In the Void Behind My Deaths by Effie Seiberg

In my first death I died alone, pierced through the belly with a velociraptor talon. I bled out before I felt much of anything, floating into a black void. It was quiet and and peaceful and still,

and then I pecked my way out of an egg, slimy and cold.

By my third death, stomach empty from a particularly hard winter, I looked around. The blackness was a void, uniformly empty in all directions, darker than the blackest black. The emptiness brought peace, but loneliness.

During my thirteenth death, after the arrow-bristled buffalo who’d gored me faded away, I wondered if others saw the same dark nothingness.

And for a brief moment I noticed something at the edge of my vision, a slight aberration amidst the uniform blackness of the void. Before I could look at it more closely I was interrupted by the sensation of being born onto sand, cold and wet and bright.

I looked for it again as soon as I could, first while being crushed by a python, and again while a childhood plague swept my village. And again and again.

In my ninetieth death, after the inner flesh of my leg turned purple with gangrene from a spear wound that wouldn’t heal, I wondered. Would others, dead from this same war, see something too in their voids? Would my wife see the shimmer of black-on-slightly-different-black when it was her turn?

There.

It was the tiniest thing, a shy hint of something in the corner.

I reached out and… emerged blood-smeared and crying, dragging a placenta behind me into a leather tent, before I could touch whatever it was.

In death after death, I tried to touch the thing. Each time it felt like I got a little closer.

During my four hundredth and sixty third death, asleep in bed with a stroke after a long life well-lived, I thought fondly of my baby grandchild. He too had this perseverance, trying a task over and over, even if he fell each time. This time when I reached out into the void, remembering how his pudgy hands would reach out to me, I stretched further than ever before and… my fingers brushed it.

Something papery, like peeling wallpaper. I reached out again and gave it a scratch, and managed to pull a small piece away. It turned to ash in between my fingertips, and the next thing I knew I was again shrieking at the indignity of being born.

During the next several hundred deaths I worked at it, tearing bits layer after layer. Until one death, while I was wondering if I’d ever see my spouse again in a new life, my hand popped through.

On the other side of the papery layers was a glowing milky liquid which clung to my hand as I pulled it back. It was as lightweight and sticky as spider webs, with swirls of opalescent lilac and coral and the occasional hints of sky blue and lime, a burst of pastels against the black void. I wanted to look at it more closely but instead I was born again, this time in a ceramic tub filled with warm water.

It was ok. I was used to patience.

The next death was surprising, an aerocar crash that sent my body hurtling through the biodome. My family was there as well, and as the world faded I wondered if they were ok. I hoped that if they did survive they didn’t see me.

This time the hole in the papery layers was larger. The glowing substance twinkled like the clouds of nanobots my childhood friend used to dance in. And without knowing what I was doing or why, I pushed my whole self through the hole and dove into the pearlescent liquid.

It felt more like flying than like swimming, and I tried to breathe and couldn’t and panicked but then I realized I didn’t need to breathe so it was fine. The further in I swam-flew, the warmer it got, like the warmth of the sun on your skin on a summer day.

All around me the liquid was uniform in its cacophony of glistening pastels. Something was different this time. Should I try to go back to the void, or even try to go all the way back into life? What if this meant I could see my family again? 

I tried to paddle-glide back to the hole I’d gone in through, but there was nothing there anymore. I floated in the material, wondering what would happen next, wondering what my husband would do if he were in this situation.

And suddenly, there. In the distance, a speck that turned into a blob. It was him, swimflying towards me in the pearlescent liquid. It didn’t look like him, just a patch of liquid that looked slightly different from the rest, a little more… dense, perhaps, and glowing, but it was definitely clearly him. I swam up (noticing that my hands were also just blobs of luminous dense liquid, and the rest of me too) and we embraced, becoming a single unit. Soon (or was it eons later) our children showed up and joined us. And their spouses. And soon old friends, and lovers, and my grandmother from the steppes who braided beads into my hair, and my spouse who liked to ice fish, and my wife who taught me to fly a helicopter, and my friend who shared her burrow with me when I was chased by a fox, and their friends and their spouses and on and on and on

until we were all there, a dense glowing blob of connections, full of the love that brought us all closer together, and closer, and closer, feeling a glorious growing pressure, until we were an infinitely dense mass of light and love

and we exploded outward and the world began anew.