thought she hated me, but becoming a servant to the dead was a much better excuse. But did that make her a daemon as well? How complicated was that world beyond Earth? I shuddered at the thought.

“Hey, I tried to leave a voicemail,” said Cara.

“I…uh…I changed my number and all’s forgiven?” I said. “I wish I knew more about this.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Cara helped me on board, not caring about the water dripping from me. She was still as beautiful as I remembered her, while I aged as much as anyone. And she almost made me forget about how I should have loathed her for being part of the daemonic world.

There was so much I could ask her. What was she hiding from me about Vega? Did she even know about her? And why were they immortal anyways? What was the point? Clearly they dabbled in death, I had nowhere else I could have gone to but the land of the dead itself.

“So…you have to explain the speed boat.”

“Our boss sometimes gives us an upgrade,” said Cara. “But she’s as stubborn as she is kind, at least you only have to deal with us.”

“And is this just part of Vega’s sick playground?” I asked her.

“Kill me if it is. I know Barry makes fun of her kind all the time, and you have an appointment with him, talk about your sins or just the rest of your life I guess.” She quickly looked around the islands near us. I at least figured that my sins were mundane, outside of trying to break up Screwtape’s marriage. “Yeah, it’s gonna be a bit of a ride there.”

I actually recognized her dad behind us, wearing the same hood and thigh high boots getup and reclining near where Cara docked her boat. His old job was taking away neglected children after all, a life far more traumatic than this.

She put her key in the ignition, and I clutched her vinyl seating.

“Wahoo! Call me uber-Charon, ladies!”

Looking to my side, I at least got my answer as to where pets went after death. One of the servants of death hugged a furry airedale mix.

“We don’t get every human down here but we try to get every dog,” said Cara. “Oh, and I dunno if you ever met my mum, but that’s her. We’re all born to serve Death and believe me, it was a huge shock!”

“Wait, she owned the pizza shop,” I muttered to myself. It was a hipster-y place right outside of Twinbrook with brick ovens and pinball. And those pizzas fueled a lot of parties. “Uh…so it’s not all humans?”

“You need to meet a daemon before Death really cares about you, and there are so many more swamps like this. But I think experiencing nothing is a lot better…no offense to you. We don’t have a choice in this. You screwed up by meeting me.”

“Or being raised by Vega.”

She looked towards the steering wheel and became very quiet.

“Fine, I hope my parents and uncle Harwood were at least happier than me,” I said. It wasn’t like anything was ever fair to me before anyways, compared to anyone. The only humane thing to do was to get my mind to stop racing.

“Hey, I hope they were too.”

And our boat ride was over. Cara implied it would be longer, but this wasn’t my waterway.

I meekly approached Barry when we docked, hanging my head down. Of course I felt humbled, but I was also tired.

He dressed the same as the others: hood, modest top, hot pants, and those high boots again. And he must have had a life on Earth before this, much like Cara and her family, with a name like that. My only consolation prize was that he was far better looking than Cara’s dad…with no offense to her. She looked like her mother’s daughter instead.

“Sheila? We got ya early,” he said. He had a very clear voice, forged from a city I had never lived in. But he must have had a life on Earth like Cara did.

“Regrettably.”

Barry escorted me to one of the wicker seats, keeping the tip of his scythe only inches away from me. At least it still smelled like being stuck in the tall grass of Twinbrook’s swamps.

“This is unreal, you have to know that,” I said to him. “And can you put that thing away?” His scythe’s blade could have poked my eye out.

“Imagine how I felt when I was told what my new job would be,” he said. “The scythe is the best part of it, even for you guys.”

“I want to trust you on that.”

He then sat further away from me, so I felt a little safer. But if there was a barrage of questions for Cara, then Barry had the same ones. And different ones, for a man or daemon that I never met.

“What is even going on here?” I asked him.

“Just my family’s business,” he said. “It’s like a funeral home…”

“…run by daemons.”

“Now you get it.”

“You do know your kind is awful, right? That some of us are here because daemons ruined our lives? What can people like me do to trust you?”

He looked at his scythe, gripping it with both hands. “I know it’s hard to talk to a man with a weapon. I never really think about it, there are as many of us as there are of you. I could hate humans for a lot of things too. Ever hear about the potato famine?”

“Of course I did! It’s different when you’re reeling from what happened for your whole life.”

“Like famine victims?” Even beyond his hood, I could see Barry rolling his eyes at the thought.

“I…I know. But I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I lived a whole life for this? I died unloved and I didn’t have a way to escape it, and…”

I tried to escape Barry’s island. I got up and walked towards the edge of it, thinking that a super-powered daemon couldn’t catch a dying old woman. But I bumped into his blade. It could extend out further than any weapon I had seen before.

“Can this just be over?” I asked him. “Hit me with the scythe if you must.”

“As many doctors say, it won’t hurt one bit. And I’m sorry ‘bout all this.”

“Really?”

“Wish there was more I could do about it. At least there are cool parts to being a ghost.”

I looked up as Barry jumped and lunged towards me with his scythe. That was when I knew he loved his job. His shiteating grin told a longer story than any of his words to me could. And he knew his craft better than I did, because it didn’t hurt at all.

My skin and spirit separated, but it wasn’t painful.

The blow knocked me to the ground so I could split into two. I felt my bones from inside of me as I got up.

Barry ended up helping me to my feet.

“You’ve been a good human, even if you tried to break up a marriage,” he said, taking my hand. I felt my spirit fading away in his grasp. “We’ll see ya later.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Maybe I am a little, we can’t revisit every case.”

“I’m not even gonna ask…”

And I was gone. Plunged into darkness but aware of it. Time slipped away yet dragged on slowly, and worst of all, my parents never visited. They probably got a private beach for spirits or for my mum, a nice little library.

But I got nothing.

“Did you know that one?” Barry asked Cara. “I remember being that miserable too.”

“She was an Ironstar,” Cara muttered. “And it’s unfair to die as one. I didn’t even know that I’d miss her this much, and I didn’t even try to save her from that, and…can you not mistreat her?”

He looked up to the great blackness above him while Cara burst into tears.

Barry sighed. “If you insist, Cara.”

---

As time went on…

---

I was not the friendliest ghost they could have known. In my solitude, I yelled and cried and kicked and screamed. But for a while, I figured they weren’t listening.

But even the chambers of Death had thin walls like any crummy apartment.

I could hear them too, sometimes. Or I wanted Cara’s voice to ring in my head forever as the years stretched on, and I wondered if I had grandchildren and what they would learn about me.

Did it trouble her? Did it trouble Barry? In a strange way, I wasn’t surprised when his red hand appeared to dig me up from the deep. He gripped me like a vice, and I would follow him anywhere, even through a well.

And that was how I returned.

For the last twenty-something years I had been a silver ghost, dressed in the same cocktail dress I died in. I was surprised when it was real though, back in a familiar swamp with Barry holding my hands.

“Some of us have to sleep,” he said.

“If this is for punishing me, then–”

“It’s for punishing Vega. Or to see your new grandson, or something we’ll revisit. You have to get there fast.”

“There? Fast? Grandson? Punishment? You’re kidding me, Barry.”

Cara grabbed my arm and I instantly relaxed. Could I even relax as a ghost? Whatever energy held me together was much more loose.

“All I can say is that I said we should resurrect you. Everyone deserves a nice life,” she said. “Or, well, I couldn’t stop thinking about you and it came to a head. And then my daughter told me that Marco and Alhena finally got together.”

“Wait, you gotta be kidding me too!”

“We’ll explain the rest later, that’s not really what’s important.” said Barry, as we walked towards a door that would take me to my remains. I had a good idea of where they were but not any of the fine details. It’s not like I was allowed to ever visit my mum’s urn and tell her all my regrets. Or see her ghost. Before I died, I was 50/50 on whether they existed or not. Or if Barry ever let her out.

For a moment, I didn’t even know if I wanted to live again, even though I was a miserable ghost. But I had a grandson! I was gone for a while, since I only remembered Alhena as a little kid. A bratty little girl like her mum was, but Marco needed someone forceful in his life. Or not. I missed out on a lot of his life too.

At least my grandson had no choice but to be adorable between the two of them. I couldn’t wait to see him.

“I can’t thank you enough.” I leaped up into Cara’s embrace, which was easy because I was weightless.

“No problem, and remember one thing,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Vega can’t hurt you anymore. But she’ll probably want to.”

“That doesn’t sound new…so what are you doing now?”

“I have to find my daughter and have a long talk with her,” said Cara. “You know, about joining us underground or raising a teenager, just the usual stuff.”

“Well…I shouldn’t stop you. I know I’ll be busy.”

I still don’t know how she left without anyone noticing. Her daughter had to have still lived in Twinbrook or close by. And she had a grandson too? I almost wished we could have had a normal life together.

I had my doubts about their food raising the dead, but if nothing else, I’d finally know what it tasted like. Screwtape compared it to “the most pungent of durians, the most sweaty of Samhain’s gym socks and other equipment, and the best part is that I and my marital partner can both cook it!”

Well, if this wasn’t what Clarissa had in mind either, then it felt and tasted even better. I thought it was more like blue cheese, my favorite salad topping and wing dip of course.

The real question was who left it out? I assume they’d get blasted by Vega for it even without my presence.

And it worked. I floated like a spectre but felt my skin coming back to me in patches. It was warm, it was exciting, it was the kind of disobedience I craved.

“I struck magic! I can’t wait to see the look on Vega’s face when I–”

“Oh Sheila Jane Drudge, if you thought you would come back to life for a friend, you have come back for an enemy instead!”

Unfortunately, nothing was going to change Screwtape. It was a lesson learned far too late.