Prompt: Someone who has been dead before comes to terms with their rebirth/new life.
Amy had done this before. She’d been through this – the trauma of leaving the womb, the shock provoking tears and screams that had people in white coats and blue gowns alike cooing in delight. She’d been here before, and she wasn’t altogether pleased to be back here now. They had told her at HQ that all of her cycles had been used up. She’d learned all of her lessons. Her soul had reached completion. She shouldn’t have been sent back to Earth again. Oh well. There wasn’t anything to be done for it. She was here. She might as well make the most of it.
This was the last coherent thought that Amy had for years. It was so difficult to hold on to one’s soul essence when one was in the body of a newborn infant. You had no way to communicate, and all you could really do was be uncomfortable, sleep or cry. There was very little variety. It would be a relief to be able to take care of herself again, but Amy wouldn’t know that until she was much older.
Her new parents, Siobhan and Howard, gave her some ridiculous name. Amy didn’t care for it. As luck would have it, or maybe it was the Fates intervening, as they seemed to do, they gave her the middle name Amy. “I don’t want to be called Jacqueline,” Amy said when her new body turned six. “I want to be called Amy.” A chagrined glance was shared between Siobhan and Howard, but they agreed. It had only taken them nearly a year to settle on Jacqueline. How were they to know that their new daughter would hate the name that they had lovingly chosen?
Amy’s awareness of her past life came on in flashes.
At first, it was just the general sense of déjà vu. Her old body had lived in the same town that her new one lived in. They had even gone to the same public school – Lord Beaverbrook Elementary. “There’s a stain on the floor behind that door, Mommy,” Amy said when her parents took her with them on parent-teacher conference night. She had pointed behind the staff room door. “A big brown one. It’s shaped like a puppy!”
Siobhan had just smiled at that. Clearly the child had seen it when a teacher had opened the door. She hadn’t been involved in making it or anything. That would be absurd.
The next flash happened when the family had decided to move house. Amy’s new parents were expecting another baby, and the little bungalow that they had lived in since Amy’s rebirth would be too small for them all to have their own rooms. That’s what they told her, anyway, when they pulled up to it in their wood-paneled station wagon. “When your new little baby brother or sister comes, don’t you want to be able to have your own room? Babies can cry all night! You don’t want to have to sleep with that, do you?” Howard had asked her as he unbuckled her car seat.
“Well, no,” Amy had grumbled. Her new father set her down on the pavement outside of the little stone farmhouse. “But does it have to be this house?”
“Let’s just go and take a look, okay, Amy?” her new mother said, taking her by the hand and leading her up the front steps. Howard looked like he wanted to take his wife’s other hand, but he kept his hands in his pockets. House hunting had not been going well, and Siobhan thought that he was too soft on their eldest child.
The realtor was inside the house already. She pasted on a smile as the little family opened the door. Amy didn’t trust her immediately. The realtor was hiding something, or maybe that was just the way that Amy felt. Amy let go of her new mother’s hand, wandering up the creaky wooden stairs to what she knew would be a playroom.
“Be careful, honey!” Amy’s new mother called up after her. “These old houses can have lots of surprises in them. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Yes, Mommy,” Amy called back automatically.
The play room had a sloped roof with a window seat set into it and buttery coloured hardwood floors. They were right under the gables of the house, and the room was stuffy with the mid-afternoon sunshine streaming in through the window. The wallpaper was bright and cheerful, with a pattern of toy boats. Styrofoam puzzle pieces lined the floor in garish multicoloured blocks. Someone had overturned a bucket of Legos on the mats.
Amy walked past all of this, sending a stray brick skittering across the hardwood. There was a door set discreetly into the back wall of the playroom. It wasn’t covered in wallpaper, but it was painted in a similar pale blue to the background. Most children wouldn’t have noticed. They would have sat right down on the foam mats and begun building a Lego city. Amy stretched up to turn the knob.
“Oh, and here’s your beautiful daughter,” came the sickly-sweet voice of the realtor. “She’s found this little bonus room, which could be converted into a nursery until baby is old enough to need a little more space. Then you could use it as either a playroom or an office. It gets plenty of light, as you can see, and it even has its own closet. Such a difficulty to find storage in these century homes, but you can’t find character anywhere else.”
“Where is she?” Amy said, turning away from the open closet door.
The realtor gave her a funny look, but turned on her heel and began clomping down the hall in her heels, Howard trailing after her.
“What do you mean, Amy?” her mother asked, anxious to get on with the rest of the showing.
“There was a girl here,” Amy said, pointing into the closet but keeping her eyes fixed on her new mother’s. “She was hiding in the closet, and her face went blue. My daddy found her and started screaming.”
Siobhan raised her eyebrows. “There’s no girl here,” she said slowly. “And your Daddy has never been here, so he couldn’t have found anyone in that closet.”
“No, not this daddy,” Amy said impatiently. “My first daddy. The one who used to milk cows and ride horses.”
“You only have one father, Amy,” Siobhan said. The hairs on her arms were standing up straight, despite the heat. “Now let’s finish looking around at this house so that we can go and get some ice cream, okay?”
“Okay!” Amy said happily. She ran out of the room, little pink sneakers thumping down the uneven hallway towards the master bedroom, where the realtor was explaining how the lack of an en suite and upstairs laundry room was really what they had asked for when they had given her their budget. Amy ran up to her new father, grabbing his wrist from where it was still shoved into the pocket of his khakis. He glanced down at her and smiled slightly.
“Howard, it’s time to leave,” Siobhan said from the doorway.
“But… Shea…?” Howard said slowly. Amy could hear the questions in his voice.
“Amy, why don’t you go and wait for us at the front door. We’ll meet you there in a second,” Siobhan said, stepping back a little to let her daughter pass through. “Don’t go out to the car yet. Just wait for me at the front door.”
Amy skipped down the hallway to the staircase, but she didn’t go down just yet. She wanted to hear what they were talking about. It sounded important.
“Is there a problem, Mrs. Jones?” the realtor asked.
“Yes, Sandra, I think so,” Siobhan hissed. “You failed to mention in your quote that someone had died in this house.”
“It’s over a hundred years old! Of course, someone has died in this house! I didn’t think it was relevant to list every single death that there’s been!” the realtor said peevishly.
“It’s relevant when my daughter goes up to the playroom and asks me about the girl that hung herself in the closet!” Siobhan yelled.
Amy heard a sharp intake of breath from both her new father and the realtor. “That – that – I mean, yes, that definitely happened, but it was around the time that the house was built. How could she possibly know that? There isn’t – how could – I mean…” The realtor’s voice trailed off.
Siobhan made a harrumphing noise then clicked her tongue in disgust. “Howard, we’re leaving,” she said flatly. Amy could hear her new parents’ heavy footsteps coming down the hallway, and she scrambled down the stairs to wait at the front door. Amy looked down at the scuffed toes of her sneakers. There was a big black mark on the left one. Her new mom would be mad about that if she saw. Amy tucked her left foot around her ankle as her new parents made their way down the stairs.
“Come, Amy,” her new mother said, grabbing her hand. She didn’t look down at Amy’s foot. Her new father followed after them silently, pausing only to open the door for his heavily pregnant wife. Amy settled herself onto her booster seat (she had the sneaking suspicion that she ought to have been taller, but didn’t have the words to articulate this thought at the time) and waited for Howard to buckle her in. He did, and they drove home in silence.
They didn’t end up getting ice cream, but Amy wasn’t going to bring that up right now. Her new parents were too grumpy right now. She didn’t want to get yelled at the way that her mother had yelled at the lady in the red pantsuit that had shown them her old house.
Maybe if they had stopped for ice cream that day, Amy would have been able to reassure her new parents that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with her. She had known that a woman had been found in the closet of the playroom in the little stone farmhouse because she had seen it a long time ago. Maybe she would have been able to say that it had come to her in a dream.
Instead, Amy’s new parents had packed her off to every psychologist and psychiatrist that they could find. Even though none of them could give Amy a diagnosis as anything other than a normal little girl of eight. Amy didn’t mind really. They let her colour and draw pictures. Sometimes they asked her if she had scary dreams and if she could please draw them on the paper. Amy tried, but she didn’t really remember her dreams. The scariest one that she could remember was a nightmare that she’d had about her new baby brother being born with two heads like something she’d seen on the news the night before. It didn’t occur to Amy until years later that they were asking her about her previous lives.
The final time that Amy became aware of the fact that she had died before, was in fact just before her next death.
She had grown up by this point, gone on to university and finished her degree. She was just about to start her new job as a social worker for inner city schools when she was struck by a falling air conditioner.
Amy had woken up that morning with a sense of unease. “Something bad is going to happen today,” she told her boyfriend when she got out of bed that morning.
“You’re just nervous for your first day, babe,” he’d said, rolling over and going back to sleep. He worked a two weeks on, two weeks off shift at an offshore drilling rig.
Amy had privately disagreed, because she knew that she had felt this way before. She’d had this feeling the day that she had died as a teacher in Lord Beaverbrook Elementary, and she’d had this feeling when her stepmother had punished her in the closet at the farmhouse. It was comforting, in a way. This was going to be her last day.
Of course, she didn’t think this until she was lying on the dirty sidewalk in front of her new office.
She lived in an apartment that was close enough to her new office that she was able to walk to work. It was a great cost-saving choice, especially in the summer when it was halfway pleasant in the mornings. Amy had packed a lunch using the good containers that her parents had gotten her as a house-warming gift.
Amy made sure to check both ways before crossing every street. She even pulled a teenager back from the edge when a bus rounded the corner unexpectedly. “You need to be more careful!” she’d scolded her. “Turn your music down a little bit so that you can hear the traffic coming, even if you can’t see it!”
Bolstered by her good deed, Amy didn’t think to look up when she was walking underneath a row of apartments. A couple had been arguing about the air conditioner, at one point hitting it with their palms, and the rotten board that they used to block off the rest of the window gave way and toppled to the ground. Amy looked up at the noise, only to see the air conditioner falling on her.
“Not again,” was all she had time to think before being whisked away to a now-familiar white room.
“Sorry about that,” a harried young man said from across the glass desk. “We didn’t realize that you’d been sent out again until just now. You wouldn’t believe the backlog of paperwork here. As soon as I noticed the error, I rectified it. Hopefully it wasn’t too painful.”
Amy froze in her chair. She’d just been crushed by a falling air conditioner, and this guy had the audacity to be complaining about paperwork? She opened her mouth to cuss him out, but he cut her off with a gesture.
“Oh, right,” he said, scrubbing a hand through his hair. The brown strands lay back down almost immediately, falling perfectly into place. “You probably won’t remember all of this right away.” He sighed, shuffling papers around and pulling out a manila folder. “I’m Dashaniel, but everyone just calls me Dash. Well, you used to anyway.”
“Wait, how did I – do we – ?” Amy started. She looked down at the hands in her lap, which had taken on a golden, luminescent quality. Oh. Oh. She hadn’t been a human girl for a very long time. She was Amaniel and she had been sent back to Earth several times to guide people back to their own paths. With varying degrees of success, evidently, as she kept being killed in brutal ways.
Dash waited patiently behind the desk. “How could you possibly think that it wasn’t going to be painful to drop an air conditioner on my head?” Amy said, crossing her arms and leaning back into the white chair. “Those things are heavy, Dash.”
He froze. “Did I not pull you out in time?” He looked scandalized, genuinely concerned that she had suffered until she snorted.
“I’m fine, Dash,” she said. “But what I don’t understand is why I was ever sent back in the first place. None of the people that I had interactions with in this life needed any kind of intervention. They were all good people with good intentions.” Well, maybe not the realtor that she’d met when she was 8, but they didn’t have a significant enough relationship to really be able to influence her life.
Dash sighed, running his hand through his perfect hair again. “Like I said, it was a clerical error. You were never meant to go back in the first place. It was my fault really, and I’ve put in an organizational system that’s been approved by the big man himself but – ” Dash shook his head when he noticed Amy’s raised eyebrow. “Right, not important. There was a mass send-off, trying to prevent some sort of catastrophic event in the northern hemisphere. It seems to have failed. People just aren’t listening to children the way that they used to.” Dash sighed heavily again. “I’ve been informed that you’re not to be sent out again. At least, not for some time and only at your request. The big man is saving you for his next big plan for humanity.”
“Right,” Amy said, uncrossing her arms. “I guess I’d better go and see the big man then.”
Dash smiled, his grin splitting his face and lighting up the room. “He told me that you’d say that.”
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