(to audience)
Folks, that's our show! Tune in next week, when Caroline asks why I made her allergic to shellfish! Goodnight, everybody!
Theme music swells. Credits roll. The studio lights fade to black.
And then, somewhere very far away, somewhere distinctly un-celestial, a voice that is decidedly not God's says my name.
Low.
Gravelly.
Pissed.
"Caroline Oglethorpe… what the fuck are you doing in my yard?"
I groan and try to blink, but the blood crusted over my eyelids and gooped in my eyelashes makes that task a little harder than usual. I struggle until I manage to crack them open a tiny bit.
But then a flash of bright light makes me wince and slam them shut again.
It's not a heavenly light. Not by any means. It's bright and fluorescent, and we all know that fluorescent lights are a product of Hell, not Heaven.
So either I've ended up in the Bad Place, or God really didn't let me die yet. Smug son of a gun.
I'm annoyed.
Not because I want to be dead, mind you. I'm quite attached to life, all things considered.
But being dead would have at least spared me what I am now coming to understand are going to be an extremely embarrassing few minutes of my life.
I make a second effort to open my eyes again. The light has turned away from beaming directly into my retinas, thankfully, so it's not as painful when I work open a sliver of vision. But as soon as that arduous little mission is accomplished, I'm hit with a throbbing wave of pain from the right side of my forehead.
Oh, holy fucking shit.
Thathurts.
Did you know rocks are hard? I thought I did. I may have been underestimating them all this time, though. I wonder idly if God is punishing me for my horny thoughts. Given that the lump on my skull feels like a literal horn growing from my head, though, I almost want to accuse him of being overly literal in his choice of methods for divine retribution.
So far, that's the grand total of what I've deduced about my current situation. Light is bright and cracking your head on a boulder hurts.Give this girl a Nobel Prize, folks!
I set those groundbreaking discoveries aside and try to figure out where the hell I am.
Whatever I'm lying on, it's too soft to be grass or dirt. It must be a blanket. And the padding under my head feels like the arm of a couch. I pry my eyes open a bit more and realize that the blurry silhouette looming over me has a shape I recognize.
It's the shape of Afon Satyrin.
He's no longer shirtless. That's tragic.
Er, I mean, that's excellent. Quite good. Modest and appropriate, really, as these things ought to be.
"You're not dead," Afon notes.
"Bold of you to assume," I croak. My throat is the Sahara and I sound like I've been inhaling hookahs since the day I was born. "I might be a ghost. The ghost of Caroline Oglethorpe, sent to haunt your cabin until you—ow. Ow. Ow ow ow."
He has pressed a washcloth, which is shockingly cold, directly to the knot in my head.
"Stop talking."
"I literally just woke up."
