Your Lease Is Up

CW: Depiction of death, vehicular accident, graphic depiction of injury, emotional conflict

I don’t remember how I got to where I am. Far as I can tell, I’ve always been laid out on my back like this, desperately trying to blink away the cobwebs from my eyelids. My vision is blurry, but I can almost distinguish a silhouette beginning to form, replacing light with the contour of a shadow.

“Hey, didn’t you hear me?” the shadow said. “Your lease is up.”

“Wh-huh?”

“On this body, I mean.”

“I… I don’t…”

“Yeah, you gotta get out now.”

Before I can pull enough brain cells together to form an intelligent response, I feel myself being lifted, none too gently but not roughly, either. The next thing I know, I am standing face to face with…

“Snucky?”

“Huh? Oh, right.” My childhood toy almost manages a look of sheepishness, despite being, well, a plush horse. “This wasn’t my call, by the way. Your brain just did what it thought it’s supposed to do, and picked a comforting form.” His voice is deeper than I thought it’d be.

“Form?” I try to pull myself together, but I feel strangely weightless, uprooted. Lost. “Wait, what… Or who are you, exactly?”

Snucky sighs heavily, like he’s had to explain this a hundred times before.

“I’m your psychopomp. You’re getting evicted, so I’m here to make sure you leave your body and check the condition you’ve left it in.” And that’s when I realize that 1) Snucky is floating and 2) so am I. I look down, and if I had any breath left in me, I’m sure it would’ve left me by now. Because I’m looking down at my own body.

My eyes are open, gazing up, unfocused, my lips slightly parted. In a way, I look almost dreamy. I would’ve been able to pass off for a regular cloudgazer, lost in picking out shapes in the sky, if not for the dark pool of blood surrounding my head like a corrupted, gooey halo.

“This is where you came out of yourself, drip by drip,” I hear Snucky say. “Tsk. This isn’t gonna look good on your credit score, I can tell you that much. Couldn’t you have paid a little more attention?”

“What happened to me?”

“You got hit by a car. You were too busy looking at the sky.”

That’s right. I was cloudgazing. It’s been storming for close to a month straight now. The sun has basically become a stranger, warned away by sparks of lightning and stray thunder. Not that it bothers me, really. I like rain. I like the smell it leaves behind, of petrichor and wet pavement. Today, though, I happened to raise my head just enough to spot one clear, fluffy cloud, hidden amidst the dark, seamless sheets of nimbostratus. It looked sort of like a dragon, if I squinted. I suppose I got distracted.

“Am I dead?” I ask.

Snucky doesn’t look back at me, too occupied with inspecting my body from various angles, his little hooves somehow holding a pen and furiously scribbling away with it on a clipboard. “Ehhhh,” he waves his pen hoof non-committally. “Maybe in the way you understand it, I guess, yeah. But not really. No one’s ever really dead,” he momentarily turns back to throw me a knowing look, and it’s like his glassy eyes are trying to let me in on some inside joke. I don’t know what to do with that. Neither does he, I gather, because he keeps going:

“Look, like I said, your corporeal lease is over. I’ll hook you up with this incarnation broker I know as soon as we’re done here,” he assures me, and goes right back to what he was doing.

I don’t know what an incarnation broker is, but I don’t want to disturb Snucky while he’s working. I figure he’ll tell me later. I glance back towards my body. It’s in a strange, unnatural position, my legs at awkward angles. Like a broken doll, a puppet with its strings cut. The sight would probably disturb most people, but I feel strangely at peace. I’ve always enjoyed… Wait, is that okay to say? That I’ve always enjoyed physical afflictions? A broken bone, a disease, a chipped tooth, a migraine. Conditions with long, scientific names that are hard to pronounce, like granulomatosis or polychondritis. At least with physical afflictions, I can tell someone exactly where it hurts. I can even tell them why.

I think of how people will likely describe my death. Open skull fracture, traumatic brain injury, severe blunt force head trauma. I’d like it if they used something like ‘subdural haemorrhage’, maybe. But it will probably just be something like, ‘run over’. At most, there would be a nondescript drawing of my body, with a pronounced circle around my temple, or an arrow pointing to it, on a medical examiner’s file. Distantly, I realize that I’m surrounded by people. Some with hands over their mouths, crying. Some trying to settle on whether an ambulance has been called or not. One guy is trying to keep other people back from swarming over what used to be me. And then there’s this woman, off to the side, just holding her head.

“The driver,” Snucky says, as if he can read my mind.

“I can,” he says. “Or, your soul rather. How do you think we’ve been talking so far? You don’t have a mouth anymore.”

I don’t know how I haven’t noticed until now, but he’s right. I have no mouth, or eyes or ears or limbs. Nothing. I don’t have anything anymore, I just… Am. I try to think of what I am, and the first word that comes up is simply ‘regret’.

“I think I ruined that woman’s life,” I say, staring at the way the driver seems to crumple in on herself, staring wide-eyed at nothing in particular, her hands clenching and unclenching around her hair, and I think I am regret.

“Well, this certainly wasn’t pleasant for her, I’m not gonna lie to you,” he says, attempting what I think he would like to be a shrug, “But she’ll be okay.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m tight with her psychopomp. Her lease isn’t up for like, what, another 40 years or so? And she’s gonna start this like, social campaign for conscientious driving or something. Pretty neat.”

“So… Does that mean everything is, like, prewritten? Our whole lives? Our deaths?”

“Not really. Think of your life like a painting. We, the psychopomps, just get the broadstrokes. The rest is all up to you. Even whether or not you end up finishing the painting at all is kind of a 50-50 type of deal.”

“And everyone has their own personal psycho-whatever?”

“Pretty much. But we have more than one charge. So, like, two different people might share the same PP.”

I snort, which causes Snucky’s beady little eyes to peer at me like he wishes he could kill me a second time. “Yeah, yeah, the acronym for psychopomp is PP, go ahead, yuck it up. I swear, every single time…”

Despite the circumstances, my whole being settles into one easy, floating smile, and a comfortable silence lingers between me and Snucky. I am no longer regret, but something else, something more peaceful. The rain pitter-patters on, and the soft blue and red lights of the oncoming ambulance reflect in the rippling puddle of water forming on the sidewalk. I think, maybe I should be sad. Or desperate, or afraid, or something. But what use would that be to anyone? Not like I can change anything. My lease is up.

The pen in Snucky's hoof clicks with finality, and he suddenly takes off flying towards the sky. "Come on, we’ve still got work to do here.”

“Wait,” I begin, doing my best to catch up with him. He’s a quick little guy. “What’s gonna happen to —”

“You gotta get this weather in check,” he stops suddenly, and I almost bump into him. “You’re gonna leave emotional residue all over your body, and that’s gonna muck up your reincarnation process even more than your little accident down there.”

I look at him, his form distinctly small and huggable even through the thick curtain of rain. “Huh,” I eloquently contribute.

He groans, throwing his head back and massaging his eyes with his hoofs like I’m the biggest headache he’s ever had to deal with. “Look, I don’t care about the rain, but when someone dumps a low-pressure front all over their exit paperwork, I’m the one that has to deal with the fallout.”

I look around, at the sea of dark clouds rumbling around me, at the water showering the earth steadily below.

“You mean to tell me that… I caused this? The storm?”

Snucky’s beady eyes seem to widen for a moment, “Ah, right. Sorry, I, uh, was on holiday, haven’t done this in a while. I was supposed to explain how this works. The short of it is that, yeah, you’ve inadvertently drawn in the storm by consistently broadcasting low-pressure fronts like a broken HVAC unit.”

“Low-pressure fronts?”

“Yeah. You’ve been carrying a lot, emotionally. Too much, actually. You never released any of it, so your soul started collapsing inward. And when that happens, the atmosphere tends to follow. Nature hates a vacuum, y’know. And voila. Month-long rain.”

As weightless as I am now, I can’t remember ever carrying anything. I struggle to recall something, anything about my life, about what could’ve happened, but I’m struck with a sudden, all-encompassing pain, just as a lightning flashes from nearby.

“Mm-hmm, yep, there it is. We have to work on that.”

“It hurts,” I say, because it does, it lingers, and it does so everywhere now that I don’t have a body to compartmentalize it anymore.

“I know,” Snucky’s voice softens sympathetically, and he inches towards me. I can’t remember anything about my life, but I can remember him so clearly, I remember the feel of his fluffy coat when I used to snuggle him against my cheeks, the way we used to cuddle under Dinosaur-print bedsheets. “You’ve been ignoring it for a while, but you didn’t let it go. You have to.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Try to remember.”

“But it hurts.”

“You have to do it, anyway. The only way out of a storm is through it.”

I don’t have any eyes to close, but I imagine that I do. I don’t have a brain to rack through, but I try to. I can’t recall the past, but I embody it anyway. I become my pain. I become memory.

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“I think, maybe, I’m not doing so well. Like, I’m really tired and unmotivated all the time? And I’ve been having a hard time just… Dragging myself out of bed, so I skipped all my classes this week. Just… I thought maybe you should know,” my brother said, because I had one. I had a little brother. I can’t remember his name, but I remember everything else about him. I remember his curly hair. I remember the silly belly dance he used to do to cheer me up on bad days. I remember his obsession with bugs and nature, and the way he used to point out native and non-native species of plants on our walks. I remember his nickname, because he got it after this one singular spot appeared under his left eye when he was around 6 years old.

“Freckle…” I sighed, shifting my phone closer to my ear with my shoulder, my hands squeezing the dish soap from my Scrub Daddy like it was some kind of stress toy. “I dunno what to tell you, I think you should just, like. Focus on what you have to do instead of, like, overthinking it.”

“You’re so…” I heard some rustling from the other end of the line, then a pause. “Why do you sound so dismissive all the time when I tell you how I’m feeling?”

He couldn’t see it, but I rolled my eyes, abandoning my dirty dishes and my wrung out sponge.

“I’m serious,” he went on. “You always sound like you can’t wait to change the subject, or get off the phone, or do literally anything else.”

I couldn’t find a rag to dry my hands with, so I just shook the water off over the sink and said nothing, because I didn’t know what to say. Freckle always wanted to talk about feelings, but I was so, so tired. And it was such a nice day outside, and the sun’s warmth was settling so nicely on my skin, and my mind was everywhere, anywhere, except with me.

“You’re doing it again,” Freckle said, anchoring me back, pulling me down in the depths of a conversation I was too tired to have. “Whenever you don’t like where a conversation is headed you just… Mentally check out.”

“Maybe I’m just tired, man.”

“Well… Do you wanna talk about that?”

And I don’t know why, but that question right there, the earnest way he asked it, it made me hate him so, so much.

“Look, don’t pretend like you actually care how I’m feeling. Shit’s always about you, isn’t it, Freckle? How you’re tired, how you’re sad, or mad, or lonely. I don’t know why you always wanna talk about it with me, like I’m some kind of dumpster for your emotions or something.”

“Are you serious right now? You never want to talk about what you’re going through. Whenever I ask, you push me away. It’s almost like you want to be lonely and miserable, and you need someone to blame. You never give me a chance to be there for you.”

“You can’t even be there for yourself,” I spat. “How can you expect to be there for anyone else?”

The line went quiet for a moment, and it’s like the planet was waiting for a sign that it was okay to keep spinning.

“Don’t be cruel to me just because I love you enough to let you get away with it,” Freckle said, finally. “You don’t get to judge me because I love you and want to share my burdens with you. Your suffering doesn’t make you special just because you choose to do it alone.”

I wanted to scream, cry, vomit. I wanted to beat him up. I wanted to beat the ease with which he embraced vulnerability out of him, beat it out of him and take it for myself. But I couldn’t, so I did the next best thing.

“I fucking hate you, Freckle. I always have. I never wanted a brother, did you know that? I hate taking care of you. I never had anyone the way you have me. I had to take care of myself. Maybe it’s time you do the same.”

I could hear him stifle a cry. “Okay. I see you’re not feeling well. Call me when… If you feel like talking. I love you.”

Outside, the first dark cloud manifested itself, the sun hiding behind it and flooding my kitchen in darkness.

“I —” I began, but I choked on the rest of my sentence, the words breaking at the tip of my tongue like a millions shards of glass, shattering, scattering —

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— Splintering across time, hitting me all at once.

“I love you.”

Just as soon as the pain began, it stops. Snucky looks at me quietly, expectantly.

“I never got to tell him I’m sorry. I never got to tell him I love him one last time.”

“No,” Snucky says softly. “You did. Don’t you remember? You called him today. You apologized.”

The air around me freezes with a trembling sort of hope.

“I did?”

“Yeah, bud. The cloud you were looking at, the fluffy one? Right before you died? That was all you, too.” The cloud. The dragon cloud. My killer cloud. “You did good.” But then…

“But then why is it still raining? I did what I was supposed to do…”

“You weren’t done releasing the pressure. But look around you. It’s going to be okay.”

I look around me. The rain finally stopped. From where we’re floating, I can clearly see the sun making its first shy appearance. I’ve missed the sun. I’ve missed its warmth.

In the distance, a rainbow begins to take shape. I follow Snucky towards it. “C’mon, this here is our ride,” he turns back to look at me one last time. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” I whisper, and I feel lighter than ever for having said it so honestly.