The wet, leaf riddled ground does it—wakes me.

My eyes shoot open to find tall trees in every direction, leaves spreading a canopy of shelter overhead. I can hardly tell if it’s day or night from my spot on the soggy floor.

Pushing my body into a sitting position, I struggle to make sense of the eerie setting as I raise one hand to my forehead.

The last thing I remember is Nixon driving me to work.

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No one would see her, shadow that she was, slinking along the abandoned street. They’d never get her back to the palace to learn them lessons. She weren’t no lady, no matter what they said.

Time to bury the thing and be done with it. A little trouble at times weren’t no problem, but when that trouble took on life and opened its gaping jaws to swallow her down to hell, well, that was a tad more than Jessamine cared for.

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“Shanna? Do you ever sleep?”

She stopped in mid-strum, fingers halfway across the guitar strings, and turned with a faint smile. Her brother Neil was standing in the hallway, yawning like he’d much rather be in bed, his long copper hair sticking up in the back. He rubbed one eye and put on his glasses before settling on the worn leather couch by his sister.

“Not much. Do you?”

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The great war had just ended.  People were dancing in the streets, confetti and streamers were being thrown down into the streets, banners were hung to welcome home our soldiers, sailors, and pilots.  Everyone was celebrating, and even though I was ecstatic to have the war over, I couldn’t join in the festivities.  I could watch all those men returning and their loved ones hugging and kissing them in the streets.  I couldn’t stand the reminder that Mark was not coming home to me.

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The tinkling of the bell over the door had for years introduced everyone (important or not) and anything (newsworthy or not) to the West End Print and Copy Shop.  It was a sound that Maggie heard many times throughout her day, but not one that she expected to change her life—until the day the bell announced a seemingly ordinary event: Steve’s arrival.

Maggie had been at the shop for a couple hours already; set the OPEN sign in the window, started the coffee, checked her email, answered several phone calls.  Steve was, as usual, running errands and running late.  As he came through the door to the tinkling of the bell, he balanced his briefcase, the mail, a parcel, his coat, and his keys.

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The most devastating moment I can recall would have to be the moment I realized I was dead. My entire world was destroyed with one realization. I thought it was the end of me, the end of my Soul and the end of everything I had ever believed in. Had I realized it was only the beginning, that my Soul was merely an infant ready to emerge from the world’s careless womb and that my beliefs, which had once been reliant upon faith alone, were about to be strengthened, maybe I would not have been so melodramatic.

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