(A BRIEF PEEK)  I WAS MURDERED LAST NIGHT

 

A novel by

A. J. Gallant ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 

 

A new beginning arrives when

we take our last breath

 

 

CHAPTER ONE       

 

 

 

    IT WAS SO DIFFERENT BEING DEAD than she thought it might be, even though she hadn’t given it much thought. After all, she had been young and full of life; a twenty-one-year-old had no reason to consider death. Death was for feeble senior citizens covered with wrinkles. Her dream of attending university to become a teacher wasn’t going to happen now.

    It was Sunday morning, and she was sitting on one of the oval benches in Central Park, which was supposed to have been a lot safer that it used to be, but, unfortunately, it hadn’t worked out that way for her. If she had a guardian angel, he or she must have been on his lunch break, although she did have a bad feeling about an hour before it happened. She thought that those feelings needed to be much more vigorous. Obviously, it hadn’t been good enough just to give her a dreadful feeling; they should have given her a good shaking.  Don’t go out tonight!

        How did guardian angels fit in with free will? Could they make you feel as if something untoward might happen, but they couldn’t say what? She guessed that people just didn’t listen to those feelings. Maybe it was that people didn’t listen or take the hint? Or was it just an awkward thing to make one understand something from the other side? She tried to push up her glasses onto her nose, but there was no longer any need for that.

    The benches encircled a grassy area and had crude little red flowers on them and inside the space were two trees at the opposite ends of one another and three lampposts. Anita remembered the lights from last night when she was alive. Strange though she couldn’t remember coming to the park.  She noticed a plane flying high overhead leaving its trail behind. If it crashed would they be all popping up here? Her father used to tell her to think outside the box. She was thinking outside of the box now because there was no box. He must be taking this hard.

    Anita’s fiancé Curt was most likely just receiving the terrible news right about now, and she knew it was going to be a terrible day for both him and the rest her family, especially her identical twin sister Alana and two younger sisters Eva and Courtney. Would it be possible to console them? Even if she could appear to them, she would scare them to death. The universe was a stranger place than she could have ever imagined.

    And again she thought so this is what it’s like to be dead.

    She smelled the strong black coffee that one of the officers was holding, and it didn’t grab her as much as it usually did, strong Java was one scent that she appreciated in the morning. The police had the area cordoned off as detectives had come in to see the body; her corpse. And check the area before she was to be put into a body bag and taken away. They were searching for the knife, but there was no sign of it, not much evidence at the scene that they could acquire. A Gold Flake cigarette placed into a plastic bag, but no way to know if it linked to the case or not. The voices of the police sounded almost muted to Anita as if the sound on television had been turned down; she would need to pay close attention if she wanted to hear what they were saying.

     There were no words for staring down at one’s corpse, just didn’t seem real, not as much blood as she would have expected, most likely because the knife had stopped her heart. Her engagement ring was still visible on her left hand. Her body was already beginning to smell. As she tried to recall the events that led to her death, she couldn’t. Was she not supposed to remember?