Gold in the Green

                                         GOLD IN THE GREEN

               I remember the screeching, like a piercing scream of infants as tyres burned against asphalt, leaving black against the cliff-road. I remember my father’s foot forcing a full brake. I remember the swerving, yes, the swerving, like we were hit by the four winds and the vehicle came to life, lifting off the cold road in a tumble, like a stuntman jumping over the cliff-road bars and into the steep end towards the trees below. I remember the smell of rubber and gas, and after a few hits to the head, I remember the taste of metal and a searing heat like I had already reached hell before it ended. But no, something came afterwards, because I remember darkness.

               It hadn’t yet dawned on me the gravity of the situation till I saw myself standing away from the car and staring at my own body. I had heard a million stories about out-of-body experiences but never had I had to tell a story about my own experience. There I was standing in the woods, a few feet from a car struck from all sides by branches, like a fish fresh out of the barbeque. The red and yellow of the flames from the engine section had totally engulfed the vehicle in a blanket of hell, and through this hell, I could see my dad, or what the evil disaster had left behind for his daughter to see but darkened skin shrivelled upon bones. While I stood, I wept but tears wouldn’t grace me with their presence. Then I saw it, I saw me, I saw myself, or at least what I thought was me in the back of the car, curved in an unnatural position like the bones in my body had been shattered and reassembled. Half my body seemed to have been kissed by the blanket and had turned a mix of red and black, and the other half of my body was staked from different parts like the car. But I felt nothing from where I stood, no burns, no pain.

               “I must be dead or pretty darn close,” I thought. But dead wasn’t what I was. I could see my face; I could see my forehead wrinkle in pain as my lips divorced and let forth a moan like a final plea. I stepped forward towards the flames, they felt cold or perhaps, I couldn’t feel them, but the closer I got, the more I began to feel the pain. It wasn’t the pain from the blanket of fire but the pain my body felt, the broken bones and burned flesh. It first began with a little tingle in my fingers, till it became an all-out torment that forced me to back as far away from the car as possible. I wasn’t dead, not yet. A voice came screaming down the steep end from where we had fallen, a voice of a man running at full speed with a fire extinguisher in his hands.

“Hey!” he shouted. You guys alright?!

“No!” I shouted back in despair. But this good stranger simply ran past me, no, that’s wrong, he ran through me, like I wasn’t there. He approached the burning car but kept his distance unleashing the extinguisher in a cloud of foam, completely putting out the blanket of fire.

“Oh my God!” he screamed as he looked into the smoking vehicle. “Call 911!” he shouted towards a second stranger somewhere beside a car parked on the cliff-road, his wife I assumed. He looked once more into the smoking vehicle this time, at my body. “Dear God, she’s alive. Hey, hang in there. We’re going to get you out of there, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.” Once more, I remember darkness.

It was a deer, a goddamn deer!

What it was doing there in the middle of the road, would forever remain a mystery to me. What I do know, is that dad and I had had an argument, one that made me choose to stay in the back seat, one that made us realize too late the confused animal standing before us. It was a goddamn deer.

               Something bright flickered through the darkness, a flash, then two. “Perhaps the tunnel and the light people always talked about,” I thought. I opened my eyes and there I was, half-burned and definitely unconscious but clothed in bandages and probably half-drunk on morphine or something but at least, comfortable on a hospital bed. And here I was, the other me, this me, no hell, no heaven, no tunnel, just hospital lights twitching. The other me, unseen by anyone, no doctor or nurse would fathom the fact that each time they walked into the room, they walked through a person, thing, or whatever the heck I was. Even my mum who was seated head down and fast asleep with tear lines stretching all the way from her eyes to her chin like little tracks meeting at the tip of her little chin, made even more visible by her mascara or what was left of it. She must have wept a whole lot to be this deep in sleep. It was then I remembered, I hadn’t cried a single tear, not one, not when I saw my dad’s remains, not when I saw myself, half-burned and grasping for air and dear life in little moans and broken bones in a blanket of fire that seemed to come alive and a pain so unimaginable, my guardian angel probably pulled my spirit from my body to save me. Not when I now stood staring at my mum and myself, wondering if I would ever be back in that shell of a body, even if just to make her feel better.

               As I walked slowly towards the sleeping shell on the bed, I could now tell the severity of the situation. The burns suddenly seemed minor and not as critical as they looked in the fire, the broken bones and torn parts, I couldn’t tell because they were all straightened out, held together with P.O.P and stitched up completely. And more surprising of all, I could barely feel a thing when I got close this time. “Probably the morphine,” I thought. It finally dawned on me that I might just live, I might actually get through this as the stranger with the extinguisher had said. At that moment, I felt a kind of heat, like two little fires scrolling down my eyes and cheeks. They were tears, I couldn’t see them but I knew they were, and just the realization that they were indeed tears, made me cry some more. This was something beyond sadness, it was a silent cry of confused joy and a new knowledge that even spirits cry.

               As the days passed by slowly into a week, I began to slowly understand new things about myself and the people who surrounded my life, people I thought I knew. Aunt Kelly or Kells as the family called her visited and most times simply lamented about her failed relationships and boyfriends, talking to me like I was conscious and weeping sometimes profusely, more for the reason of her relationships than my condition. At the sight of this though, I couldn’t help but laugh at how much more a mess her life was than mine at the moment. Truth be told, this helped me begin to recover faster.

All this was about to change in a few hours, and I would get as close to death as anyone is allowed to, even closer than I did in the crash.

A cold and eerie chill passed by me, and seemed to return and stop right behind me. I hadn’t felt temperature till this moment, I was certain that this wasn’t normal because even as a spirit, I suddenly had goosebumps as I began my slow but steady journey turning around to face what stood behind me.

               It was a man! A man in glasses and clothed in a fancy but weird attire that seemed to have a perfect vertical divide between its black and white colours. He just stood there in the doorway, staring, staring at me. At first, I assumed it wasn’t at me, that he was either staring at something else behind me or, he was a psychiatric patient or just sick but looking closely, I caught a glimpse of something stuck under his left arm, it was a note, and in the left pocket of his shirt were two pens, their covers sticking out and perfectly arranged about two centimetres from each other, one was black, and one red. He definitely didn’t look mentally disturbed, and he most definitely could see me. The man placed two fingers against his glasses to adjust them and looked at me closely as if in search of something, then he took out the note from within his arm and looked into it, then he said, “Raya Little, hmm, okay, this one’s not yet due, just another spectral experience”. “Let’s go Reaper”.

               I stretched forth my hands and was about to say, “hey, wait!” when I suddenly caught a glimpse of what followed behind him. It was a hooded figure with a dark, empty face. What lay within the hood seemed more like and emptiness, a void that sent my words scurrying back down my throat. The figure ended in a jagged, frail looking end of clothing that didn’t touch the floor, it floated in mid-air. In the parts where there should be arms, there was a sort of darkness that poured out in thick veins like smoke. This figure that followed behind the man, was accompanied by darkness, a darkness so thick, it caused the lights to flicker like they had come alive and gone mad. A darkness that caused chills to run up and down my spine, and goosebumps on my spirit skin. Although I had wrong feelings against it, like some ancient code had been written into my spiritual software to not ever follow this figure, I followed it, I ran after them both.

               “I wouldn’t do that if I were you!” came a voice from behind me. it was the man in glasses. How he’d suddenly appeared behind me was something I couldn’t understand.

“What’s that?” I asked, referring to the floating figure which seemed to have stopped as if waiting for something, or someone.

“I don’t think you’re quite ready for that answer yet,” said the man. “So, I’ll answer an easier question, who, and not what,” he added. “His name is Reaper”.

My eyes widened in sudden realization of what I was about to grab with my hand, “Reaper? Like the Grim reaper?” I asked.

“No, I’m Grim, he’s Reaper,” said the man in near contempt. “We always come as a pair but most people who wake only remember him because he’s less friendly, and for good reason, his job requires him to be”.

“The thing is, you shouldn’t remember a thing when you wake but somethings are either so scary or so beautiful, they stick to your mind even through the waking process,” said the man. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we have work to do, unless you want your car crash to actually be fatal?”

“What? N…no!” the thought of actually dying scared me, even though I technically couldn’t be considered living.

“Ha ha!” laughed the man. “You won’t be dying soon sweetheart, I would know, I have your file”.

“Besides, Reaper wouldn’t touch you until you’re due, unless he wants to have a brawl with your guardian over there,” he said, nudging his head towards a man who was seated on a chair by the corner, reading what seemed to be a novel. This man lowered the book he was reading until I could see right above it into what seemed to be his eyes, his pupils, red as crimson dipped in gold irises that glowed like fire. He took the book up once more and hid his eyes.

“Just so you know, between Reaper and guardians? Guardians are scarier and way less friendly, at least towards other spirits,” said the man in glasses, suddenly turning his gaze towards the hallway where the other rooms were. “She’s here,” he frowned, then smiled. “Alright lads and lasses, come on out!” he screamed.

Just then, a few other people like me began stepping out of some rooms and into the hallway. It was then I realized this was the first time I’d stepped out of my room for over a week.

“Gotta go,” said the man, moving quickly towards the figure which now seemed to float towards each person as if inspecting them, with some sudden keen interest like it was searching for something or someone, really close.

“Why haven’t I ever heard of you? Not even a drawing.” I said to the man. “I mean, I only ever hear of the ‘Grim Reaper’, and it always appears as that,” I added, pointing at the figure.

“Well, I can’t say I wouldn’t like a tale or two about me, but I try my best to erase all spectral experience memories as protocol, especially memories of myself and Reaper but Reaper’s memories are too traumatic to simply be wiped clean so, sometimes, they get through.” He replied. “And no, he has no damn scythe, he’s a reaper, not a farmer, he reaps bad souls, not crops.” He added, as if anticipating my next question.

I chuckled. “I’ll write about you,” I said. “I’ll write if you let me remember”.

               The man paused for a moment, stared me in the eyes, his cold blue pupils reading my intentions. He adjusted his glasses again and said, “I don’t think so”. “All you need to know is, I escort the souls who were not so sinful, and Reaper over there, escorts those who were horrible”. “Also, don’t stray too far from your body, else you’ll actually lose connection and you’ll die for real”.

Just then, a young lady about my age or less walked slowly out of a room and screamed, then took to her heels like a mad deer. Immediately and like a pre-practiced scene, both Reaper and the man in glasses turned towards her, and Reaper roared. A roar so fierce it shook the building and blew a few lights, then he chased after her. They both did, except that Grim more or less jogged while screaming, “Mary Cortes! Murder, trafficking, bribery, and then some, and now cancer got you? Isn’t that Shakespearean?!”

I ran after them, for reasons unknown to me till today, or perhaps sheer stupidity. They were already outside the hospital building when I finally caught up to them, Reaper and the girl at least, Grim was nowhere to be found. I saw the girl suddenly stop like she’d been frozen against her will, she turned and stared in total and complete horror at the figure. It was then I saw it, from within the darkness that poured from its right sleeve, a hand appeared, a hand made completely of bones and sand stretched forth, grabbed the lady by her face, and in a mix of what seemed to be unearthly screaming and anguish, she vanished into thin air, as if absorbed by the reaper.

“Wait!” I screamed, and made another utterly stupid move. I touched him, it, whatever this was, and a chill nearly broke my spirit bones as he suddenly turned around, screeched like a million banshees and made as if to grab me. Just then, time seemed to freeze his arm in mid-air, and Grim appeared.

“You’re due!” he said.

“What?!” I asked in total confusion.

“Not for reaping, for waking. Maybe not for long though, since you left your body in a seizure right now. who knows, the story of a failed summer road trip and the loss of a husband and a daughter could make a great headline don’t you think? You’re lucky this was prevented” he replied.

“Oh my God! Thank you,” I said, assuming he’d just saved my life.

“Don’t thank me, I didn’t save you, I stopped by a room to take a good soul. I reckon your guardian did, and if I’m right, I presume he’ll be here in let’s say, seven seconds, so, I’ll be getting my scary friend out of harms way now. But before I leave, I’ll give you something for this brave and foolish act, I’ll let you remember it, every bit of it. And when you wake, this time at least, try to get some sun, it’s pretty today. Take care little one.” Said Grim.

               And just as they disappeared, I saw a sword of fire replace where they stood, as if thrown there, and before me appeared the man who was reading a novel. He looked me straight in the eyes and pushed me. the world seemed to fold about me and once again, I remember, darkness.

               I opened my eyes slowly, this time, perhaps, sometime just past noon. My mum suddenly ran to my side.

“My baby!”

“Hey mum,” was all I could let out.

“Hey,” she replied, tears strolling down her swollen eyes.

I made effort to sit up.

“You shouldn’t do that, you should rest,” said my mum.

“I’ve been asleep for a week and a half mum; I think I’m well rested.” I spoke.

“How did you…?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I interrupted. “I just want to see the sun”.

“Okay, okay.” She helped me into a wheelchair beside my bed, then began to push. There was a small balcony attached to the room which she slowly wheeled me towards till we were out in the open and I saw it. The gold settled on my face like my guardian’s eyes. I could see far into the large hospital garden where the sunlight kissed the green fields. I made it.

You were right Grim. It’s beautiful. The gold in the green.

By: Ozuzu Iheanyichukwu O.I.