Sort of Dead

4 - How I Was First Born Dead And How I First Died

Everyone thinks me strange. I don't blame them.

Why, what would you call a home-schooled, pale, freckled, pimpled boy with mismatched eyes - one brown and one green - a somewhat crooked nose and no (human) friends?

Thought so.

Thankfully, no one knows how I can talk to spirits and how I can't help myself when blood is my sight - again, I am not a vampire. I don't even have fangs (though I do have a placid case of buck-teeth), or super-speed, or -strength, or attractiveness, or religious fears. You can't kill me no matter what. I mean, you can, but then I will just come right back. More on that later.

I am simply grateful nobody knows - nor cares - about the details of my birth. Or they would just think me even more of a freak.

Still, I promised I'll tell you about it, and so I will.

Deep breath. Here we go.

So, I was born dead. Bizarre much? I know. But hear me out.

My parents had been trying for quite some time now, to produce an offspring. Their first two children had both been stillborn.

I was the third, and I was a stillborn too.

But my parents couldn't bear it anymore. They needed a kid, it was the only things they craved for. So my Dad came up with a solution. He drove Mom miles and miles away from our home, through places you've likely never heard of, places that cartographers didn't put on map, to this crazy old woman who lived in some forgotten crevice of this world.

Mom asked him how he knew of this witch (and this isn't a derogatory term, she prefers she be called that) - but Dad didn't answer. I myself have poked him numerous times, but he always flips the topic with expertise.

Now, they took the stillborn me to this witch. They never told me how she looked, though I have often had dreams about her. Nightmares, really, where I see this really old, extremely wrinkled, gruesome-looking woman with long, twig-like, pale hair and this hunched back and this three-eyed raven on her shoulder and this moldy staff in her moldier hands and rubies glowering on her fingers and whatnot. You get the idea.

The witch said there was indeed a way she could breath life into me, but it was an old way, a way developed first in the Dark Ages, whatever that meant. My parents were eager and desperate; they are generally spontaneous and naïve. The witch warned them that it was ancient magic which birthed cursed life, gave them time to think. They told her to carry on with the process almost immediately, without a second thought.

Have I mentioned my parents are really spontaneous and naïve?

So the witch called upon the archaic powers of the lost souls - at least that's what my parents tell me - and combined it with her own wicked enchantments. Lightening cracked. The earth quaked. Green light blinded my parents. And the witch did exactly what she said she would.

She breathed life into the stillborn me.

Like, she legit gave me a mouth-to-mouth.

Which is pretty disgusting, if you think about it. Still gives me the creeps, to think that dirty old hag's rotten, putrid lips touched my own silky ones.

I guess that's part of the reason why I look how I look.

But it did work, and I did begin to cry like babies do right after birth.
So to say, I was born twice.
Once from my mother's womb, dead; then from a witch's repelling breath, alive cursedly.

The witch supposedly informed my parents of how I was to be an undying, immortal, inhumane being. I'd never believe them in a billion years, if I didn't discover stuff for myself.

The first time I died, I was four. A truck hit me. I don't remember much, really, except that it hurt a lot. My parents thought me dead and chased after the truck, but the shameless driver dashed away, probably afraid of being arrested or something. Yeah, but I didn't die. I wish that driver gets this story told to him, because that would really screw with his moral plugs. You ran after seemingly killing a young boy. You lived with that on your conscience all these years. Well, guess what. You didn't need to. 'Cos that kid's still alive!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you mustn't run away from the mistakes you make. And the victims you hit with your vehicle.

Yes. I lived. My parents thought me dead, initially. Anyone would. I had no breath in my chest, no life in my limbs, no light in my eyes. Blood covered my body. All disfigured and whatnot. Mum cried her eyes out, as they took the "dead" me to the hospital. But by the time we got there, I was hale as a new-born baby again (only I was still four, same age as I'd died; I even had a scar and patches on my face from earlier, so apparently my power only vanishes the death wounds). Bones healed, heart pumping, breath even.

My parents were both overjoyed and freaked out by my return. I don't remember distinctly, but I think Mum and Dad inquired me like the FBI about this and that and that and this before realizing whatever the witch had told them about me being cursed and all was true.

They asked me what it felt like, the period I had been dead. I told them the truth: 'I don't have a clue.'

They didn't hold me being cursed against me. They're good parents, I'll give them that.

Of course, I asked them all the witch had told them about me, but they said they'd taken it all in a joke and didn't really remember. I told them to take me there again, to ask the witch about what all was freakish about my system, but they said she had forbid me to ever visit her.

Such is life.