Talia
I don’t know how long I walk before I find her. Does time exist when all your ways of measuring it have gone? Heartbeat, tiredness, all of it seem to have faded into memory.
She’s the first person I’ve seen sign of, a middle-aged Black lady crouching to draw on the floor with a piece of chalk. The mist rolls over her work, and she frowns at it. Then glances up at me and stands with a bright smile, a denim maxi skirt swishing obnoxiously around her ankles. “Hello,” she says. “You’re new.”
“Am I?”
She smiles and holds out her hand. I shake it because why not? “I’m Madeline,” she says.
“Talia. What is this place?”
“We call it the grey place.”
“It’s death, isn’t it?”
She screws her face up. “Not exactly or not entirely. Most people move on at one time or another. Some stay longer than others. Those who aren’t ready to move on.”
“Move on? To what?”
She shrugs and laughs wryly. “As you can see, I’m not ready to know either.”
I bite my lip and look down. What can you do with this sort of information? It all seems so pointless, so empty and…well. Fucking unfair.
She pats my shoulder. “Maybe Kitty will come for you,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I’ve met you.”
“Kitty?” I frown at her. It’d be just my luck to be caught in limbo with a crazy cat lady.
“My daughter,” she says. “She’s a genius.”
So am I, I don’t say and feel bad about it anyway, doing my mother’s job for her and yelling at myself for being arrogant even in the privacy of my own head.
“Come, sit down,” Madeline offers. She makes a gesture with both hands, and red patterns appear briefly in the air before forming into a sofa. I gape, and Madeline laughs. “Magic,” she says, wiggling her fingers.
I shrug. Of course it’s magic. I’m dead and still conscious; why wouldn’t there be magic? Might as well sit on the comfy looking sofa with the cat-lady-slash-proud-mum.
“So,” she says, crossing her legs and clasping her hands in her lap. “How’d you die?”
I laugh so short and sharp, it may as well be a bark. “Hit by a car, I guess.”
She nods sagely. “Car accidents are a common one, especially for young people.”
I scramble for manners in this new world. “Uh, what about you?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. Something that hurt a lot at the time.” Her flippancy is more shocking than the words themselves.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was years ago,” she says. “And as I’m sure you’ve figured, none of it hurts anymore.”
“Yeah,” I say slowly.
“It’s one of the rules of the grey place, it seems,” she says, counting them off on her fingers. “Nothing hurts. You go back to your favourite time of life, the time you felt most comfortable. And you can only get out by moving forward or going with Kitty.”
This lady is definitely crazy. But then, I’m dead. Who am I to judge? I’m pretty sure she can’t kill me again, and if nothing hurts, then, well, hopefully she’s right about that. And maybe I have trust issues, but I’m not planning to take her at her word.
She turns like a voice has spoken in her ear; for all I know, that’s exactly what happened. “’Scuse me, will you?”
“Sure,” I say, waving awkwardly. She’s gone so fast I gasp.
Then the sofa disappears from under my arse, and I land on the floor with a thump. Turns out, she’s right. Nothing hurts here.