“Yeah, darling, I saw him. Sit down. Easy, now.”
Glaring, she shrugged him off and pushed herself upright.
“I’m fine. I’d be better if I got his fucking license plate, though,” and then, as her very broken legs gave out and spilt her back onto the pavement. “Mother of fuck.”
“You are not fine.”
And for once in their nearly two years together, Charlie actually avoided his eyes. “It’ll buff out.”
“You keep spitting blood, Charlie,” he insisted, kneeling beside her, trying to get her to look up.
“I’m fine.”
“It’s coming from your lungs.”
She glared at him, ready to keep fighting, even with all the bruises and breaks. But then she sighed, slumped back against the car. The light changed from red to green, but no other cars drove down the street.
“I’m not going to the hospital,” Charlie announced, quite calm, like she’d said she didn’t feel like grocery shopping.
“Like hell you aren’t.” He scrabbled through her handbag, still somehow hooked on her arm, feeling panic rising like a sticky, cough-syrup tide as his fingers kept falling through the things he tried to grab. “Fuck, Charlie. Fuck. Where’s your phone?”
“I don’t have it.” She shrugged. Somewhere, bones ground together. “It wasn’t charged this morning, so I left it.”
Max jolted up standing then, scanning the apartment building, looking for lights on in the flat. He couldn’t find any, but those bulbs blew out all the time and maybe Mason was trying to surprise her with something now that he had his own key—sounded like him—and fuck he couldn’t think straight to save her life.
“You think Mason’s in?” he asked. “Bet I could make him come down here.”
“You’re not possessing Mason.”
“Well, fuck, Charlie. What am I supposed to do? You want to die here?”
Serene as a saint, she sighed and leaned her head back against the car. “I’m not dying, Max.”
Something in her voice made him stop. The way she said it, probably—like there was no way in the whole universe she could be wrong.
Max sat down. A couple streets over, a horn blared. Distant voices shouted.
“Charlie?”
“When I was five years old, I fell into the pool,” she said and swallowed, staring off down the street. “Beautiful day. Sky like you wouldn’t believe, blue for miles. They pumped the water out of my lungs, hooked my body up to all these machines. I was dead. Still ticking, but dead.”
She glanced at him and he couldn’t see a whole lot in the hazy street lights, but he thought she might be crying.
“I was just a little girl, Max. I was scared. When it happened, I did what I knew—I followed my parents. I just wanted everything to go back to normal. So when they went up into the hospital room, and there I was, looking at myself sleeping, I just… slipped back in.”
Jaw taut, she shook her head. “It’s not like being alive. It’s like hooking up a car with no battery to a generator on wheels. The car’s dead, but it still runs. Just not fast or far.”
Max memorized her face, hot lines of blood and desperation trickling down the back of his neck, her shoulder a warm, gauzy comfort against his own. “Why didn’t you say?”
“Because I hate it. Because I was only five years old; I shouldn’t have died! Because I didn’t want to be dead. I just want…”
“To be normal?”
Charlie smiled, kind of, and she was crying—lying in the road, in the dark and crying—and Max scooped her up as best he could manage. More than half mist, he held her tight to his chest and rocked as she whispered into his neck, “to not be a damn shadow.”
“You want I should ride with you to the hospital?” he asked.
Another car turned the corner. Headlights fell on them, Charlie’s blood glittering black on the asphalt.
“I’m not going. It’ll patch itself up.”
“Sweetheart, real girls go to the hospital.”
The car squealed to a stop. He listened as a car door opened and slammed. A woman gasped, words spilling out of her mouth like the gash on Charlie’s leg.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Are you okay? Just stay right there. Don’t move. Don’t move; I’m calling an ambulance. You’re gonna be okay.”
Charlie sighed, closes her eyes and reached for his hand. “All right. I guess.”
Max smiled. He twined their fingers and together they waited, through more headlights and sirens, through shouting men in green and alternating pavement washed red, washed blue. Through needles and monitors and sobbing, grateful parents. Through baffled doctors and smuggled-in chocolate. Through TV movies with Mason and bad hospital food, he held her hand.
And one of the benefits of being dead?
Max never let go.
Crystal Lynn Hilbert lives in the forgotten backwaters of Western Pennsylvania and subsists mostly on old trade paperbacks and tea. A fan of things magical and mechanical, her stories tend towards a peculiar blend of science and spell work. These stories have appeared in such magazines as Kaleidotrope, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and with Apex Magazine.
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