Revelations

The frozen dew coated her with a slight icy sheen, turning the skin a pale blue. My skin. At least I was finally certain of that. I had been sitting here next to my body for what felt like no time at all; my memory was short.

I tried to touch the wounds at her neck and torso, but was unable to. They were not present on the current me. Maybe if I concentrated hard enough I could actually touch my old body, maybe even find a way to get back inside.

"I wouldn't even try that. It never works and you'll just be wasting your time." I looked behind me to see a girl that was about my age and looked so very similar to me-long brown hair, blue eyes, pale. We could easily have been mistaken for sisters.

"How did you know what I was going to do?"

"Because we've all tried that. You're new here." Her voice was emotionless, cold.

"Where are we?"

"I have no idea. None of us do, really."

It had just registered to me that maybe this same thing had happened to this girl. Maybe she had the answers. "So this has happened to you too?"

"It's happened to all of us here. Come on. You're not going to want to stick around much longer anyway." She started walking towards the trees to the right, not even checking to see if I was going to follow her.

I walked in her footsteps, not wanting to be left alone here with my former self for company. "Why not?"

"I guess you'll figure it out anyway, so I'll be blunt. You're dead. We're all dead."

You'd think that a statement such as that would have shocked me or startled me in some way; oddly it did not. All I could feel was this overwhelming sense of nothingness, a cold that permeated my mind and replaced all my memories. Surely I had possessed some from when I was alive…

We quickly walked through the woods to a cluster of flat rocks that appeared to be part of some grand design. Eight women sat on these stones, so similar to the two of us, all with the same long brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and in their early twenties. They were my carbon copies with very slight changes and they were sitting and waiting for my arrival. This was so surreal, and I began to wonder if I should feel faint or at least feel something.

If what the girl had said was true then we were all dead, all here in this place together. Then that had been my body. I was still me, but I was dead. Dead. No, that could not be possible. I would have remembered dying, right? But then I did not even remember how I got to this place. Then I realized I could not feel the ground beneath me. I could not feel the wind that was going through the trees. There was no temperature around me. She had been right and I really was dead. And all of these girls, my sisters, were dead as well. How long had they been here? How long would I be here?

One girl sat in the middle of the boulders. She looked less like me than the girl that had found me. This one was older and the shortest by far, but the other girls deferred to her with an odd respect. Could she have been the first one to come to this place? The girl that brought me pointed in my direction, "Here's the new one. I told you all it was time for a new one."

Each of them looked me up and down as if searching for something, hope in their eyes. They eventually all sighed and turned away as if I were lacking something important. The girl in the middle still studied me long after the others had stopped. "Well, she's not perfect, so I guess there will be more. I'm Aimee." Who was I? For some reason I could not remember. Did I have a name? As if reading my thoughts, she continued, "I'll just call you "Ten" until you can remember your name. That takes a while. Everything takes a while, just so you know."

This was nothing like what I knew of death. It was supposed to be a place where your loved ones that had gone before met you and welcomed you into paradise. Instead I was in a void where I was separate from the world continuing around me and the only people I could talk to were in the same boat I was. Maybe this was hell. "How did we get here?"

Aimee looked at me, a slight frown marring an otherwise pretty face. "I can't tell you that yet. You'll remember when you can handle knowing."

"If you know everything then why are you still here?" I felt I should be angry, should feel some emotion, but everything just seemed so gray.

"I don't know. None of us do, so we wait. We don't sleep. We just exist until we don't anymore."

I knew she was right. There was no choice, so I just sat down and began to wait for the end, not knowing when it would come or if it ever would. This could not possibly be my afterlife. I looked around at my new friends, the same dullness I felt inside of me permeating them through and through. My identical ghost sisters all looked deep in thought as if chasing some lost dream, something that they could almost touch but was just out of reach. I leaned against number nine and found she felt remarkably solid, the first solid thing I had touched since I awoke outside of my body. She leaned back and I let myself finally relax and let my mind wander.

Maybe they were right and the secret out of this place was just to exist and to remember. If that were true I would try my hardest. My face took upon the same concentrated look as the girls around me while we each tried to remember parts of our lives long passed and put the pieces together in hopes of ascension.