One Week

The days passed so slowly that she could hear the seconds ticking off in what seemed like hours. Tick tick tick. Sighing, the pretty red-haired girl rolled over in her bed. It had only been a week. A lousy, slow, stupid week since she had died. But here she was, sitting in bed, tucked under the comforter and snuggling into the pillow of her still-living husband. Why had she put herself into this sort of nightmare? Why had she /insisted/? Now she lay miserably in their shared bed wishing desperately that she had given in.

"It will be romantic," she had said, "Won't it be something when we're reunited in twenty years?"

"No," he had replied, "No, no. I don't want to be without you for twenty years. Can't we just die together? Please, darling. Reconsider."

"I will not. It will be so romantic, can't you please do this? Just for me? Oh, please?"

"Five years."

"Fifteen."

"Ten and that's my final offer," his gaze was serious and she knew that it was ten or nothing. He was not going to reconsider after he had decided.

"Ten then," she agreed eagerly. She kissed his cheek and cried, "Thank you! Thank you! It will be so romantic, you won't regret it!"

But now SHE was regretting it. The first day was okay. They told her how she died and when her husband would join her and handed her the completed paperwork of her past life so she could file it in the Library. So she had done that, and at the House of the Newly Deceased she had received her house key and any mail that might have come would be delivered in the morning. Then she had caught a bus home and spent the evening looking around her house.

It was odd to remember your life and the one before it and the span inbetween suddenly. She remembered her first life, which she found dull. She remembered the first time she had died and the seventy years of mindless working. For what she was working for she wasn't sure, as she hadn't known then either. And she remembered her husband. She remembered how they met, and how she had won him over, and their wedding and their love and their children. She remembered buying their house together and opening up a bookstore together. She remembered their fights over how they would die, and in the end she remembered who had won.

A sob escaped her throat and she pulled the covers over her head. There was a policy in Heaven where you couldn't visit your husband unless they were to be alive for fifteen years or more after you died. Unfortunately they had settled on ten years instead.

Only one week.
She tugged on her hair. How many weeks were in a year? Fifty-something? Times ten? Over five hundred. Five hundred more horrible, terrible weeks.

"Oh, Raziel, you were right," She sighed and buried her face into his pillow and sobbed herself to sleep.