Meet Cute for Legacy's sake

The fall was incredibly excruciating. Completely unnecessary, too. The Ferian chambers of The Lord had plenty of carriages with shiny step pedals for a graceful descent, but they chose to shove me down a lightning bolt of a rather beastly rain cloud.

My Victorian roll bun, braided in a top knot, was a mess with dried leaves and bark stings from the tree under which I fell, or was mercilessly thrown, belly side down, on mucky soil. The underwire of my bustier scooped inside the ribs, and the memory of First Maid Glenda jamming the cross ribbons across my chest that sprang like jelly balls made me wince with the residual pain.

“You have twenty-four hours.”

“Yes, yes. Can you not make me more miserable than I already am, please?”

Reccy Angel Braddy was a snob, an irritating snob, and a whining snob. My timeline had been stuffed in my head for the numerous years of my desire to return to this world. He knew that. All the Angels were trained with that kind of information, but I don’t know why he had to keep reminding me of it constantly.

“Your time starts now,” he sighed. But I could hardly hear him as the sound of drums, violins, and shrilly high-pitched voices began to grow inside my ears.

I had insisted on getting the whole experience to feel human again, with all my senses, feelings, and a beating heart. Well, I was here. Back from the dead and thrown head-on into a festivity.

A crouching figure stumbled out of an open glass door and emptied its intestines barely a smidge away from my stilettoes. It was gnarly. And the stench, well, a rat with diarrhea had eaten a rotten egg. Yes, that was it.

“Uggh! Do you mind?” I said, salvaging the tapering ruffles of my green Tea gown.

The figure leapt. I would have easily taken her to be a scaredy cat had I not noticed the familiar aquiline nose. Ah, she was in a state. No wonder, I could hardly ‘rest in peace’ with the impending task of bringing her back to her senses. First, from whatever she had been consuming, and second, from the kind of person she had become.

“You shouldn’t be mixing them.” The rotten egg smell of wine gave away the blasphemous mixing. “We always liked our whiskey neat, remember? Oh, how would you remember, it was… okay, let us get you cleaned up first and then…”

“Who… who… are you?” she heaved and cried simultaneously. “And… wait, what is that dress?”

I couldn’t tell if her tone was praiseworthy or reprehensible, but my opinion about her dress couldn’t be clearer.

“I’d love to have commented on yours, if only there were enough cloth flowing to call it a dress in the first place,” I said, scanning her bare body from top to bottom with a shiny band barely covering her essentials.

“Hey, hey, are you okay?”

A glorious, suited figure armed her waist. Perhaps it was a quest to adhere the band to her body to salvage her decency, I suppose. But blood rushed to my face as I tucked an absent hair strand behind my ear. Even in the flickering incandescent light sneaking out from the main party hall, I could see the contours of his jawline and the parting of his silky tresses that covered half of his forehead.

“Yeah, I am good, Jack, umm, thank you,” she said, wiping her face as her eyes rolled without her permission. She nudged him off her body in a way that made him awkward.

Shirley and I jerked our necks sideways – completing the Trinity of Awkwardness.

Jack scooped Shirley like a soup spoon, and I swayed a little but had to run after them in my pursuit against Shirley’s misjudgment. I glanced at my clock pendant as it thrust against my chest because of my sprint, and it sent adrenaline to my heart. I had already lost an hour and didn’t even manage an introduction.

I was never an athlete, hardly a runner, to that, and the party hall was huge. Not bigger than our ballroom at Fraser Castle, of course, but bigger than, wait a minute - this was the ballroom. I was standing in the center of the mosaic’s eye, catching my breath on the only floor pattern left unchanged in my vicinity.

This was the place where I was killed in the year 1898.

Jack came down the staircase, the old majestic one replaced by metal barrels floating midair. The clacking of his shoes reminded me of my father graciously descending from his wardrobe chambers in a navy-blue tailcoat, to kneel and kiss my mother’s hand for their weekly celebration from proliferating railroads.

I glided towards that sound and raised my hand for my turn to swoon, but he lumbered past me, with his neck saving his head with a grasp of a thread. His wrist peeked from the gap of his fully buttoned white shirt, and I could see it twisting my hands together against a wall as if they were two twigs, surrendered to his masculinity.

“Is she okay, now?” A man, half an inch shorter than Jack, inquired.

“Yes. She wants to be left alone with him.”

Jack unbuttoned the cuffs and rolled them up. I fanned myself, and my fingers touched the clock pendant. Two more hours, gone in a jiffy. I could no longer afford to drool over Jack, unaccountably.

I faltered my ascension through the slippery metal barrels, landing in front of a white bathtub with a silver wand attached to the faucet. Water dripped through little holes on the rectangular head of that wand, which was perched over a pipe. No wonder Shirley had left her waist-long, curly hair open, after using this thing to wash them with ease. I touched my bird’s nest of a bun and felt my neck burn. One good thing about this world so far, and I bet this would be the only thing – apart from Jack, but Jack was not a thing.

A pasty-looking ghoul exited the room, which would have been the wardrobe chambers of our time. It was Shirley’s bedroom. He stank rancid. My heart stopped for a second. Had he killed Shirley? I barged into the room and saw her lying on a Queen bed with a lilac satin bed sheet. Her curly hair was stained with a gooey white substance, and suddenly I wasn’t that envious anymore. Her chest rose and fell, which kick-started my heartbeat.

“Shirley, wake up. What are you doing?” I hoped she would be sober enough to have a conversation.

“Ahh!,” Shirley screamed, so I cupped her mouth. Our eyes met and her peak troughed. “What are you doing in my room?” she flung my arm and took about ten steps away.

Her breath stank rancid. It was more than alcohol.

“I am here to save our legacy,” I said.

“What legacy?” she said and narrowed her eyes. “Have we met before? I mean, before tonight?”

Even her speech was slurred. I did not want to shock her into unconsciousness or worse, a coma. I would react that way when talking to a dead person.

“Listen to me. You have got to get your act together. No husband, no children. What have you done to our Fraser Castle? And that stinking, despicable ghoul that exited your room, who on Earth was that?”

“Hang on. I am only thirty-two years young! And that was my boyfriend. And, what the hell’s wrong with ya woman? Wait, are you my long-lost aunt or something? Look, if you are, you ain’t getting nothin’ from me, girl. All this is mine. My folks left everything for me.”

“Biggest mistake of their lives! This can’t be going on. Books have been written about our family. I couldn’t rest in my grave because of your antics…”

“What?”

There was a knock on the door, and I leaped behind a curtain.

“Are you okay, Shirley?”

Why does everyone keep asking her if she is okay? Are they blind? What are these people really on? The lady needs fixing, and there is no one here, even slightly bothered by her state or the boyfriend she keeps.

“I am. I was just talking to…” Shirley scanned the room looking for me, then grabbed her head and plopped on the bed.

“Hallucinating again, are we?” It was Jack. “You have got to stop doing these hard drugs. Hunter is killing himself, and he is doing you no favors, too. When will you understand that I, I want, I, I… care about you. I want the same old, kind, smart, and happy Shirley back.”

Jack, the stunningly exquisite Jack, was in love with Shirley, and the stupendously idiotic Shirley was chasing Hunter! There was nothing good about this world. I had won that bet hands down.

Muffled voices filtered through the curtains. To my left, through a thick glass panel, Hunter was talking to another man. His lanky hands were shaking, and all over him. The other man, nicely suited, was wearing dark glasses at night. Hunter curled his fists and faced the man up to his nose, but was immediately taken down by two other men wearing similar suits and dark glasses.

Then the door shut, and I focused my attention on the room I was in. I carefully stepped out to find that Shirley was fast asleep. Jack had probably given her medication to rest and get the nasty substances out of her system. What would I give for a loving and caring man like Jack? I was taken away at seventeen, in the throes of surging hormones, stabbed by a rejection.

I had to get Hunter out of Shirley’s life at any cost. I pushed the door, but it was jammed. I maneuvered the complicated new-age lock, but the door wouldn’t open. There was no other exit from Shirley’s bedroom. I tried waking her up, but she was passed out. I glanced at the room behind the glass pane, but it was empty. I looked at my pendant and hoped that time would slow down if I didn’t look enough.

Then, I heard the gong. My mouth dried up. I was here to save Shirley from herself. To get her act together. To save our legacy so I could truly rest in peace in my grave and face my ancestors with pride when we would all be in heaven together. I only had thirty minutes left.

“I know you!”

Shirley appeared in front of me. Calm and serene. The medicine had worked. I could still do this. She would be more receptive.

“You are me. You are my soul. I have always had dreams about you,” she said calmly.

“Finally!” I sighed. “I am your great-great-great, umm let’s say, grandmother from the nineteenth century. You are my soul’s reincarnation. I am here to fix you. I don’t have much time left on Earth, but I know what we need to do. Get rid of Hunter and marry Jack. Have his children and continue our legacy. We need to populate this Earth with good people. Not with drug addicts. Please, you must do this.”

“What? You have got it all wrong. Hunter is saving me. He is not what you think he is. He is the love of my life. My people want him out of my life to control me.”

Typical statements of typical drug addicts. I had seen enough opioid deaths before puberty to have my reincarnation suffer the same.

“They have always tried to control me. The only reason I am even allowed to see Hunter is because I refuse to eat if I don’t see him. They can’t afford to have me dead because my parents have left me a super strong Will, which means everything goes to charity if I am suddenly dead.”

“You don’t understand. You are limiting yourself with drugs.”

“Oh yeah? Like you, right?” she smirked. “You are a soul. You can go anywhere.” She shoved my head on the pillow, and my body crossed through it. “But you don’t know your ability, so you conform to what you are told. Human bodies can’t pass through objects, but souls can. You limit yourself. You don’t know what you are capable of.”

Footsteps stopped right outside the door, and it flung open. I froze. Shirley had already tucked herself into bed.

Jack walked past me and stood for what felt like eternity, looking over her, right next to me. Then he nodded and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

The gong hit my ears again, this time marking five minutes remaining on the clock.

“I need more time, Braddy.”

“Sorry, I follow orders. This was a special request granted because of your relentless whining over thousands of years anyway.”

“I don’t even know how she will react. Give me three days, at least.”

“For that, you will have to kill her.”

Reccy Angel Braddy’s voice resonated in the room.

I couldn’t let a drug addict spoil our legacy. Shirley was beyond repair, and there was only one way to fix it.

The door opened again, and Jack walked in with two men who looked like doctors as they had stethoscopes around their necks.

“Is it working?” Jack sounded sullen.

“Yes, of course. It is a kick to the nervous system, but her frontal lobe has diminished by about eighty percent. Not too long before, she will be completely under your control.”

“She was hallucinating earlier.”

“Oh! That’s a normal response to LSD and scopolamine. It grows on you.”

“What about the antidote that Hunter was trying to give her?”

“Well, it’s potent, but if she doesn’t get it for at least another month, then it will be useless.”

“Well, we won’t have to worry about that anymore now, do we?”

Jack held a device in which Hunter was tied up to a chair. He looked shabby and unconscious.

I felt an excruciating sting on my right arm, and my point of view shifted. Jack was staring down at me, and a doctor hunched over my arm with a small syringe, with his thumb firm against the plunger. They looked at each other and nodded in approval of waking someone up from the dead.

My body was bare under the sheets with the shimmering band poking my fingertips. My ribs didn’t hurt from the corset, but the tightness around my chest suffocated me.

Standing right across from me was Shirley. She looked calm and serene, but she was wearing my green Tea gown. Her hair was tied up in my Victorian bun, and she had the most contented smile I had ever seen on her face.

She whizzed through Jack’s body and stooped over me.

“Thank you for freeing me, Victorian Shirley. Now, you must do everything to save our legacy, or else I will haunt you forever.”

Shirley’s laugh echoed through the room, but the sound waves reached only my ears.

Jack smiled at me, and I saw a splinter go off in his eyes, flashing the same hell holes I had paid a visit to with the Angel of Death before getting a glimpse of heaven.

He gestured for the doctors to leave us alone, and I trembled with an ominous familiarity with the scene.

“I got you, Shirley Beth,” he roared, raising both arms to declare victory.

“Jacob! This can’t be!” My tingling hands broke into a sweat. I had not signed up for bodily fluids oozing out of me, but I should have thought about that before ripping off Shirley’s soul off her body and replacing it with myself.

“Oh yes, Shirley Beth. It is now. It happens every time. You don’t rest. You are never satisfied with anything, are you, Shirley Beth?” He crawled on the bed on all fours like a cheetah ready to devour its prey. “But, I made a deal with Braddy. To stop your whining, which was getting beyond his resentment.” He sniffed my neck, and I swallowed the bile that had travelled up to my throat.

“He sent you after me?” I should have known the extent of Braddy’s hate.

“You have been coming back with every generation. Whining and whining till he shoves you back on Earth. You have never been satisfied. There is always something that you want to fix.” He licked my neck. “Like the way you wanted to fix my nose, and my hair, and my lanky legs, and…” He jerked back, took off his shirt, and screamed. “My personality!”

The etching on his chest was a fresh wound. It was a replica of a dragon tattoo extending the width of his chest. Honestly, I had never disliked the tattoo itself. I didn’t like it on him at that time. It was a different story now. Maybe not when I wished I’d rather be dead, but with him looking like he did, it wasn’t bad.

“It’s the same old me, Shirley Beth.” Was he reading my mind?

“You bullied me all my life, but I took it as simple teasing because I liked you. We were neighbors. Wealthy, happy, prosperous. But I don’t know what you wanted.” He burst out crying. “You rejected my proposal, Shirley Beth.” Then, he ground his teeth. “That stab right in the heart was so satisfying. I wish I could do it again.” He mimed the action towards me, and I flinched for whatever was left of my life.

“Over generations, you managed to convince your reincarnations to fix themselves, and they rejected me. But I got you this time. Drugs work wonders, Shirley Beth. Evil wins.”

“I, I am sorry, Jacob. I was only seventeen then. I was a child.”

“Our parents wanted to see us married and have babies. I am sorry, Shirley Beth, but I must fulfil their wishes for legacy’s sake.”