Preview: “The Joyride”

When she opens her eyes, she looks down at a body—her body—laying on a bed and hooked to a machine silently measuring a heartbeat. Her heartbeat. 

It worked. 

She has existed as long as existence. She has taken life, but she’s never lived it. She watches her toes wiggle under the blanket. She touches her face and notices her lips are softer than the rest of her skin. Her head is pounding and her eyes hurt when she looks at the daylight streaming through the blinds in the window. She presses her hands to her head, then feels the plastic label secured to her wrist. It says, Jane Doe. 

“Welcome back,” a nurse says as he bustles around the room. Jane watches as he wraps a cuff around her arm. She follows his instructions when he listens to her heart, when he tells her to breathe. 

“Do you know your name?” the nurse asks.

“Jane.” 

“Good,” he says. “What about the day?”

Jane reads the date scrawled on the whiteboard across from her bed—Tuesday, May 17—which she relays to the nurse. He nods with approval, then asks, “Do you remember how you got here?”

But Jane is no longer paying attention to the nurse. There is a shift in the atmosphere he cannot see. She watches through her room’s interior window as the change flows through the hall and enters another patient’s room. 

“You arrived late last night, dropped off by someone who said they found you in the street. It appears you may have been struck by a vehicle.” 

“Someone needs help,” Jane says.

“Honey, we all need help.”

“No, I mean—right now,” she points at the room across the hall. 

The nurse leaves her bedside to check on the patient. A blue light flashes above the door and a team rushes into the room as the patient’s ghost slips past them. He’s an older man wearing a robe over his hospital gown and thick socks. He looks back into his room, where doctors and nurses are trying to revive him. Jane watches the shock wash over his face as he understands what happened. She waves him into her room. 

He points to himself and she nods. He steps into her doorway and says, “You can see me?”

“Yes.”

“But I thought I died—I’m dead.”

“You did,” she tells him. “You are.”

“Wow,” he says. “So this is it.”

He wanders into Jane’s room. He looks out the window and tries to open the blinds, but his hand passes through the drawstring. She watches him and knows how he feels: he can see the light but can’t feel its warmth; he can see the world, but he cannot touch it. 

“Somehow it’s exactly what I imagined, but also nothing like I thought it would be.” He sits in the blue recliner, as though to settle in and gather his thoughts—a gesture, he now realizes, that’s unnecessary. He asks her, “What happened to you?”

“I was found in the street. I was hit by a car.”

He winces, then asks, “You don’t have any flowers? No friends or family?”

“No,” Jane says.

He studies her, trying to remember where he has seen her before.

“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” 

Jane doesn’t say anything. 

His eyes widen as he realizes who she is. “You came here for me?”

“Not specifically.”

“Are you normally human like that?”

“No,” she says. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Never?” He seems surprised. “You would think with all of history—extinctions, plagues—you would have been there.”

“I was there,” she says. “But not as a human.”

“So why now?”

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