By trial and error, I finally found myself standing on the lawn of my own house, the day after I died. It felt odd; the sun still shone, cars passed by, children played. It was as if nothing had happened. While my death had been a paramount event in my life, the world had continued on nonetheless. It was just strange to know that at that very moment, somewhere in a funeral parlor they were preparing my emaciated body for cremation. I had thought long and hard about how I wanted to come home, and none of it involved leaving my girl an orphan.
Zipping back less than 24 hours, I was there, in the very room where it had all started, though it sure as hell didn't look that way to me at the time. There I lay in bed, learning the final lessons of life before I passed beyond this realm of existence. With my new eyes I can see her vitals begin to plunge as we gasped our last breaths. Within a few seconds I am dead.
I see the Boss there, his finger extended as he prepares to harvest the corpse in the bed. He looks up at me as soon as I halt time around us. DorLek has a strange look on his face, as I suppose I do too. While he is meeting me for the first time, I am seeing him for the last time.
"Have you decided how to resume in this world?" He asked me, knowing that it was my domain now.
I pointed to the form in the bed without saying a word. He knew what I meant. With a flash of light, I felt him pull me into his thumb drive before swapping me for my former self.
With a gasp I finally opened my eyes as agony coursed through my body. While I was never particularly masochistic, the pain felt good because it told me I was back. I was there in that sweaty, awful bed again, but this time I wasn't going to die. I was gonna live, and I was gonna get better, and above all I was gonna raise my daughter. Sure, I'd still keep my day job as an Editor, I'd be crazy to give that up. Not that the Guf would let me; Sluggo had been chatting up a storm since I got back. Apparently he missed me. Naw, I'd slip right back into my old life, drop my girl off at school every morning in my suburbanite minivan, then like a super powered heroine, I'd dart off to make the galaxy a better place to live. Home in time to help my daughter with her homework.
But after 187 years of training and Residency, I figured I'd earned a small vacation. As I wrapped my arms around my daughter for the first time in almost two centuries, I decided Sluggo could wait. Momma needed some down time with her baby girl. Besides, the Milky Way Galaxy wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.
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