“Hey, are you okay?
Hang in there — we’re almost at the hospital.”
I wanted to speak.
I couldn’t.
My body wouldn’t answer.
It felt like being suspended at the bottom of a lake.
Wrong in a way I couldn’t name.
Come to think of it…
where even is this?
I registered light.
I registered movement.
Something was pushing me forward.
Hospital…?
I forced my eyes open.
The world came back blurry — a nurse in uniform, shoving something with everything she had.
Is this…
a hospital bed?
Am I being wheeled down a hallway?
“Patient has a massive intracranial hemorrhage!
Multiple fractures throughout the body!”
Me…?
What kind of accident did I get into?
Come to think of it…
I can’t really think anymore.
Everything’s going fuzzy.
“Patient’s breathing is critically weak.
Almost nonexistent.”
I’m not breathing…?
No.
That can’t be right.
Am I actually dying?
I just graduated.
I just graduated, and life was supposed to be starting.
Wasn’t it…?
On that thought, I forced my mouth open.
“Ah…”
I don’t know if the sound reached anyone.
But the nurses looked stunned that I’d made it at all.
I don’t want to die.
There’s too much left.
Just leave me one breath.
Just let me…
“Ah…”
…
“AAAAH!”
I jolted awake, screaming.
Still breathing.
Still seeing.
Still here.
Was that…
a dream?
It took me a moment to realize something was wrong.
I could barely move.
Not paralyzed — just impossibly, exhaustingly heavy.
Like my body weighed nothing and everything at the same time.
I pushed all my effort into lifting one hand.
An infant’s arm came into view.
What.
Before I could process it, two strangers leaned directly over my face.
A man and a woman, close enough that I could see nothing else.
“xxx—–xxx—–”
“xx—-xxxxxxxx—-”
A language I’d never heard.
Something in their tone sounded like gratitude.
I tried to push their faces away.
In their eyes, I was just a newborn doing what newborns do.
“xxx—-xxxx!”
“xx—–xxx”
You have got to be kidding me.
This is my hand?
I opened my mouth.
What came out was “ah-oo, ah-oo” and something that sounded embarrassingly like crying.
…
I accepted it.
Quietly, completely, I accepted it.
I died.
And I came back as a baby.
From inside the crib, I turned my head side to side, taking in the wooden slats around me.
No lights.
No appliances.
Candles.
The Middle Ages.
I reincarnated into the Middle Ages.
I wasn’t upset about that, not really.
It was just…
I never got to repay my mom.
That’s the part that sat wrong.
She was probably crying right now, and just picturing it made something ache in my chest.
Apparently infant bodies aren’t great at holding that kind of thing in.
I didn’t make much noise.
But the golden-haired woman came over anyway.
I hadn’t cried.
Hadn’t moved.
Somehow she’d felt it.
I couldn’t understand a word she said.
I felt every bit of it.
Is this just what mothers are…?
Her voice was soft, and it became a song, and somewhere inside that song I fell asleep.
➤ Next: So-Called Magic?
— Into the Unknown