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“I’m sorry,” she said gently, her eyes falling to the thread she had picked from the couch. It lay on the carpet by her feet now, an erstwhile companion that would be vacuumed up the next time she did her housework. She didn’t know exactly when, though, and somehow that reminded her of the fragility of humankind. They didn’t know when they would be picked—when they would be sucked back up into a vacuum and recycled, deposited back into the cooler for another round.
“I’m sorry too,” Ben said, before clearing his throat.
She sighed, but she hadn’t given up. Not yet. “Just… think about it,” she almost begged, fighting to keep her own voice steady. “That’s all I ask.”
A heartbeat passed. “I’ll try to keep an open mind.”
A knock made Bunny jump, and she glanced in the direction of her apartment door before she realized that the knock had actually been on Ben’s office door.
“Gotta go,” he announced, his voice brisk and businesslike for the benefit of whoever was on the other side of the door.
“Okay,” she said, resigning herself to there being no point in arguing with him… right now, at least. “Bye. Love you.”
Ben’s voice softened a little. “Love you too. Talk soon.”
As the call ended, Bunny glanced out of her living room window. While she’d been talking, the sun had vanished and the street had gotten dark.
* * *
It wasone of those bizarre dreams where you know you’re dreaming, but you’re powerless to wake yourself the hell up. She was lying in an expansive field of yellow flowers—daffodils, maybe? Their scent should have been overwhelming but it wasn’t. She was lazing around amongst their stalks like she didn’t have a care in the world. That was, until the baby started crying.
She sat upright in the field, turning her head this way and that in an attempt to ferret out which direction the noise was coming from. But then it began to echo on two or three different sides of her, triangulating. Deliberately trying to confuse her. Pushing herself to her feet, Bunny strained to see anything that wasn’t a flower but everything was a sea of yellow.
One foot in front of the other, she combed her fingers across the tops of the blooms. The crying got louder, louder, and then died off before coming from a completely different direction. She felt a rising fear, a panic that she would never find this baby that was all alone and crying to pitifully. But at the same time, she knew that if she could just sit up in real life, the horrible dream would be over.
By the time she woke, fuzzy-haired and cotton-mouthed, Bunny felt like she had barely slept at all. One of the perils of being on-call in the ER was the catnaps you caught between emergencies. Your brain never fully relaxed enough to rest, so you could snap to attention at a moment’s notice and kid yourself that you felt a modicum more refreshed than when you’d lain down.
Somehow, working night shift was even worse. Exhaustion seeped into her bones as her body protested the thought of doing anything at all during the daylight hours. She only started feeling like she was alive before soon feeling she might like to crawl back into bed again. If Death was personified, and she could put souls into people, she sure as hell hoped vampires weren’t real. If she ever got bit, she didn’t think she could handle the lifestyle.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Bunny sat with her head in her hands until she felt like she was human enough to stand. A shower was needed, then coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. Her crazy dreams had her feeling hungover in the worst possible way, and it was all she could do to shake them off as she stood under the scalding water of her shower for a full ten minutes before roughly toweling herself dry. Some people preferred soft, fluffy towels. Bunny preferred the older, more scratchy ones. She had no idea what that said about her personality.
Today was the only other day she would have off from nursing this week. She needed to get those other five souls into bodies today, so that she didn’t have to think about her quota for the rest of the week. Half an hour later, while finishing her toast and coffee, she hit the jackpot. Her thumb paused her newsfeed on her cell phone, the giant pink and blue words jumping right off the page and directly into an idea.
BABY EXPO – TODAY ONLY.
She put her phone down next to her plate, switching it out for a piece of now-cold toast. She had a feeling she was gonna need all the strength she could get.
* * *
There werestrollers as far as the eye could see; crammed into corners near booths and grid locked in the walkways like some early childhood version of rush hour traffic. Bunny kept her sunglasses firmly in place despite the strange looks it got her, mainly so she could hide the strange looks she was giving everyone else. But being in the dark had another surprising benefit.
It made it way easier to see anyone who was glowing white.
Which up until now hadn’t been a problem for her. But at an event that seemed to have attracted all the mothers-to-be in the tri-state area, it was more challenging than she would have liked. There were a lot of glowing women in this place, and it wasn’t just a metaphor for the joys of pregnancy. But from a few booths over, a blue glow could look an awful lot like a white one and vice-versa, and there was nothing more guaranteed to piss Bunny off quicker than to wade through a tide of waddling mamas, only to find out it had been a wasted effort.
To say nothing of the grandmothers-to-be. Those bitches were ruthless.
She managed to ensoul two silvery tadpoles in the first fifteen minutes of being there, though, so it wasn’t all bad. At this rate, she was going to be able to fill her quota and get a leap on next week’s number, which would be nice. She’d always been an overachiever and being able to come home from the nursing home and put her feet up for a bit instead of traipsing around downtown Atlanta releasing souls into the wild sounded like a much sweeter gig.
Bunny pretended to be seriously interested in buying a state-of-the-art smartphone baby monitor so that she could place another soul in an incandescently glowing African-American woman. She squeezed in between another two glowing women to pull off a double-whammy, both women glowing blue as soon as the ensoulment was complete.
Congratulating herself as she turned away, the smug expression on her face faltered when she turned around and faced a wall of muscle clad in black.
Her chin jutted up and she looked Death square in the face. “What are you doing here?”
He smirked, his obsidian gaze slipping to the left as he scanned the crowd without answering her question. She blinked, turning instinctively to look in the same direction.
“You’re not serious!” she hissed. “Here?”
