A piece I'm hoping to self-publish

She lay in the garden, her heart slowing with every painful breath, staring at the star sprinkled sky. The moon bled its energy, flooding the night with its inner glow and she saw the apparitions of the afterlife within its silver light.

The fire within her stomach died and she felt the evening’s cold wind biting at her wound once more. She brought her hand up from her stomach and held it up to look at it in the moonlight.

The blood, her blood, painted her hand crimson. She turned her hand around in the light, studying it as though she was attempting to find out if the hand actually did belong to her.

She was dying, not that it was coming as a complete shock to her. She had been waiting for it for some time now, the world seemed to turn cruel a long time ago and finally, almost mercifully, the end had come.

There was what sounded like a distant and muffled siren approaching and it was enough to snap her out of her numbed state. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, aware of the fire that reignited in her stomach and was spreading upwards into her chest.

That must be the ambulance rushing valiantly to my rescue, she thought. It’s an amazing thing the body, really. The only thing missing from the scene is the white light at the end of the tunnel, but then again my eyes are closed.

She blinked her eyes open and was disappointed when, rather than the white light beckoning her forward, two heads appeared above her.

“What’s happened?” She saw the paramedic’s lips move and after a couple of seconds the words followed, like a scene from a badly dubbed movie.

“She’s been stabbed twice in the stomach. We found the boyfriend still holding the knife in the kitchen. We have him cuffed in the car over there.” She recognised the policeman that was the first to reach her.

“Jesus Christ, so much blood,” the second paramedic applied pressure on her abdomen in a desperate attempt to stop the blood loss while his colleague rooted in the kit for something that seemed to be elusive.

“Neighbours say he was always abusive to her, beat her, strangled her, you name it, a real animal.”

Was? I’m already dead to these people as well, figures.

She tried to speak, but bubbles of blood stopped the words from reaching her lips. She tried to tell them to leave her alone, to let her die, but she couldn’t, she didn’t have the strength.

The numbing sensation washed over her again and she felt as though she was being lifted from the ground by ghostly hands. The stars suddenly seemed within reach and she tried to grab them.

The policeman grabbed her hand and squeezed it, not seeming to mind the blood. “It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her, “just hang on.”

She tried to speak again, tried to tell them she didn’t want to be okay. She tried to tell them not to bother, tried to tell them that she wanted to die, but there was more blood.

Her face contorted as the last of her life bled away and pooled beneath her. She tried once more to reach for the stars, those ghostly hands lifting her ever higher, when there was a quick and violent spasm throughout her body.

Those around her vanished and were replaced with spectral visions of her past. A warm, soothing awareness engulfed her as mortality was replaced with fatality. She was finally able to reach the stars and she used them as a guide to free herself from the clutches of the living world.

Ah, that would be the white light I imagine.