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An Epilogue Worthy Of You
Cynthia Sibrian
Has it ever happened to you where one moment you are at the store, or work or anywhere really. You are there one moment then the next thing you know you are driving down the freeway at 95 MPH and you can't remember if you stopped at the last red light, not to mention how you got in the car in the first place? As if your body is on autopilot for hours at a time.
I've been walking in what I can only explain to be a white void– for probably a while now– everywhere I look there is endless nothingness, I'm walking on white light, moving towards it then I'm leaving it behind.
This is how I know I must be dead.
I'm scared to stop moving, maybe this is why they tell you not to wake up sleepwalkers. Reality is so jarring, especially going from the nothingness of sleep to being awake. I'm getting sidetracked, how did I die? I can remember every detail of my life, my name is Jace Hillcrest; I'm 25 years old and currently–well I was– working on my final thesis for my graduate program. The last thing I remember is that I was driving to a party with my girlfriend.
Maybe that's it, maybe I went on autopilot driving and I crashed.
I keep walking then ahead I see a figure in the distance, I run for it. I trip over my shoes and claw my way back up as I sprint to- wait a second, I know them.
"Isla?" I stop dead in my tracks, "Isla, are you dead too? What happened? I-I've actually been meaning to talk to you for some time now."
Isla cocks her head at me with a smile I have never seen before. She looks weird, as if her skin isn't sitting on her bones the right way.
"Oh hello Jace! I'm sorry I think I should explain. I am not Isla, I feared you would not take kindly to my true form and so I scoured through your memories and took the shape of the person that I saw the most often."
"Are you an angel here to take me to hell?"
Not Isla shakes her head, "No I am here to evaluate and determine your fate. May we begin?"
"If you can go into my thoughts, shouldn't my afterlife already be determined?"
"I can only see your thoughts, I do not understand your actions nor can I feel your feelings in those moments. I would like to understand, may we begin?"
I nod my head and the space around us changes, suddenly we are in the student lounge.
"I have changed our environment to a place where you are comfortable and familiar with, hopefully this can help lessen the pressure of your answers. Please take a seat."
She sits on a loveseat in front of a worn brown leather couch where I take a seat.
"Can you change into another person, I-I don't really want to talk to my Ex Girlfriend."
A notebook and pen materializes in her hands; she scribbles.
"Why is that?"
"You know why."
"Jace, please be honest during our session. It will make this all easier." She pauses, "Let's begin with something small, tell me about your current Girlfriend, Ashley."
"What do you want to know?"
"Are you in love?"
"I don't know."
Not Isla stays quiet and writes more notes.
"Why is it that when you awoke and remembered you were driving with her you didn't think once about what happened to her?"
I frowned, both at the fact that she can read my thoughts and that I hadn't thought about what the implications of me dying have on Ashley.
Is she alright?
"I don't love her, I care about her. But I think I got together with her because of proximity; we were both there and lonely. Nothing more to it."
More scribbles.
Not Isla frowns and looks up at me, " So you are merely with her because you two occupy the same space? Not because of any emotional factors at play?"
"I guess so."
"Is that how it was with Isla?"
"I don't want to talk about her."
"Did you love her?"
"I don't know."
"What do you know then, Jace?" She looks angry, the pen shakes in her grasp.
"I was bored okay! Dating them was something I did between labs and my thesis. Why can't I talk to you about that? We found a strange sea creature off the coastline I'm almost positive it's an undiscovered species of jellyfish-"
"I don't want to hear about the butcher job you call an experiment."
"We found it alive! One of my group mates had tried to kill it, but I decided it would be more interesting to keep it alive-"
"While you tortured it." Her face turned red, Isla would never look that angry.
"Enough with your games Jace, why did you hurt her?"
I get up to leave, I'm done, maybe this is my hell. I go to the door but as I open it there is nothing there, and not the kind of nothing I can walk into. It's a black abyss and something tells me I would disappear forever if I walked into it. Hot rage fills my veins and I feel my face get hot. I grab a chair and throw it against the wall.
Not Isla shakes her head and continues to write.
"I'm sick of this, and I'm sick of you. Of course I loved her! I cheated on Isla with Ashley because I knew she was going to leave me soon. I saw her dancing with that guy and I knew she was going to break up with me. So I took her choice away from her, is that what you want to hear? What are you writing?!"
Red fills my vision as I take the notebook from the imposter's hands.
"What is this? These aren't notes."
Not Islas shakes her head, "I never said it was."
"Why are you creating a data set on my behavior? This is what you do when you are observing an animal in the wild."
"Unfortunately I couldn't gather the data in a natural setting so this will be adequate for when I submit my research to the Galactic committee of Alien welfare."
"I'm so confused."
"Well I'm not, I have all the clarification I need." She blinks and suddenly we are inside a spaceship?
I grab Not Isla by the throat and pin her against the wall, she looks frightened and begins to squirm.
"Stop! no! Let go of me! I just got out, I won't let you take me again."
Suddenly I'm pinned against the wall with restraints on my limbs and the light above me feels too bright. As I begin to yell at her a strap appears and covers my mouth, now I'm struggling against them with all my might.
"You couldn't have given me a few moments to compose myself after crashing into your ocean before poisoning me with formaldehyde. I still gave you a chance to prove to me that humanity is great and special, even after you experimented on me! But you have only shown me how vile and antiquated your kind is. Now Earth's fate will be determined by the counsel."
She was my ticket to early graduation, my senior thesis; experiment X.
"And until the committee arrives we will run this experiment again until I get the data I am looking for."
Has it ever-
This work was an entry to the San Jose Public Library's Fall into Fiction 2022 short story contest.
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