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Jayme K.

The May Selected Story is by Jayme K.

Please feel free to email Jayme at: jaymekarales23@aol.com

Jayme K.

EVERYONE COMES BACK
by Jayme K.

That day, the first thing that ran through the mind of forty-seven year old Bill Fasulo was the morning drive. There was more traffic on his route than usual. What Bill hated more than anything else was being trapped in his Oldsmobile in the middle of the highway, especially while wearing clingy clothing. In this case: a long-sleeved button up and a pair of undersized dress pants.

The air conditioner in his car had been broken for the better half of a year, and being a hundred or so pounds overweight, Bill had tendencies to sweat profusely. He didn’t want to go to work smelling like an onion patch but the Boston weather had been too cold to justify rolling the windows down. It would be a twenty-two minute excursion of misery that morning. Bill figured he would overcome it.

But once he finally reached work and took a seat at his desk, his brain seemed to stop processing rational thoughts. He felt an overwhelming sense of dread and that scared him.

He tried to convince himself it wasn’t serious. Ruled it out as anxiety. He was just a little nervous about being late to work and hadn’t calmed since entering the building, that’s all. Nothing more. It had happened before…he thought.

“I need to hit the gym,” Bill mumbled to himself, adjusting his stapler to distract his buzzing mind. His heart thumped like he’d just run a mile.

Positioned behind his mahogany desk, Bill went about doing what he usually did: his job. He spent his weekdays situated in a small room centered between two other offices, uploading patient information to an outdated computer for Boston’s fourth most frequented dermatology clinic.

He dragged and clicked at various files in a documents folder, but began to worry when his heart refused to slow. Slamming up and down in his chest, he became frightened that it could stop at any second. Was he having a heart attack? Taking the shape of a rattled beehive, his thoughts became frantic. Emotions bounced between fear, frustration, and self-loathing.

Relax, you fat bastard, relax, he thought to himself. You are not having a heart attack. Stay calm and this will go away on its own.

“You all right, Bill?” Jen, his middle-aged coworker, asked. “When I walked by your office, I couldn’t help but notice that you are sweating a lot. You look like you’re hot. Are you okay? Would you like me to get you some water?”

She said he looked hot but the sweat was cold. If it weren’t for that cozy shirt, he would be shivering.

“Um,” he started, looking at her—confused. “No,” he said. “Wait, yes. Could you please bring me some water?”

He felt his chest heaving up and down. Sweat stained the pits of his white button-up shirt, making them an off-tint yellow. His face and forehead were damper than a dish sponge.

“Yeah,” Jen said, “I’ll go grab you a cup.”

She left the room. And that’s when a sudden heaviness invaded Bill’s chest. It eclipsed the numbness that presided there only moments earlier, and with it came a stinging pain to his left arm.

Bill gripped it quickly. He tried to massage the burning annoyance away. You pulled a muscle opening the door on the way in, he thought. You opened the door too fast. That’s it. Must be it.

Jen returned with a plastic cup full of ice water. One of her blonde hairs had fallen astray and landed over the rim of the oval. She handed it to him.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Bill said, breathing deeply. He downed the entire cup within seconds and then set it down on his desk, right next to his mouse pad. “Really, I am.”

“Okay…” Jen said, sounding unconvinced. “Do you want a refill?”

“I’ll get it myself,” Bill said.

As he thrust his upper body out of the chair, Bill froze. He couldn’t move his arms. Nor could he pivot himself into a standing position. Sharp, unsettling pain arose to the center of his chest. Rendered physically useless, he shot back down into his chair.

Jen’s face became a muddled mess of emotions. “Bill?” she said. It was almost a whisper.

Bill clutched his chest and continued to wheeze. His heart pattered a mile a minute, steadily edging toward a path of finality. With his wave of consciousness fleeting, Jen’s face became a blur. The cabinets behind her disappeared. Peripheral vision diminished. It was like trying to look through a pair of binoculars backward. Everything had turned into a glowing gray blotch.  

“Oh my god, Bill! I’m going to call 911!” Jen cried.

He gurgled, too overwhelmed by the pain in his chest to respond. The chair toppled over. Bill fell to his side, his head crashing against the paper shredder. A crack divided its lid.

Jen dashed out of the room.

But help would arrive too late. Four minutes too late.

Oxygen ceased flowing to his brain. And it felt good.

Pain steadily decreased. All at once, his chest felt lighter. He felt lighter. This was the closest thing to bliss. And yet, to the sudden, overwhelming change, Bill was nonplussed. It was too hard to focus. Or even think coherently.

Lights became brighter. He could feel the presence of others around him, but there was nothing there. Glowing smudges occupied his view and nothing more. It was over. This was the end.

He blinked and then…

Nothing.

But then there was light. Light everywhere. Devastatingly beautiful light. Streaming up, down, left, and right at an immeasurable pace. Constantly moving yet hard to distinguish, it made the rest of—wherever Bill was—invisible.

In spite of its brightness, the light was not bothersome. Quite the contrary, it was warm. It made Bill feel whole.

And then he remembered…the heart attack. It all came rushing back. How it had taken him down in one swift blow. A ten-ton truck parked on the center of his chest.

I’m dead, he thought. I have to be. No hospital lights are this bright. Could this—is this Heaven?

He looked around. There was no one else. Not that he could see, anyway. He couldn’t even see himself. Blinding beams masked his thickly built body, though he felt it present. As well as something else…

Bill could not detect exactly what it was, but it was there. Something else that was alive. And that something else told him that this was not Heaven. That this was not death. This, whatever this was, was something that would take some time to configure in his brain.

Where am I? Bill asked the thing. What is this?

Life, the something else answered in the back of Bill’s mind.

There was an emptiness that came from inside upon hearing the response. He should’ve been surprised. Perhaps even frightened. But he felt nothing.

Life? Bill repeated.

You’ve been dead for 3,721 years, William, the something else said. Death has passed you by.

What do you mean?

Your consciousness has been resurrected. We are reinstalling your memories and preparing them for simulation, it informed him.

I’m very confused.

You’ll understand shortly, it said. In seconds.

Why can’t I see anything? Bill asked. Then, he suddenly realized that his voice—the voice he was using to respond with mentally—had inexplicably, and seemingly uncontrollably, changed. It was not the voice he’d used to say, “I love you” to his wife Edna in the mornings. It was the voice he had used to tell his mother he loved her before the first day of second grade.

The light in front of his eyes changed color. It melded from a piercing white into a vibrant, unfamiliar bluish hue.

What’s happening? Bill asked.

His voice was different, again, and no longer childlike. He had sounded like himself during his heyday in college, pioneering WTBU, the beat of Boston University. He manned the college radio station and was an on-air talent before shifting his major to political science, and eventually dropping out.

This world is yours, the thing told him. You now know it all.

And he did. All of it. Every aspect of life from the beginning of recorded history until now was now implemented in his brain…except there was no brain.

There was no physical William “Bill” Fasulo any longer. Just a strand of DNA uploaded to the world’s most advanced technological program. He was now a file, along with every other living and deceased human damned to the planet Earth. 

As the bluish hue melted away, Bill saw something new—something familiar—as it took form. He looked down, and could now see a pair of lively young hands. His hands.

My body is being recreated, Bill thought.

The program confirmed it.

A rectangular shape emerged into his left palm, seemingly out of thin air. It was a thick piece of wood. Weightless in his grip.

Bill looked up. The light was gone. In its place was the diamond field where he had played baseball as a child. The sky was a purple and orange canvas, mixing colors only the way an artist could. Saddled up at home plate, he stood, a bat in one hand. He reached two gloved fingertips to his head, and was greeted by the hard feel of a helmet cupping his ears.

Is this real? he wondered.

You know that it is, the program affirmed. It echoed in his mind.

Lining the bench to his right were all of his friends, decked out in matching blue and grey jerseys. Even the ones who didn’t play baseball.

Everyone comes back, the program said beneath his helmet. Everyone.

Jayme Karales is the author of the novel Disorderly and the eBook Youth. He is also incredibly handsome. You can follow him at @jaymekarales on Twitter.

Disorderly