Excerpt: Stop

Quinn felt mourning covering her from head to toe like a mantle. Was this what happened when you died, then? Everything around you just lost the qualities that made it yours yesterday? Was that why she couldn’t remember anything anymore? Great. She was dead. She couldn’t remember what she was missing in life, what there had been there that had been worth living for, but surely there had to be something. Surely she’d remember if she only weren’t dead. So. Now what? Other then the breath thing, and the heart thing, and the entire things not moving that should be moving thing, nothing was all that different. Well. She hoped. Her memory was not that reliable at the moment. And then it came, soft, almost so scared that she nearly missed it. The kind of sound a baby rabbit might make in the middle of an intense dream with a soft padding of it’s paw. Thump. Her heart. It was there. It was beating. It was beating impossibly slow. Did that mean that she was actually alive? Dying? In an alternate reality? What the hell had happened to her since yesterday? She waited, needing to feel the small thump again. She needed to know if she was alive. Seconds, minutes, centuries later she felt it thump. She was alive. Thump. What exactly did that mean, again? Thump… thump… thump…