I awoke dead, eyes fluttering beneath light I wasn’t meant to see. A deluge of touch and smell flooded my nervous system. My ears gurgled and buzzed with static. A flurry of chemical signals ricocheted between dormant synapses. Over agonizing seconds, neural pathways peeled open like raw scabs. 

I writhed serpentine and senseless. Bloody, foul spit pelted my tongue, which I instinctively hacked up. I convulsed, tensed tight like a wrung towel, and then collapsed. Laying crumpled on my back, I stared at a blinding white. It faded to a tolerable fluorescence, and I was left in disbelief at my own existence. 

I was subject to an instantaneous change in setting. The rough, plastic operating table that now cradled me grated on unaccustomed skin. I yearned for my padded coffin. In it, my last sight had been a painted ceiling of cloud-garbed infants. It was the closest I’d come to my buyers, their image of permanent perfection. This new ceiling was unadorned, crumbling mineral wool, lit by a flickering strip. 

A masked man slunk into view, his voice distant like my parents’ muffled calls when I hid under the covers. In a torrential rush, my ears cleared and popped. “Eight million in the hole,” he chided. The surgeon’s barking bled into a counselor’s mawkish sermon. “Part of a luxury experience,” she had cooed. It was some bad luck I was alive. 

I had already chosen death, the last thing I had wanted to do. I had impatiently smiled through her corporate speech. I had signed away my meat as collateral. I had slipped into umbilical, opiate calm, an IV feeding into my right arm. “Ski accident in the Alps,” wormed through my morbid trance. That appendage was now a pale parasite. Of course it wouldn’t be mine anymore. 

And really, who could bear it? I was a squatter. 

The surgeon’s monologue refused to end. In protest, I sputtered an unrecognizable grunt through foreign, leather lips. My mouth merely flapped, the tongue an unfamiliar contour. I fought to sit up, mind unable to coax sinew, like I was sewn into an ill-fitting diving suit, heavy and wrong. Gone now were the cherubs from that cushioned room. I had been transplanted from a bed of cloudy bliss into a hell of pure discomfort. I was blubber. The body fit like a badly cut glove. 

“Humanitarian” and “noble” had been her words. “Eighty years on ice” were his. My recipient and benefactor was dead. I was a product without a buyer. No returns or exchanges. I had no choice but to live, the last thing I wanted to do. 

My un-reborn patron had croaked before paramedics could arrive. His icy end denied me mine. He posthumously desecrated the corporate speech that had served as my last rites. I was gristle. The surgeon concluded his explanation. My organs ached, and I cried with a face that was not my own. I begged to sleep forever again as someone else.

By Raphael Chambers

Litro Magazine

afterlife Body Horror Corporate Satire dystopia flash fiction Identity litro stories speculative fiction