LIFE, DEATH, and BACK is available now. Here now for your reading pleasure is an exclusive excerpt:
Resurrection
CHAPTER 1
It was eighteen years to the day. Approximately one hour to
the time, Bryan Adam Caleb had passed away. His sudden
resurgence left him in a panic. Six feet deep within the bowels
of the earth, Bryan stirred and came awake. Gasping, his
chortled screams muffled by the lined pine box that had been
chosen for his eternal resting place.
Sightless in the dark, he clawed at the box top, ripping
and striking until finally he burst through. The thick mounds
of dirt that covered the casket fell all around him. The soil
tumbled through his matted hair; fell across his shoulders,
into his mouth and in his eyes. Feeling as though locked in a
vertical tunnel, he moved through it like a rat in a sewer,
anxious to see the light of day.
When he finally broke the surface, he was chagrined to
find the moon shone down on him from the midnight sky. Its
yellow hues danced off the surroundings, and impaired
Bryan's sight further.
He fell to his back and covered his reborn-eyes against
the earthly world. Eighteen years had passed since the day the
auto accident had taken his life. Since that time he had come
Life, Death, and Back 93
to know another way of life, an ethereal life. Now, catapulted
back into the realm of the living, what he wanted, needed to
know, was why?
Slowly, guttural screams crept into his throat and then
echoed deep into the night. He wailed as though he were a
newborn child brought to life for the first time, when indeed
it seemed to be his second passage at life.
Sustaining his shouting, he finally uncovered his face and
looked with his new eyes. What he saw were markers, dozens
of them laid out in neat little rows down across a grassy null.
He sat up and looked towards the front of the hole he just
erupted from. Indeed, standing straight, tall, and bearing his
name was his own marker.
Bryan quickly pulled his legs up from the hole and
crawled over to look in. Down past the darkness he saw the
casket, torn asunder by his emergence. His lips parted in awe
and his breathing became rapid.
Breathing.
He had not taken an actual breath in such a long time.
The crisp night air seemed to burn his lungs with each
inhalation. He was alive.
Bryan's world spun out of control. Life and death were
becoming a shared unity with one seeming to cancel out the
other. He didn't know which side of the spectrum he was
labeled.
So many years ago, he was killed; his life extinguished.
Then, he was able to walk the grounds of Earth only in
spiritual form, forsaken of any sensory details. Now, he felt
the ragged grass beneath his fingers as he perched over his
plot. He smelled the cold, musty soil and the stale odor of
long lasting death emitting from the bowels within.
Concentrating now, he was able to visualize more clearly
and took in the meanings behind what he saw, what he felt.
There was no body in the open grave beneath him. There was
no indication only his soul had come awake, as it had upon
the brutal impact of his initial death.
As he looked over his hands and arms, he saw no decay,
no time worn distinctions that any human body would have
94 Cynthia Vespia
undergone after so long in burial. He was flesh and blood
with muscles and fibers, skin, and sinew: all intact.
Frightened, he scrambled back from his grave, only to
back into another. He bumped the large stone and it startled
him. Looking around at the dozens of plots, he sensed fear,
an all-encompassing fear he never knew before.
Once he had felt there had been no other place safer than
a cemetery with its calm and simple solitude, but if he were to
once again rise from his final resting place, what was to say
that at any minute the rest of the bodies laid out wouldn't do
the same?
He forced himself to his feet and ran as fast as he could.
His feet pounded the ground beneath him with each step, and
seemed to echo at the back of his skull.
“Where are you going?”
For a moment, Bryan thought the voice came from his
own subconscious. He truly did not know where he was
going, just he needed to get away quickly, but the voice had
lingered too long on the night air just by Bryan’s ear. It
caught him by surprise and tripped him up.
He came down hard upon the cemetery floor, feeling the
impact of the hit. A wandering soul would feel no pain, but
Bryan’s own pain sensors were fully active as he hit the
ground. He rolled to his back. His eyes searched through the
blackened night for the speaker.
He didn't have far to search. Standing over him, clad in a
white tunic, his straight blonde locks framing his stone jaw,
was Charlie: Bryan's own guardian when he had been alive.
The angel who helped guide him through his passing and the
dubious tasks that had come with it.
Charlie helped Bryan accept his fate, by making him help
another who was in distress and showing him what it meant
to be a guardian in his own right. It had cleared his way of
thinking, and Brian had no longer felt cheated of his life.
Helping the young girl, Lisa, out of her turmoil had been an
awakening for Bryan in his death, as much as it was for Lisa
in her life.
Life, Death, and Back 95
It had been many years since Lisa needed Bryan's
guidance. She reached a straight and narrow path, leaving her
self-destruction behind her.
Bryan had become mostly recluse, retired in his efforts, in
his spiritual guardianship. He easily could sense this new state
of affairs had nothing to do with that.
As though reading his thoughts, Charlie extended a hand
and said, “Come, I will enlighten you to your new affairs.”
Bryan hesitated to reach out for Charlie. He had become
a trusted companion during their time together, and Bryan
had learned a lot from him, but he was not certain of
anything now. He felt a strange rush of emotions, like a bad
head-trip or a nightmare.
Bryan found himself stuttering. “Wha...what’s going on?”
Charlie re-extended his hand, and Bryan finally took hold
of it. As he drew to his feet, he relinquished Charlie's grasp
quickly, and put a considerable distance between them.
“What’s going on?” he repeated.
“You are going to have to accept the fact there are many
things you won’t understand tonight,” Charlie told him. “But
the one thing you must accept is He is pleased with you.”
Bryan blinked hard several times, trying to sustain his
vision in the magnificent glow of moonlight that was all
around them. His mind raced, as he tried to take in and
decipher the cryptic way of speaking Charlie always used.
“Does that mean I get a second chance?”
“For a time.”
“What does that mean? Why are you being so vague?”
Charlie lurched forwards, and Bryan pulled back
instinctively. It was a knee-jerk reaction of fear. He wasn’t
sure why it occurred. Charlie and he had bonded; they had a
fraternal like companionship. There was no obvious reason
he should think to have any fear toward Charlie.
His drastic changes lay heavy in the air. There was
something unpleasant coming his way. Locking eyes with the
angel before him, Charlie spelled out the personal deterrence.
“It’s your kid. Something has to be done about your kid.”
To find out what happens
ORDER NOW!
This means that no matter how much you may love a paragraph or even a character if they don't work in conjunction with the plot and pacing you must kill them. Eliminate the problem.
