Okay, so we all have bad days.

We get up late.

We miss the bus.

We forget to brush our teeth, put on matching socks, or grab our wallets when we're racing out the door.

And, sometimes, we get run over by ambulances when we're crossing the street on the way to important job interviews and are reduced to bloody smears on the road.

What I'm trying to say is that, if bad days had a scale of one to ten, mine was somewhere around an eleven.

Maybe eleven and a half.

The irony of the manner of my death wasn't lost on me.

The sound of wailing sirens approaching normally meant—at least in my mind—that some heroic paramedics were on their way to save the life of some poor soul in dire need of their help. It had seldom meant oh-shit-that-looks-like-it's-driving-right-at-me. Yet, that was exactly the thought that occupied my mind in my final moments.

Okay, that's not true.

It was actually, "Fuck."

When death bears down upon you, shrieking, cutting through traffic, and going way over the speed limit, you don't have a lot of time to create eloquent thoughts. It is literally: Fuck. Smack. Dead. Then there's all the screaming and stuff because, you know, people react when they see someone get turned into jam in a busy street.

Thanks to the invention of the smartphone, my death was on YouTube within minutes. I never got to find out just how many hits that video got, but I imagined it was in the high thousands.

Hell, maybe it went viral.

I was probably a clickbait article already.

Girl gets hit by ambulance; you'll never guess the one crazy thing that happened next.

Well, I could.

Death.

I just saved you from a hundred pop-up ads. You're welcome.

Although I was pretty much dead at the scene, the paramedics did still try to save me. Honestly, it was the least they could do after killing me. Well, the least they could have done was to leave me there and skip the country, but I appreciate they stopped and attempted to do something about it. It was like one of those medical TV shows with the patient being strapped to a gurney and all that jazz, except I was the patient, and I wasn't curled up on the sofa with my sister, making her watch all the gross gory parts. The journey to the hospital was a lot of me coming back for a few seconds, giving my would-be rescuers a flash of hope, and then sticking up the metaphorical finger before I crashed out again. I couldn't pinpoint the precise moment when I decided I was tired of that game and tuned out of the world, but it had to be before we reached our destination.

My family weren't waiting for me when we arrived. It takes time for people to be contacted when someone is alone and needs to be identified. There are all kinds of checks to be done, questions to be asked, and tough conversations to be had. I was long gone by the time my family wept in dramatic soap opera fashion all over my body.

That's not entirely true.

As far as they were concerned, I was gone.

As far as I was concerned, I was still stuck inside my gross body, listening to them work through their grief. I couldn't reach out to hold their hands or to tell them it would all be okay. It wouldn't all be okay, but that was the sort of comforting lie you told the people you loved when you wanted them to feel better.

I wasn't sure how long I'd been dead by the time they arrived. I might have been in the morgue for an hour, or maybe a whole day. I didn't think they would leave me out under a sheet for a day. Bodies stank, and I'd be pretty ripe by then. Besides, they'd have tried to contact my family as soon as possible, just in case I pulled through. Not that there'd been much danger of that happening. The ambulance had done a thorough job of wiping me out. Mentally, I sighed. There wasn't much else for me to do but think about my predicament.

Was I going to be stuck in this corpse forever?

Well, that sucked.

As if things weren't bad enough, I was going to have to sit in my body until it rotted away underground. Oh, but they might cremate me. That didn't feel like the better option. Watching my body incinerate would be quite a grim spectacle.

Okay, I was officially depressed.

I had to think about something else. It was just super hard to focus on much of anything, given my condition. Or lack thereof. I mean, did you really have a condition when you were dead? You didn't have much of anything anymore, other than the prospect of becoming worm food and the less I lingered on that, the better.

One problem of my state, besides the obvious, was that time slipped by in strange chunks. A mere blink after fretting about being under a sheet and stinking up the place, I was rattled off into some dark storage drawer listening to the faint sounds beyond my metal tomb as the staff carried on about their day as though there wasn't a twenty-three-year-old woman lying cold and broken just beyond their sight.

It was as I mentally dividing up my belongings between my friends and family and hoping that my sister wouldn't read my diary because I wasn't always totally polite about her, that I heard it. A voice. Not the ethereal lull of an angel or the familiar tones of a long-passed grandparent.

No, it was a stern male voice that asked, "Are you just going to lie there in that cadaver all day?"

So, if you're reading this, I assume that you've not been dead. I can tell you that, when it happens, you can do little else but lie around all day. It sorta goes with the territory. Limbs are very difficult to move when you don't have an ounce of life left. Therefore, I assumed that the person speaking was a mortician in conversation with a colleague. I mean, he couldn't have been speaking to me. Not unless he planned on conducting a séance.

"You know," the man continued, "it's rude to ignore people, Mackenzie Bowen."

My eyes widened. Not my body's eyes. They would never do that again. But whatever eyes I was using to stare at the inside of my body's eyelids were wide with shock. Something wrapped around my ankle. Well, not my—you know what? I didn't know what I was at that moment. I might have been a cluster of stardust or a swirling vortex of goo sloshing around inside a corpse, but if I had a human form, then something that felt like fingers were on my whatever ankle, and they had an iron grip.

All it took was one firm tug, and something yanked me out of the storage drawer and my fleshy prison all at once. The mortuary was too bright compared to the confines of a steel box. Light pressed in around me and my back slammed against the floor. I drew in a deep breath like I was finally coming up for air after being held underwater. My lungs hadn't needled until the man had touched me, yet now it felt like I'd been drowning without knowing it. The sting came all at once, burning and tingling across my skin. It was gone in an instant. The kind of pain that follows a band-aid being torn free. Made sense when I considered I'd just been ripped straight out of my body.

I scrabbled upright and realised then just how wrong the world around me was. I felt the floor beneath my bare feet. It was solid yet disconnected. Like a thin sheen of water or air had formed a barrier between it and me. The colours in the room were toned down, as though someone had played with the settings on a television. At least I felt present and solid. I pressed my hands to my body, turned them over, and inspected my arms. There were no scars. No bruises. No open wounds. Just the ordinary me I remembered being earlier that day, but in a simple white cotton dress that didn't look like it'd come from my wardrobe. It certainly wasn't the body of someone who'd lost a fight with a speeding vehicle.

Either I'd made some miraculous recovery, or something wasn't quite right.

"Are you done?" the man asked.

I'd almost forgotten he was there.

The man who'd torn me from my carcass watched me as if he saw this reaction every day. He was dressed in a formal black suit with a white dress shirt, waistcoat, and a thin black tie knotted so neatly that it was almost military. He ran a finger down over the paper affixed to his clipboard, came to the end of the page, and then flipped to the next.

His brows became increasingly furrowed the longer he spent repeating this process, until finally he told me, "You're not on my list," as if my death had inconvenienced him somehow. I opened my mouth and before I could utter a word, he pointed a finger of warning and snarled, "Shut up, I'm not losing my job over some administrative cock up."

"Your job?" I asked.

The man rolled his eyes and tucked the clipboard back under his arm. "I hate when I get the stupid ones."

"Hey! Don't call me stupid!" I snapped. "I don't even know who the Hell you are!"

Was it a good idea to fire back at him? I didn't know. All I knew was that I was having a terrible day and none of it was my fault. I didn't think that it made me stupid to have questions about what was going on. Any sane person would. If I'd taken it all in stride and hadn't asked a thing, surely that would've been more a point of concern than my confusion.

"Who the Hell indeed," he muttered. The man sighed and tucked his clipboard under his arm so that he could give me his full attention. "My name is Leon. I'll be your Reaper today."

I'm sure you've heard of Reapers before. Cloaks. Scythes. Usually, a tad skinnier and more skeletal than the man standing before me. Rarely pictured with clipboards, but I would accept that modern population booms brought about a need for lists and other organisational changes. Although I was certain that he couldn't make me any more deceased than I was already, I still backed away from the man. I ought to have collided with the storage drawers, but I passed right through them until I was standing upright and somehow through several bodies like I was in some shoddy green-screen special effect. I turned slowly and, through the gloom, found myself confronted with my own broken, battered face. Pale, blue-lipped, with a tangle of blonde hair matted with blood.

Horror-struck to be confronted with my corpse, I leapt back out of the cabinets and declared, "I'm dead!"

"Finally noticed, did you?" Leon asked.

I rounded on him. "Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is shit?"

"What makes you think I care about bedside manner?" he countered.

I waved a hand towards the cabinet. "Because I'm fucking dead! Would a little sympathy kill you?"

"Sorry for your loss," his voice dripped with sarcasm. "Can we go, now?"

"Go where?"

"The Beyond."

My breath hitched in my throat. The Beyond sounded so final. So serious. So... beyond. Like, beyond what? Anything could be beyond. It could be Heaven, Hell, maybe nothing at all. It might be endless white for as far as the eye could see or just eternal darkness. I couldn't imagine Leon was carrying an informative pamphlet about the wonders that awaited me in The Beyond with pictures of elderly people playing chess and, I don't know, angels giving classes on how to play the harp or something.

"Sure, okay..." Even as I nodded along with the idea, the quiver in my voice and my inching steps toward the door betrayed my intention. "That sounds great. Who wouldn't want to just go with some random guy to a random place where random stuff probably happens, right?"

Leon sighed. "Please, don't do what you're thinking about doing."

"I'm not thinking anything!"

"Well, I can believe that," he muttered.

I jerked my arm upward and pointed to a random spot behind Leon. "Oh my God, what's that?"

Although he'd already guessed my plan, Leon succumbed to human instinct and turned to look over his shoulder. It was in that split second that I turned and ran for the door. I reached for the handle, but there was no need. Just like the cabinet, I passed through it like a ghost, and thank God for that, otherwise, I'd have hit it with enough speed to break my nose.

The last thing I heard from Leon as I made my escape through the door was, "Why do they always try to run?"