Are We Dead?

Are We Dead?
Oakley

I can’t remember what I’m doing in our kitchen for a moment. Sunlight drifts through floral print curtains that are oddly unfamiliar. My worktable in the center of the kitchen is covered in scattered flour and the beginnings of… oh, right. Biscuits. To go along with the eggs and bacon sizzling in the pan stationed over the cooking fire. 

I look down at my hands. A fresh jar of honey is clutched tight, still warm from the sun. Ian walks by outside the window with a shovel resting over his shoulder and disappears from sight, and I expect everything to rush back to me, reminding me of what exactly I’ve been doing all morning, but it doesn’t. 

My mind feels hazy. 

I snap out of it when the bacon begins to burn. 

“That smells great,” Ian whispers against the top of my head, the back door snapping closed behind him, my only clue that he’s nearby. I feel out of body while fixing two plates that seem oddly blurry, and I honestly can’t smell a thing. “How’s the oven working? I added more bricks, and Wren helped me insulate it last night.”

What is he talking about? I don’t remember any of this. He takes his plate and walks to the window, where sunlight blurs the view. He takes a few bites while I just linger in space time, trying to force my brain to catch up with my surroundings. 

An exterior door opens and bounces off the wall. Sunlight blurs, casting a bright golden ray directly in my line of sight. A small shadow races inside. Long hair plaited into two braids bounce off the shoulders of a young girl with startling, stormy blue eyes and hair a soft shade of brown, just like mine. 

“Rosey, you need to eat something before you go back outside,” Ian says, catching her around the waist and hauling her over his shoulder while still holding his plate in his free hand. Her squeal of delight breaches a so far unused part of my brain, igniting more questions than answers. 

“I already ate at the den!” Rosey whines, beating her little fists against Ian’s back. “Put me down!”

“Your mother and I spent ages building that brick oven so we could make you the cookies you constantly beg for,” he teases. “And this is how you repay us? By sneaking breakfast from the den?”

“Thomas invited me!”

Ian sets her down at the kitchen table. “I don’t care what your cousin Thomas says. You can’t sneak off like this, Rose.”

“I wasn’t sneaking!”

The argument continues while I stare at the little girl who looks so much like me that it’s like looking into a mirror and seeing a blue-eyed, fiery version of my eight-year-old self. On the wall behind her, pictures hang in frames. Ian and I are surrounded by our families, but their faces are… uncanny, wrong in strange ways. Me holding a baby in my arms, but the baby’s face is blurred by specks of light–stardust. A picture of a house I don’t recognize. Clothing I don’t recognize. A letter in handwriting that isn’t ours framed but yellowing with age. Rosey’s drawings, more memories that don’t register.

Rosey turns to look at me. “Auntie Juliette said I could come over whenever I wanted to. Mom was there!”

Ian looks at me, arching a brow. 

“I don’t remember?” My voice sounds different. I clutch my throat. “Auntie Juliette?” Rosey called me Mom. I should remember, shouldn’t I?

“The den is getting ready to move to their winter home, Rosey. You’ll be in the way. You need to stay home.” Ian makes the mistake of turning his back on the child, and she leaps off her stool and runs back into the light, her body nothing more than a grainy shadow that the sunlight breaks apart and consumes until there’s nothing left. 

I take a step toward the door. The light touches my toes. It’s warm. 

“Oakley, wait.”

I turn toward Ian, and the kitchen around us blurs to nothing but cold mist. I slowly look from his face to the light again, and… I realize where I am, or what, at least, this is. 

This isn’t our home. I haven’t somehow forgotten an eight or nine year period of our life, the life we had no chance of living. 

“Her death breaks your curse,” Ian says, but his voice is very far away. “Your death sets her free.”

“What?” I whisper, looking back at him. He’s dressed differently now, in a white, blood-stained shirt and dark pants, not the familiar flannel and faded jeans he’d been wearing in our dreamscape of a morning spent together. “What happened to you? Where are you hurt?”

“It’s not my blood,” he breathes. 

I look down at my nightgown, which isn’t a soft cream linen anymore. It’s dark and heavy with blood. All of my blood, it seems. I stick my fingers through a slit in the fabric right above my heart. 

The light begins to creep closer to us. The rest of the space is chilled, and instead of kitchen sounds and a warm, crackling fire, I hear wind howling through mountains, which is a familiar noise. 

“What happened?” I ask, my voice breaking. 

“The full moon,” he replies. His face begins to blur. “I couldn’t do it, Oakley. I made you promise that if anything happened to me that you’d live on and be happy, that you’d live a full life. I took that from you from the beginning. There was never a chance, and I didn’t know it until it was too late. I got better. You didn’t.”

“What did you do, Ian?” A startling realization cuts me to the core. “Where are we?”

“I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to go on without you. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“I died?”

He’s barely more than a shadow now. I look down at my hands. I’m fading. 

“I’m not ready. I’m not ready to go.” I look up at Ian, but everything is going dark. “Wait! I’m not ready! Neither of us asked for this! This isn’t our fault!”

Wait. Wait. Wait. 

My mind reels over every single possibility I have left. Can anyone hear me? Can I scream to the heavens? Is it worth it to beg?

Was this vision of a future we could have had some kind of test, or just one last, fleeting gift from the Goddess? If so, what a tease. What a cruel way to go.

My arm suddenly burns furiously. I look down at the scars depicting the entire cycle of the moon trailing from my wrist to my shoulder. The full moon to full moon engraved in silver now shines a bright, endless gold, like the stars are within my skin. The light erupts, blinding me. 

A sharp pain radiates through my body. I close my eyes as the darkness sweeps through me, churning like roiling waves. For a moment, I can’t breathe. My mind feels as numb as my body, and I’m sure this is it. 

Death. It’s quieter and emptier than I thought it would be. It’s much colder, too. 

I take a breath on instinct, and my lungs fill with cold, wet air. I suddenly feel my entire body at once, and little pinches of heat radiate from the top of my head down to my toes, which doesn’t seem like something that can happen to a dead person.

My fingers are woven between something warm, something firm and familiar. 

My neck aches, but I slowly turn to look at the body lying beside mine. A rocky, uneven landscape spreads out all around us, jutting rocks and moss-covered stone highlighted by fading moonlight. 

“Ian?” I whisper, but my throat hurts, like it’s burned raw. 

Ian slowly opens his eyes and stares up at the fading starlight and mountain peaks. 

“Ian?” I repeat, more forcefully. This is a dream, I’m sure. None of this is real. We’re dead. This is some other trick of my mind. But, at least for this moment, I can see him clearly. I can touch him and feel his heat. 

“Oakley?”

“Where are we?” I ask, but the words blur in a gust of wind that knocks us both around. 

The wind howls viciously, drowning out any other noise, and we instinctively curl into each other. Ian clutches my upper arm and tugs me close, folding his body over mine as the wind whirls, carrying small rocks and flakes of ice that bite into my skin. He moves his fingers upward to cup the back of my neck, but then he goes rigid, and his touch turns hard and damning. His entire body trembles with disbelief. 

“I’m fine,” I rush out. “Are we dead?”

“I thought….” 

He presses a kiss to my forehead, then frantically begins to investigate my welfare. He prods my skull, then down, making sure every single bone is intact. 

“Stop. I’m fine!” I clutch his face between my hands. “What happened?”

“Fraser stabbed you,” he says, but his voice is absolutely wretched with grief. “I let him do it. You were in so much pain, and I couldn’t stop it.”

I don’t remember that. I don’t remember anything after Naomi  showed back up in my life, bringing Skye. Everything else is a blur of pain and fever. 

“Oakley,” he says slowly while gently tucking my wet, matted hair behind my nearly frozen ears. “I thought I killed us both. That was the plan.”

“You what?”

“I carried you over the edge of the balcony. I let us fall.”

The clouds part high above us. The full moon is like a beacon, like the single light in a brutal storm, yet Ian remains by my side, warm and himself, no beastly wings to speak of. 

“I couldn’t bring myself to live without you,” he admits, “so I jumped.”

I’m not sure what to say. I’m still not sure any of this is real. If we’re dead, this might be hell. It’s insanely cold. My body begins to tingle with a needlelike sensation, followed by a numbness that feels shockingly warm. Is hypothermia a thing in hell? 

“Did you see her?” I ask as the cold seeps in, the words trembling as my teeth begin to chatter. A great, sweeping kind of fatigue washes over me. Even Ian is slowly beginning to crush me, like he’s under the same kind of spell. 

“Who?”

“The little girl.”

The clouds cover the moon again, and the world goes dark. 

Ian rests his chin against the top of my head. Neither of us speak for a long time. 

I might be falling asleep. I might be drifting toward whatever true end awaits us. I think I’ve stopped caring. This is what I needed the most: this embrace. Him. His arms around me. Ever since we met, I’ve noticed that being with him is like shutting off the rest of the world. 

I’ve always liked it quiet. 

A soft, guttural squeak sounds nearby. A high pitched chirp follows. Scurrying sounds out directly above us, where jutting rocks are smeared with blood, like we bounced our way all the way down. Goddess, we should be pulp, shouldn’t we? 

I suppose the Goddess works in mysterious ways. That bitch. 

A fox pops into view on a rock directly above my head.