Edgar was panicking slightly, he was running late. He was also a little angry.

“A little dusting of snow is no reason to drive 20 miles per fucking hour!” he yelled through his teeth and groaned but wasn’t about to lay on the horn or try to pass with barely enough room. He waited patiently, or not so much, for the car in front of him to turn before he could finally accelerate.

He had an interview for a new job today, no maybe the start of a new career! He needed this and knew he may as well turn around if he was late. Six years in the Air Force hadn’t taught him many skills useful in the private sector, meaning he was stuck being a barely above minimum wage security guard. This new job working as a corrections officer gave him hope. Besides a higher wage he would get decent benefits and the chance at advancement; something impossible when his only superior also happened to be the owner of the company he currently worked for. He couldn’t help but think ‘greedy dirtbag’ as the thought of his current employer crossed his mind.

The work itself wasn’t too bad, maybe a bit boring. The thing that got him was his boss always kept his employees below the threshold of what the state considered full-time. Edgar and his coworkers couldn’t claim full-time employment and his boss wasn’t required to offer medical, dental, or vision insurance to part-time workers; and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be offering it without being forced to. Besides that, nothing was provided for by his employer, uniforms had to be bought, the firearm was Ed’s personal weapon, and even his patrol vehicle was his own pickup with a magnetic sticker on the door. Ed had tried to request compensation for gas or mileage and was told to get out and re-read the employment contract. Sure enough, he’d signed that he was solely responsible for that.

He knew he’d have to stick with his crappy job unless he found something better but living in a small city meant there wasn’t a ton of options. He knew some farms and construction jobs would be opening soon but he doubted he’d get in with a decent employer with his general lack of experience.

He was knowledgeable but there’s a difference between growing up in a small farm town and learning the basics to actually knowing how to operate a tractor. The same could be said with construction, helping his dad build a shed a couple of years ago and mortaring in some bricks on his brother's patio retaining wall was far from building a house. The random trivial information he gleaned off the web when he was bored didn’t count either.

A flash of red ahead brought Ed back to reality. He was rapidly approaching the intersection with county road 12 and was already close to the stop line. Startled, he hit the breaks a bit too hard and started to skid out into the intersection.

Years of driving on icy roads gave him plenty of experience and he released the breaks and turned into the skid trying to straighten himself out. He couldn’t help but notice the police cruiser sitting on the other side of the intersection ‘hey, sorry I’m late. I wasn’t paying attention and ended up skidding through a red light. Local PD saw the whole thing and gave me a citation. We still good?’ didn’t sound like the best reason to be less than punctual, especially for an interview at the sheriff's department. He subconsciously decided he’d cancel last minute and go home if the cop pulled him over and hope for something else.

Huuuuuuuuuuuuun…. Huuuuuuuun!

Ed had just enough time to look away from the police cruiser to see a set of headlights and the large grill of an 18-wheeler before it plowed into his driver's door… After that there was nothing. Not a sight, sound, feeling, or thought. If it wasn’t for his thoughts coming back a few moments later he would have never been aware of his fate.

**********

“Have to watch out for that black ice, ya know?” He heard a male voice but still couldn’t see anything, at least his hearing was back. The voice had a distinctly north Midwest/Canadian accent. Living in Iowa it wasn’t a strange thing to hear.

He tried to speak but found he couldn’t. He remembered what he’d seen before he blacked out and thought of the person that spoke. Was it the cop? A Paramedic? The truck driver? It didn’t sound panicked or condescending, so whoever it was could at least keep calm in a situation like this, even if their comments weren’t helpful.

He hoped he was sedated because he realized his arms weren’t responding either. He was starting to get scared as his consciousness unclouded and more of his situation came to light.

“OH! That’s my bad, you can go ahead and speak now,” the man said after a few moments of silence.

“Am I at the hospital? Why can’t I open my eyes? I can't move!” Ed spat out quickly. If he had thought about it, someone with the amount of trauma that his body sustained should be in at least some pain and have difficulty speaking so soon after being either intubated or sedated.

“Sorry to have to tell you this bud, you’re not in the hospital, you don’t have eyes at the moment, and your spine is basically shattered but you’re not technically paralyzed, well you are but you aren’t…. hmmm…..” the man seemed confused.

“What the hell does that mean?!” Ed half-shouted, again not realizing how weird it was that he could even do it.

“Sorry, I mean you can’t move your body because you no longer have a spinal cord, which would mean your paralyzed but does it matter that you don’t technically have a body at the moment either? Without a body to be paralyzed, you can’t really say you are. Then again, incorporeal beings can normally move but you can’t…. so again paralyzed by that standar-” he seemed to be amusing himself.

“Where the hell am I!” Ed full-on shouted this time.

“Oh, your body’s being extracted from your truck but offda, it’s not in good shape. Sorry, I can’t be sending you back to that mess,” the man chuckled, “To answer your question, I guess the closest you know this as is purgatory. Sorry again bud, you’re dead.”

Ed’s emotions jumped back in forth between shocked because of the news and mad as hell at the orderly or whoever this was for making light of the situation and failing to answer anything seriously.

“No, you really are dead. The human body can’t withstand that kind of force. It was ‘honk, honk’, ‘crush’, ‘splat’” the man said while emphasizing the last word with the sound of his hands clapping together loudly, “I know it’s confusing, you’ll get it in a few minutes. WELL, not really, ya know? Being that I need to pull your memories.”

Ed deadpanned, or he would have if he had a face to pull off the expression. The expression only lasted for a second before his ‘face’ went blank without emotion. He couldn’t remember what he was talking about anymore. He could faintly hear a distant voice yelling something but couldn’t hear what it was but he heard a name. ‘Ramiel? Who the hell is Ramiel’ he thought, ‘Wait, am I Ramiel??? Why are they yelling at-’

The memory of whoever was yelling had disappeared. Ed just laid there, confused as to why he couldn’t see anything. Was he in the hospital?

“Hmmmmm…. You know what, I’m just gonna pull your personal memories, technical memories you can keep…. Yeah why not,” an unknown male voice said, Ed had forgotten he’d already spoken to this being, “you’re headed to Erda anyways. They could probably use a bit of help, although I’m not sure that knowledge of how to use a smartphone is going to help much there. Hmmm, they’ve already rated it unsalvageable? Ugh, that sucks for you, the bigwigs basically giving you and every other decent person on that planet a 0% chance of survival. Well, you’ve got a few decades it looks like... Oh well, boss is angry, and looking at the file you’ll probably be dead again in a few years anyways. I’ll just pull this last bit of old stuff plus ya know, the memories you’ve gotten from this conversation... Oh hell yes! Recent, pristine memory of season 8 binged back to back!!!!”

‘Season eight?’ Ed thought as it was silent for a few moments.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!!!! How could they end it like that! Ugh!!” the being yelled, clear to anyone nearby that he’d absorbed the memory. Well, clear to anyone except Ed, who had no idea what was going on.

“Nevermind…. I know you won’t remember any of this, being the best at what I do and all but good luck out there, don’t get eaten!” the being said, sounding disappointed with the first word but getting obnoxiously cheerful after that. Ed forgot all about the being at that moment.

Things went quiet again and stayed that way, only random clips of memory flashed past him. He could still think though, kind of. He felt sluggish, almost drunk like he knew all the memories were there but his brain wasn’t working right to recall them. It took forever to try to remember anything. He tried counting to see how long he laid like that but he kept getting confused, he also slowly became aware that it felt like he was floating in something….

Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub...

A quiet thumping sound eventually made itself known. He had no idea how long it’d gone on before he noticed it, it seemed so faint. The sound sounded vaguely familiar but with his mind scrambled as it was he was having a hard time remembering it. He tried counting the thumping sounds that he could even slightly feel but still no luck. Meanwhile, the thumping continued to get louder and louder. Finally, it reached its crescendo.

Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub…

Over time he learned new things about his surroundings, he was in some sort of padded container. He was pretty sure there was something or someone else in there with him. He could feel it moving around. First on occasion, then on a regular basis. He could hear voices from outside but he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t…. it wasn’t…. What was the name of the language he was thinking in? How could he be fluent in something without even remembering the word that labeled it? Of course English is a proper noun, which was lumped in with every other proper noun in his personal memories but he didn’t know that anymore.

He spent what felt like months floating around. His padded room, or cell, seemed to shrink, and no matter what he couldn’t get it to stretch back out. Sometimes when he’d push, something would push back from the other side and it was considerably stronger than he was. At least with the room shrinking he could for sure say he wasn’t alone in there, he shared the space with something. He wasn’t quite sure what to think of that. Part of him was scared because he didn’t know what it was but another part felt comforted because he was alone without it.

He sat like that for what felt like ages until finally, a big change occurred.

**********

“He’s so precious, he looks just like his handsome Da” a woman laying in bed covered in sweat cooed. Her eyes laid on the baby boy being cleaned by the village midwife, Aebe. He was wrinkled and covered in yellowish-white goo.

“See little Erin, I told you he’d be comin’ out right after ya! Little brothers always follow ‘round and pesterin’ their big sisters,” an older lady who resembled the first chuckled while holding a baby girl wrapped in a soft but simple blanket, “Hild, ‘ave you picked out a name for my grandson yet?”

“Jon,” the new mother smiled softly as she took both the babies into her arms. Holding them both for the first time, “Erin and Jon…”