The first thing I thought after dying was that Dad was going to be furious.
The second thing I thought was that he’d been right.
That was the annoying part. Not the dying. Obviously the dying was worse in a permanent, headline-sized way, but the first clear thought I had was not theological or poetic or even particularly mature. It was not So there is an afterlife or I wish I had told everyone I loved them or anything a person would want printed on a candle at a memorial service.
It was Dad’s voice in my head, saying the same thing he had said since before I was old enough to sit in the front seat.
“If something runs out in front of you, don’t jerk the wheel. Hit the brakes, keep the car straight, and let insurance handle the rest.”
He had said it about deer. Dogs. Squirrels. Possums. Raccoons, which he claimed were just possums with better branding. Once, after a turkey walked across Poplar Tent Road like it owned property, he gave the entire speech again with enough seriousness that I wondered if he had been personally wronged by a bird.
“You can fix a bumper,” he said. “You can fix a hood. You can fix a radiator.”
Then he’d look over at me, because Dad didn’t believe in ending a lesson before you were emotionally cornered.
“You can’t fix a tree at fifty miles an hour.”
I knew that. I agreed with that. I believed it in the same way I believed seat belts worked and gas station sushi was a trap God allowed to test free will.
Knowing a thing, though, is not the same as doing it when half a second arrives with teeth.
I was sixteen years old. I had been licensed for less than a month. I was not texting. I was not racing. I was not trying to prove something to a boy with a truck and an exhaust system loud enough to violate several constitutional amendments. I was driving home on wet roads in a car that could legally be described as transportation if the person describing it was feeling generous.
The car had no smart screen, no voice control, no wireless anything. It had a radio, a CD player that worked when it felt emotionally supported, and an auxiliary cable that had to be twisted at a very specific angle like I was trying to extract a confession. Dad said it gave the car character. I said mold also gave things character, but we didn’t build families around it.
Still, it was mine. Or close enough to mine. Dad called it a “starter car,” which was one of those adult phrases that meant this thing is old enough to vote but please pretend we’re excited. I loved it anyway, mostly because it meant I could leave places without asking another human being for permission. I had been listening to Radiohead because I was in one of those moods where sadness needed a British accent. Then I got tired of feeling like the inside of a rain cloud and wanted Wu-Tang. Then, because my brain is a raccoon in a record store, I remembered some indie artist with eighty-seven monthly listeners and a song that sounded like it had been recorded in a kitchen during a power outage.
That was what got me.
Not the song. The reaching.
My phone was in the cup holder, connected to the auxiliary cable, face-up but dark. I knew I shouldn’t pick it up. Dad had drilled that into me too. Eyes on the road. Two hands when possible. Don’t let the phone become the thing that tells people what killed you.
But there was a straight stretch ahead, and the rain had slowed to that soft, lazy mist that made everything look calmer than it was. I glanced down, thumbed the screen awake, and the dog came out of nowhere.
It was not cinematic. It did not leap into the road in slow motion while violins climbed the walls. It was just suddenly there, tan and wet and terrified, all elbows and ribs and bad timing.
My mind knew what to do.
My hands did something else.
I jerked the wheel.
The tires lost the road.
For a second, the car went quiet in a way cars should never go quiet. The music disappeared. The engine disappeared. The rain disappeared. Everything narrowed into the terrible smoothness of momentum continuing after control had already left.
There was a ditch. A mailbox. Trees.
I remember thinking, very clearly, Dad is going to kill me.
Then the tree did it first.
I don’t remember pain.
People always want to know about pain, I think. Maybe because pain seems like proof that something happened. Maybe because if death hurts badly enough, it feels fair, like the universe charged an entry fee. But I don’t remember pain. I remember pressure. I remember sound leaving the world. I remember my body becoming a fact I was no longer in charge of.
Then I remember standing.
Not waking up.
Standing.
That was one of the reasons I didn’t understand what had happened at first. In movies, people wake up after accidents. They cough. They blink under fluorescent hospital lights. Someone says, “Can you hear me?” in a voice that makes it clear the answer had better be yes. There are tubes, machines, worried faces, maybe a doctor who looks too young to legally prescribe anything stronger than cough drops.
I did not wake up.
I stood.
My feet were on something that was not a floor, under a sky that was not a sky, in air that did not behave enough like air to deserve the name.
For a second, I thought I had been thrown from the car and was in shock. That seemed reasonable, because the human brain likes reasonable explanations the way small children like stickers. It will slap them on anything.
Then the world folded.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way adults say things like my whole world folded when what they mean is their vacation got canceled or their fantasy team lost. The actual space in front of me folded inward, turned over on itself, and unfolded again into a shape that had too many angles for my eyes to count.
I blinked.
The shape blinked back.
That was when the first little thing appeared.
I call it little because it was smaller than me at first, maybe the size of a toddler, although toddler is the wrong word for something made of light, glass, gears, laughter, and what looked like punctuation marks trying to become insects. It bounced out from the folded shape and hung in front of me, vibrating with excitement. Its face, if that cluster of shifting symbols was a face, rearranged itself three times before landing on something like delight.
It held up an object.
The object was impossible.
I don’t mean complicated. I mean impossible in the way a square circle is impossible, except there it was, being presented to me by a glowing geometry goblin like a handmade birthday card.
I stared at it.
The little thing stared at me.
Then it shook the object, apparently disappointed that I had not reacted properly.
“Okay,” I said.
My voice sounded wrong. Not distorted. Just unanchored, like it had forgotten it was supposed to come from a throat.
The little thing brightened.
I took a step back.
The world took a step with me.
That is the closest I can get to explaining it. Distance did not work correctly. When I moved away from the creature, it did not become farther away. Instead, the space between us rearranged itself, offering several different versions of distance and letting none of them win.
More of them arrived.
They came from everywhere. From the folded shapes. From the bright seams in the air. From little doorways I had not seen and did not understand. Some were small. Some were long and thin. Some looked like stacked crystal toys designed by someone who had heard about children but never met one. They moved too fast, talking over one another in clicks, whistles, tones, and flashes of colored language that appeared in the air and collapsed before I could read it.
One of them zipped behind me and tugged gently on my hair.
I spun around.
“Don’t.”
It froze, delighted.
Another one clapped without hands.
I backed away again, and again the world refused to obey the basic agreement between feet and ground.
“Where am I?”
The creatures erupted.
Not with an answer. With joy. Like I had done something wonderful by asking the most obvious question available.
Several objects were shoved toward me at once. A cube that contained a hallway. A ribbon that tied itself into a knot and became a bird made of numbers. A spinning wheel of tiny rooms, each room containing another me asking another question. One of the creatures opened its mouth, and instead of sound, a staircase came out.
I am not proud of what I did next.
I screamed.
Not a pretty horror-movie scream. A full, ugly, chest-ripping scream that would have embarrassed me if I had been capable of embarrassment at the time. The creatures scattered, then returned immediately, thrilled. Apparently screaming was also interesting.
“No,” I said, putting both hands out. “No, no, no. Stop. Everybody stop.”
They did not stop.
One zipped close enough that its face almost touched mine. Its eyes, or symbols, or whatever they were, flashed through several arrangements. For one instant, I thought I saw a smile.
“Hospital,” I said. “I need a hospital.”
The creature tilted sideways.
“I was in a car accident.”
More tilting. Several of them copied the motion, as if I had introduced a dance.
“I need my dad.”
That changed something.
Not much. Not enough for me to understand. But the motion around me shifted. Some of the creatures slowed. A few looked at one another. One that had been balancing a pyramid on the tip of a spiral lowered it carefully, like a child setting down a glass after hearing adults fight in another room.