Lost and Found

By Lady Violu

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Chapter 5

“Bella?” I repeated myself.

I hoped that maybe she hadn’t heard me, but I knew otherwise. She was gone now too. I closed my eyes and felt myself beginning to tear up.

Why did I have to be the last one left?

The seconds stretched to minutes. Nothing felt real anymore.

A shadow passed over my eyelids.

I opened my eyes to see a man peering down from above me. He looked to be somewhere in his late twenties. His hair was a disheveled mop that almost hid the surprisingly kind bright red eyes underneath. He smiled warmly down at me.

Ah, so either this was whoever was responsible for the disappearance, or it was death. I never understood why people were scared of the grim reaper figure. It’s not like he was the one to kill you, he’s just there to help you move on to whatever was next; maybe it was the big scythe. I scanned the guy above me.

Nope, no scythe. In fact, he looked pretty harmless overall; he was fairly scrawny, and wore clothes that looked out of place on a supernatural being tasked with collecting the souls of the recently deceased. He looked more like a stereotypical summer camp counselor. He looked somewhere around twenty-six years old; his shirt was a faded and worn forest green button-up shirt with a few threads hanging out of the worn-down sleeves. The shirt itself was tucked into a pair of rugged and (once again) faded pants that looked like they had been patched up a few times over the years. On his feet were a pair of simple and sturdy-looking hiking boots. Yep, everything about him screamed “I belong in the woods!”

I thought for a second, but I supposed that it made sense for death to look like some sort of forest guide. It’s what I would have liked to see before I died, someone who had the capacity to save me, but I knew that he wasn’t there to save me from the same fate that my friends had suffered.

“Just give me a few minutes,” I whispered up at him. He nodded and took a seat to my side.

Finally, it was over. I had lived an okay life. I had wasted it, but it was okay. I was never really destined to be important anyway. I never had the drive or ambition that people were supposed to have, that my friends had. Everyone always had something that they wanted to do, something planned.

But not me.

I was just the random guy who somehow got to be friends with those incredible people who would do amazing things. While I always knew that I was just going to fizzle out after high school and fall into some directionless pit with no way out.

Fuck.

I was just a wasted life.

I had good friends, a loving family, I’d had the world in front of me, but I could never see past my own eyes. Someone else deserved what I had. There were so many people who could have done so much more with my opportunities, but instead it was me, the selfish, pathetic asshole who had never learned to be happy.

I lay there wallowing in my self pity for a while until even I was sick of hearing it.

“Okay, I’m ready, take me to the afterlife or whatever, I’m done here; maybe I’ll get reincarnated as a bug that can’t think at all.” I opened my eyes and looked at Death.

He looked confused. “Afterlife? Reincarnated? What are you talking about?”

“I know I’m dead and you’re Death, you don’t have to ease me into it or anything. Let’s just get going so that I can stop thinking about my dead friends.”

He laughed a pure laugh. “Patrick, your friends aren’t dead, and I’m not Death.”

I had a hard time believing him.

“Look, I -- okay, I see I got a little out of hand, but everyone is totally okay!” He frowned in thought before standing up, pulling me to my feet as well. “Okay, let’s start over, I’m Wyatt, and I’m a Witch!” He stuck out his hand.

“Wyatt. The Witch?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, this is just some bullshit hallucination from my dying brain. I’m laying back down.”

But before I could collapse back onto the ground, he caught my body and hoisted me back onto my feet.

“I am here to help you. And I can’t do that if you think you’re dead, so what can I do to convince you otherwise?”

“If you’re here to help me, then where were you when my friends disappeared? Couldn’t you have helped them?”

“That’s what I was doing! I was helping them!” he chimed. “And they didn’t ‘disappear’, they’re at my cabin!”

“Take me there,” I demanded.

“Woah, you’re getting a little ahead of yourself there, kid. That comes next; right now it’s just you, me, and all those unanswered questions in your head.”

I scowled at him. “Fine. What do you want?”

“Well, you remember your last conversation with Lo--” He cut himself off before continuing. “Ahem -- Sorry. With Bella?”

It was hard to believe that he’d “helped” anyone if he couldn’t get Bella’s name right.

“Right before she disappeared? Yeah, of course I do. That was like ten minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well, you two had… I don’t want to say ‘a misunderstanding’, but… well, you’ll see what I mean. You told them that being a boy wasn’t very fun, right?”

“Well, not like that, but--”

He interrupted me. “But that’s what you meant.”

“I guess, yeah,” I conceded.

“Just think on that for a minute,” he pleaded.

I didn’t get what point he was trying to make, that was just the truth. I looked at him, waiting for an explanation.

“So?” he prompted.

“Look, Wyatt, I don’t know what your game here is. Just take me to my friends.”

“Do you know what being transgender is?” 

“Um… yeah, of course I do.” 

“And you don’t like being a boy, correct?” He asked.

“I guess?”

“You can just be a girl.” He stated, matter-of-factly. 

I furrowed my eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound right.”

Wyatt looked like he was going to explode. “Well, that’s how it works.”

“Okay, but if that were true, then wouldn’t everyone be a girl?”

“You were just talking to--” He took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m fine.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than me. “So what about me? I’m a boy, and I like being a boy. It makes me happy.”

“Well, I -- hmm.” That was a decent counterpoint.

“Ha! So you do see the flaw in that reasoning!”

“But that doesn’t make any sense; being a girl seems objectively better than otherwise,” I explained.

“To you.” He was grinning. “Do you know why it sounds better to you?”

He didn’t give me any time to respond.

“Because you are a girl.”

“But I’m really not!” I objected. 

“You are getting on my nerves.”

“I don’t know why you’re so worked up about this, it’s not that hard to understand.”

He glared at me. “You know what, fine. You leave me no choice.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Leave you no choice but what!?”

“Say there’s this button.” He looked at me very intensely. “And if you were to press this button, it would instantly turn you into a girl. Would you press the button?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“You’re transgender.”

“No, I’m not.”

He pulled something out of his back pocket. “Here’s the button I was talking about. Press it.”

He held out a little box with an arcade-cabinet style button right on the top. The button had blue, pink, and white stripes painted on the top of it. If my memory served me correctly, it was the transgender flag.

I didn’t press the button. “There’s no way that’s real.”

“You’re kidding, Right?” Wyatt’s face was blank. “I told you that I’m a witch, just push the button.”

“Sure. You said so, but that doesn’t make it true, you could be lying.”

He facepalmed. “Look, just -- humor me, you said that you’d push the button.” He raised it higher. “Push the button.”

“Will you take me to my friends if I push it?”

“Yes, I will.”

I pushed the button.