Caroline
Is this the light of heaven?
It must be. I asked for an audience with God and it seems I'm about to get it.
He and I have a long list of things to go over. We'll touch on the mosquito issue shortly, and I'd like to also poke His brain about the whole thing where He let both my parents be savagely murdered.
But there's a new, more pressing little nugget that has made its way to the top of our post-mortem agenda. I imagine it'll go a little something like this:
INT. CELESTIAL STUDIO — CAROLINE, dazed but plucky, sits across from GOD, who is wearing a smoking jacket and sipping from a "World's Okayest Deity" mug.
GOD
Ladies and gentle-angels, give it up for Caroline Oglethorpe! Welcome, Caroline! Sit, sit, please. I'm thrilled to have you here. Big fan of your work.
CAROLINE
Thank you, thank you. Big fan of Your work too, mostly. But I do have a bone to pick with you.
GOD
(to studio audience)
Uh-oh, folks! Looks like we're in for it!
(audience laughs uproariously)
Now, Caroline, before we dig in—let's go to the tape. Roll the clip!
A massive screen descends from the celestial rafters. It plays, in slow motion and from an unflattering angle, Caroline mid-fall, mouth open in a silent O, arms pinwheeling, one boot pointed jauntily skyward.
CAROLINE
Oh my God.
GOD
Yes?
CAROLINE
Sorry. Force of habit.
GOD
Happens all the time. Now, the question on everybody's lips, Caroline—and I do mean everybody, the cherubim are losing their little minds back there—is what, exactly, were you thinking about, in the half-second before you ate that rock?
CAROLINE
I plead the Fifth.
GOD
Caroline. Sweetheart. We're omniscient up here.
STUDIO AUDIENCE
Oooooh!
CAROLINE
This feels like a violation of my privacy.
GOD
You died horny, didn't you.
CAROLINE
I died with dignity*.*
GOD
You died thinking about the pectorals of a man who has literally killed people for a living.
CAROLINE
Okay, first of all, the pectorals were incidental. Second of all—
GOD
Caroline.
CAROLINE
—I noticed them last—
GOD
Caroline.
CAROLINE
—and only briefly—
GOD
CAROLINE. Tell the people what you were thinking when your foot met that tree root.
A long, long silence. The audience leans in. A harp plays softly.
CAROLINE
(very small)
I was thinking that he looks really, really good for a man pushing forty.
The audience erupts. GOD slaps the desk, delighted. Confetti falls. A producer in a headset wipes away a tear.
PRODUCER
This is some high quality television.
GOD
And that is why I let you smash your face on a rock!
CAROLINE
Wait. What. That's it? That's Your reasoning?!
GOD
Caroline, I have been waiting six months for you to feel something other than grief. Six months! And the first thing you feel, the very first thing, is a hot flash for an ex-Bratva fixer with a throat tattoo?
CAROLINE
This is victim-blaming and I won't stand for it.
GOD
You are not standing. You are unconscious in a pile of leaves.
CAROLINE
I'm… wait, what? I'm not dead yet?
GOD
(leaning in, suddenly tender)
Caroline. Honey. Did you really think I was gonna let you off the hook that easy?
CAROLINE
…Maybe?
GOD
After all that effort? After Plan A through Plan Z? After Guns McTaggart? Sweetheart, please. I have plans for you.
CAROLINE
Are they good plans?
GOD
Well… parts of them.
CAROLINE
That's not reassuring.
GOD
(to audience)
Folks, that's our show! Tune in next week, when Caroline asks why I made her allergic to shellfish! Goodnight, everybody!
Theme music swells. Credits roll. The studio lights fade to black.
And then, somewhere very far away, somewhere distinctly un-celestial, a voice that is decidedly not God's says my name.
Low.
Gravelly.
Pissed.
"Caroline Oglethorpe… what the fuck are you doing in my yard?"
I groan and try to blink, but the blood crusted over my eyelids and gooped in my eyelashes makes that task a little harder than usual. I struggle until I manage to crack them open a tiny bit.
But then a flash of bright light makes me wince and slam them shut again.
It's not a heavenly light. Not by any means. It's bright and fluorescent, and we all know that fluorescent lights are a product of Hell, not Heaven.
So either I've ended up in the Bad Place, or God really didn't let me die yet. Smug son of a gun.
I'm annoyed.
Not because I want to be dead, mind you. I'm quite attached to life, all things considered.
But being dead would have at least spared me what I am now coming to understand are going to be an extremely embarrassing few minutes of my life.
I make a second effort to open my eyes again.
The light has turned away from beaming directly into my retinas, thankfully, so it's not as painful when I work open a sliver of vision.
But as soon as that arduous little mission is accomplished, I'm hit with a throbbing wave of pain from the right side of my forehead.
Oh, holy fucking shit.
That hurts.
Did you know rocks are hard? I thought I did.
I may have been underestimating them all this time, though.
I wonder idly if God is punishing me for my horny thoughts.
Given that the lump on my skull feels like a literal horn growing from my head, though, I almost want to accuse him of being overly literal in his choice of methods for divine retribution.
So far, that's the grand total of what I've deduced about my current situation. Light is bright and cracking your head on a boulder hurts. Give this girl a Nobel Prize, folks!
I set those groundbreaking discoveries aside and try to figure out where the hell I am.
Whatever I'm lying on, it's too soft to be grass or dirt. It must be a blanket. And the padding under my head feels like the arm of a couch. I pry my eyes open a bit more and realize that the blurry silhouette looming over me has a shape I recognize.
It's the shape of Afon Satyrin.
He's no longer shirtless. That's tragic.
Er, I mean, that's excellent. Quite good. Modest and appropriate, really, as these things ought to be.
"You're not dead," Afon notes.
"Bold of you to assume," I croak. My throat is the Sahara and I sound like I've been inhaling hookahs since the day I was born. "I might be a ghost. The ghost of Caroline Oglethorpe, sent to haunt your cabin until you—ow. Ow. Ow ow ow."
He has pressed a washcloth, which is shockingly cold, directly to the knot in my head.
"Stop talking."
"I literally just woke up."
"And yet you're already getting on my nerves.
I wince and look past him. The cabin's interior comes into wobbly focus by the light of a single yellow lamp and the orange of a fire crackling in the hearth behind him.
It's a cute place, truly. Quaint and charming, straight out of an LL Bean spread.
The ceiling is low and beamed, very rustic.
A moose head hangs over the fireplace and a basket in the corner holds neatly folded blankets that look just like the one draped over my lower half.
I look down at my legs, just to confirm that they are still attached to the rest of me. They are—that's good.
Of more concern is the fact that I can see my bare toes wiggling beyond the edge of the blanket.
My boots are off. So are my socks. And seeing as I've been unconscious since my high-speed faceplant, that can only mean one thing…
"Did you take my shoes and socks off?"
Afon keeps dabbing at my wound without looking at me. "You snore when you're concussed."
I blink slowly. "Is… Is that relevant?"
He shrugs. "Thought you'd want to know."
He's crouched next to the couch, which puts his face at roughly my eye level.
Now that he's close, I can see things I couldn't from twenty yards out behind a tree.
I was right about the gray in his beard, but up close, it's more of a handsome silver.
Highly distinguished. His eyes are an exhausted brown-green, the color of a lake in late October, and they look sick to the death of me already.
"How… how long have I been out?" I ask.
"Couple weeks."
"What?!" I bolt upright and immediately regret that choice when I get smacked with a two-fisted double whammy of pain in my head and nausea in my stomach. Afon lowers me back down with a firm, steady hand on my upper back.
"I'm joking," he says, though his voice is so dead and flat that I wonder if he understands how humor is supposed to work. "I found you twenty minutes ago."
"And what's the prognosis, Doc?" I close my eyes as the thudding, screaming pain in my skull continues to reverberate through me like I'm a pair of cymbals wielded by a manic, clapping monkey.
Afon studies me. "You'll live. Which is more than you deserve, considering."
I squint at him through the tiniest slit possible that doesn't further antagonize my migraine. "Considering what, precisely?"
"Well, you're trespassing on private property. It would be well within my right to shoot you."
"To shoot me?!" I'd have bolted right back up again if Afon didn't anticipate my reaction and keep me clamped to the couch.
"Yes," he replies. "Shoot you. I still haven't ruled it out."
"You really know how to reassure a girl."
"I'm going to go get you some medication. Can I trust you not to do anything stupid, like try to sit up again?"
I scowl at him with one eye squeezed shut, like a pirate. "No promises."
"Hm. Well. Like I said, I haven't ruled it out."
I watch helplessly as Afon stands up. He is quite tall when one is horizontal. He crosses the room, floorboards groaning under his weight, and disappears through a doorway, leaving me to take stock of my situation.
Situation, as follows:
I am, it seems, alive. Still on the earth on which I was born and raised, too, and not yet having my feisty audience with the Big Man Upstairs.
I definitely cracked my noggin pretty good. Evidently, I'm not concussed enough to die, but probably enough that I should not be operating heavy machinery, drafting legal briefs, or, say, making any decisions about how to behave around a man like Afon Satyrin.