I'm about the last person you'd expect to end up in Gotham. One minute I'm chillin' at a roadhouse, minding my own business, then the universe says "YEET". Also, I was dead. And blond. I was kind of... perfect. I was like looking in a mirror. I have...
When I was eight, the toilet in the outhouse outside our bedroom started making a weird whiny sound at night.
It was the most lonesome sound in the world.
Like a sad, aching, cosmic wail. Not made by anything alive. It sounded like it was made by something older than alive and reminded of the old story Skeleton on the Dunny.
It made me think of stars and how big the universe was.
How the past haunts the present in more ways than we think. It certainly scares the living daylights out of me.
It made me think of how small I was.
In my mind, I called it a cold lonely sound.
"What happens when we die?" I asked my mum one night when she came to tuck us in.
She sat down on my bed. "You go to heaven, darling," she said and Daz scoffs. He's decided he doesn't believe in God. I wonder what happens to the people who don't. Do they go to Hell just because they don't believe in the same thing we do, even if they're good people.
"But what happens to us?"
Mum frowned. She didn't like my question.
"Well," she said. "We are very, very lucky God created us at all. Do you know how strange and beautiful it is to be living?"
I did. I felt that. I had always felt that.
"The olds against all the ancestors over all the years meeting up and having the children they did, and odds against the exact cells coming together to make you..."
"That sounds like Darwinism," I said. That part was awesome and scared me, too.
"Don't tell your Nonna," she said. "You're asking about dying. Not being born."
I waited. Both me and Daz have snugglies made of silky Scooby-Doo clothe, made from Mum's pyjama shorts. I was holding on to mine tight.
"I think we're a part of nature," my mum said gently. "We're born , and we live, and then we die. And our bodies return to the earth. Things grow from it again. So we're always part of the universe."
"Like the Lion King?" I asked.
"Like the Lion King." She kissed my forehead and moved across the room to tuck Daz in.
I held on tight to my piece of Scooby-Doo clothe, even though it was not alive, even though it had never been alive, and I did not sleep.
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