Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 2: LET ME LANGUISH AT THE AFTERLIFE DMV

I thought the bright light making my eyelids red was a sign of heaven for a peaceful second.

Please. As if I would be able to go there. It was more likely that I would end up down below or, as the church in town insisted, in the cold depths of space. Either of those could be Hell, after all. Mom always said that girls who refused to get married and have children were as bad as murderers. I was neglecting my divine duty, wasn't I? Now I would never fulfill it. She didn't know that I never intended to in the first place. No, no, Hell was the place for me. I had always been told so. I was sure the lights I was seeing through the skin and capillaries were those of burning rock and sulfur, of whips cracking against broken skin and flint. 

Imagine my surprise when I opened my eyes and found that I was in a DMV full of dead people.

Some of the people in this place were very obviously dead. I mean, one man had had half of a shattered glass bottle sticking out of his forehead; someone else had a horseshoe-print stomped deep into their face. There's no surviving either of those, not that I've heard of. There were murder victims, elderly ladies who looked like they died in their rockers, and every other kind of dead person. Everywhere I looked, there were the dead, walking, standing, and talking like normal people.

God, this was bullshit.

I was sitting on a beige metal chair in one of those regimented rows DMVs love so much. In one hand, I held two pamphlets I had never seen before; in the other, there was a number. 5036. They wouldn't be getting to me for a while. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! This was all so stupid!

I started leafing through the pamphlets: So You Died: What to Expect In The Afterlife and So You Were A Little Shit While You Were Alive: What to Expect As A Juvenile or Young Adult in the Justice, Punishment, Retribution, and Rehabilitation Systems of the Afterlife. The titles were long, but boy were they informative! I knew exactly what to expect when I picked up the second and leafed through the glossy paper.

Unfortunately, I wasn't absorbing any of the other information I was reading. That was par for the course. I couldn't concentrate on reading unless I was listening to something else, and I sucked at reading if I wasn't laying on my stomach or sitting in a specific position at a desk. I wasn't allowed to have electronics in any bedroom. That meant that I spent a lot of time listening to commercials, random talk shows and lectures, and old alternative music on a community radio station (or just straight-up static). Gum helped.

It wasn't like I had access to that here. As a result, it wasn't like I was going to be able to retain any of this. I folded the pamphlet back up, crossed my arms, and slouched in my chair. When I say this was all bullshit, I mean it.

At least, I thought it was. I was angrier at being dead than I was at this new part of the world I was stuck in.

What the fuck was this? I have the worst hour of my life (that's hyperbole), die in a surprisingly gruesome way, and don't get the chance for a redemption arc? Some world this is! I was supposed to die from heart disease like the rest of America. I was supposed to die after living a long life and marrying someone and getting fat and happy and pregnant. 

Did I really want any of that? I didn't know. I thought I did, at least. That was the life I was supposed to live. It was what I had planned on my entire childhood. I was on the cusp of making it a reality, or doing what I really wanted, or figuring it out, or something. I had my whole life ahead of me. I was supposed to have a good sixty years to figure myself out before I kicked the bucket. Yet, here I was, sitting in a plastic chair, dead as a doornail. 

I sat there for a while, stewing in misery. It was minutes-- or hours, or days, because I couldn't tell anymore-- before anyone bothered to talk to me.

It was the girl next to me who opened her mouth first. "Are you, like, new here?"