Déjà Vu

         Only as his finger curled around the trigger and the gun didn’t make a dry click but instead a full-blown blam! that created a spurt of warm agony down his skull, did he realize that he didn’t want to kill himself after all…too late. The bullet went through his head like it was a pat of butter, embedding itself into the cement wall he was sitting next to.  Blood and brain matter splashed the floor as he pitched to the side, his fingers convulsively tightening around the gun.

         When he opened his eyes, confusion descended on him like a fuzzy gray cloud.  He could have sworn he killed himself.  That he’d pulled the trigger on his dad’s old .36 and blown his brains out.  But there he was, lying in bed, the covers mostly pushed off and tangled around his feet.

         “What the hell?” he muttered, shoving himself up on his elbows and looking at his bedside alarm clock.  It blinked 8:00 at him in glowing green letters.  In tiny letters, it reminded him that it was Wednesday.  But…he thought.  It had been Wednesday night that he’d killed himself, that he’d played one final game of Russian Roulette and lost.  Hadn’t it?

         He shook his head, clearing the cobwebs.  Clearly, it had just been an unusually vivid dream.  Just to make sure, he reached up and felt his head.  Completely undamaged in any way.  His fingers caught in a tangle, and he winced as he extricated them.

         “Wake up!” his mother called up the stairs.  “You’re going to be late for school!”

         Yep, he was awake.  He grimaced as he rolled out of bed and shoved his legs into a fresh pair of jeans and yanked on an old concert tee shirt that featured the band KoRn in faded white letters.  He remembered his sneakers were downstairs and thundered downstairs in his stocking feet.

         “Do you have to sound like a herd of elephants?” his mom mock-scolded, shaking her finger at him.  He grinned, retrieving his sneakers and lacing them up.  Just another normal school day.  He could almost forget about his dream…except that it still lingered in his mind, the sound of the shot, the feel of his finger on the trigger, the deafening sound that echoed through his ears as the bullet screamed through his head…

         He shuddered.

         “Are you all right, honey?” his mom asked.  He nodded, though he still looked pale.  Grabbing a piece of toast off the table, he snagged his backpack and went out the door.

         The world looked grayer than he remembered.  Foggy, full of clouds.  He saw a girl trudge past, her head down, hair like raven’s wings covering her face, and his breath caught.  She looked just like Elisa Andrews, who had died in a car accident last year.  But, of course, she couldn’t be.  That couldn’t be Elisa.  Could it?

         “Hello?” he said tentatively, almost timid.  The girl looked up at him with dead gray eyes.  He recoiled, nearly falling over.  It was Elisa, somehow.  The left half of her face was covered in deep purple bruises, though the right side was unmarked, giving her an oddly clown-like appearance.

         “Hello,” she said, her voice husky and flat.  “You shouldn’t be here…”

         “What do you mean?” he asked, flabbergasted.  “This is outside my house!”  But when he turned to look, it didn’t look like his house anymore.  He turned to demand what had happened, but Elisa was gone, swallowed up into the grayness.

         Unsettled, he decided to keep walking.  Going to school—that was him.  Such a good little student, just going to school.

         Another boy walked out of the mist.  Tall, lanky, looking like skin and bones.  He had gingery red hair and hunched shoulders.  A jolt of recognition ran through him.  The boy was…but he couldn’t be…

         “Evan?” he asked, his voice trembling.  Evan Macpherson had killed himself.  He had hung himself from a back stairway in the high school.  He’d used a noose made out of a plastic jumprope.

         The boy looked up and nodded.  His face was swollen and grotesque, a dusky black-purple.

         “You don’t belong here,” Evan said, like Elisa had mentioned.  “You shouldn’t be here.”

         “What do you mean?” he asked, frustrated, his voice rising to a near scream, but Evan plodded on.  Now he noticed that in one hand, Evan held a coiled plastic jumprope, rusty with blood.

         “Why are you here?” an old teacher he recognized from ninth grade, who had died in a freak carnival accident, asked, a row of ragged black stitches crossing his neck.  “You shouldn’t be here, young man.”

         His head began to ache.  When he put his hand to his head, he felt a ragged-edged, open wound.  His fingers were bright red with blood, a startling brilliant crimson in the grayness.  As he watched, the scarlet faded into dusty red, blending into the mist.

         Others loomed out of the fog, others that he recognized as dead either from accident, murder, or suicide.  They all told him that he didn’t belong, he shouldn’t be there, go home…

         “What do you mean?” he shrieked, his voice cracking.

         “This is the land of the dead,” Elisa told him, her eyes widening in surprise.  Blood oozed down one side of her face.  “Didn’t you know?”

         Only as his finger curled around the trigger and the gun didn’t make a dry click but instead a full-blown blam! that created a spurt of warm agony down his skull, did he realize that he didn’t want to kill himself after all…too late.  The bullet went through his head like it was a pat of butter, embedding itself into the cement wall he was sitting next to.  Blood and brain matter splashed the floor as he pitched to the side, his fingers convulsively tightening around the gun.

         The alarm went off and he woke up with a surprised suddenness, certain that it was all a mistake, that he shouldn’t be alive at all…