Light streamed in from the window as your eyes opened. Panicked filled you. “Fuck!” You searched frantically for your phone, for the stupid alarm that blares every weekday at 6am. It shouldn’t be bright enough for you to see the sun, oh you’ll really lose your job now.

You stepped out of the open door, and make your way to the kitchen. You planned on getting breakfast ready for Janie(she was always a bit of a fussy eater, so you needed quite a bit of time to prepare something she would eat), but she was already there, sitting at the kitchen table, her face buried in her arms as she mumbled quietly.

“Are you okay, Janie?”

She raised her head to look at you, looking somewhat terrified.

The kill count.

When you first had gained the ability to see people’s kill count, you were sometimes shocked by the kinds of people who had such high kill counts. Once, it was a sweet old lady with shaky walkers who had asked you for help crossing the road. Her kill count was 12. Sometimes, it was someone famous, but that wasn’t surprising. Politicians always had such high kill counts. But after a lifetime of this, nothing seemed to surprise you anymore. You learned to make peace with what you saw, you learnt to close your eyes and not think too much about it.

But this. This surprised you.

“Hey Janie? What did you do last night?”

Janie didn’t reply, but simply looked at you with a forlorn expression.

“Janie? Janie!”

You walk over to her, you try to touch her, to hug her, to comfort her, but you can’t. You can’t grab her, you can’t touch her. You just, pass through her.

Her face falls, her body curls into a little ball. “I’m so sorry! I- I’m so sorry!”

“What’s wrong Janie? Tell me what’s wrong I promise I won’t get mad!”

“I- You told me that you had an ability, you told me that you could see things that other people couldn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“I, I could see things people couldn’t too.”

“Oh.”

“I see people, people who are sick, people who are so weak. I needed to see if it was real. I needed to see if I was seeing ghosts.”

“What?”

“I’m so sorry mummy! Please forgive me! They told me you’d go to sleep if I gave you a lot of the sleeping medicine you had, I put it in your water, and-“

And.

You’ll make peace with this. You know you will. Existing in odd circumstances is how you’ve always lived. But you can’t seem to believe that it was your daughter who sent you to this hell, to this purgatory.