I woke up surrounded by glowing faces.
“Alright, she’s awake. Frida and Mattie, you two will be in charge of the tour. Mattie, report back to this graveyard when you’re done. Frida, you are free to return to Mexico City or go where you wish.”
It was like I had been dropped in the hustle and bustle of a Fortune 500 company headquarters. The person speaking, a translucent gray woman with an even lighter gray bun, was flipping through a notepad. Her rimmed glasses were perched low on her nose, on the brink of slipping off. Around her were dozens of other figures. Some were in medieval tunics, some in safari shirts, and I even swore I saw a man strolling around naked except for a shimmering thong around his waist.
I took a deep breath and decided to break my silence. “Um, excuse me.”
The woman barely glanced towards my direction, she was so focused on the notepad. “Yes?”
“Where am I?” I asked.
It seemed like a reasonable question to ask, but the woman sighed in annoyance. “You’re dead. Passed. Kicked the bucket. You died under particularly bad circumstances. Some idiotic student in your dorm accidentally set the entire building on fire and ended up killing twelve people. You included,” she turned to a girl my age next to her. “And on top of that, there was a bus accident only a few miles away that killed all fifty passengers aboard. All of them to be taken care of in this graveyard,” she scowled.
I choked back a sob. The memories came flooding back, and I was transported back to the memory of the alarm blaring in the middle of the night. There were always fire alarms, and that night I had stayed up late studying for a physics exam. I figured that it was just a drill, that I should just sleep through this alarm just once. Besides, I didn’t want to be outside during a New York winter in my pajamas.
It was as if I was back in my dorm. I smelled the smoke and could feel the heat blasting at my face when I finally opened the door. There were many times when I opened the oven door while baking cookies, and the heat then was not even close to the heat from the actual fire. I wanted to scream from the pain, but my lungs were choked with ash and soot.
“Why is she crying? Oh god, Mattie, do something, I do not have time to deal with this. Look… darling,” the woman said hesitantly, as if the words of tenderness were being pulled out from her teeth. “I’m sorry, and I’m sure you are in a lot of pain right now, but I have done this for decades and I just do not have time.” With that, she scrawled one last thing on her notepad and pivoted to deal with whatever was next for her.
Tears were still trailing down my face. I looked down at my floral printed pajamas and hugged my knees close to my chest. I couldn’t feel the grass beneath me. I couldn’t even feel the skin on my knees. I might as well have been hugging empty air.
The girl crouched down in front of me. Her dreadlocks, bluish gray in the moonlight, swung in front of her face. “I’m sorry. Dr. Muller means well. She has a heart, I swear. It’s just hard dealing with newly dead people every single day of your… life, but it’s not really a life anymore, is it?” she said, stifling a laugh.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, trying to force the hysteria in my voice down to a whisper. “I was only a freshman in college. I wanted to be a physicist. I want to see my family one last time. Oh my god, I’ve never even had sex yet.” It was ridiculous, but the notion of never having sex had me sobbing even louder.
“We get creative with… that,” the girl said thoughtfully. She smirked at the ghosts still running around us. “I had a lot of dreams too. I wanted to be a scientist like you, but I really wanted to study entomology. I died over twenty years ago in a drunk driving accident when I was a freshman, too. I wasn’t driving. I was hit. And you can still see your family, you just can’t… talk to them.”
I took a deep breath. I never cried, not even when my grandma died. Not even at her funeral when they put up a slideshow to the tune of Celine Dion’s “Goodbye’s the Saddest Word”. My friends always called me a robot, so I needed to calm down right now. The sobbing subsided to hiccups, and I gazed directly at the girl. “Thank you,” I said. “My name is Cara, by the way.”
“Mattie.”
“Oh, so you’re Mattie! My… tour guide? Where’s the other person, Frida?” I asked. Interesting that my tour guide would have the same name as Frida Kahlo, my idol ever since I saw her self portrait in the Museum of Modern Art.
Mattie craned her neck and looked behind her. “She was here a moment ago. She’s sort of flighty, though. You know how angsty artists can be.”
“Wait,” I said, hardly daring to believe it. “Is my tour guide… Frida Kahlo?”
“Yep. You’re one of the lucky ones. We always try to get famous people as tour guides. Helps the dead feel more comfortable about being… you know, dead. Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking were booked, unfortunately. I myself got John Abbot, not that you know who he is-”
I cut her off. “I’m going to meet Frida Kahlo? I don’t believe this, this is the best day of my afterlife. Who knew being dead could have its perks?”
Mattie grimaced and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. She stood up and motioned with her hand for me to follow. “It’s not as great as it seems. You’ll see,” she said softly. “It kind of sucks after a while. Anyways, let’s find Frida and take you to some places.”
The fire seemed like an eternity ago. There was an entire world to explore ahead of me, and I was done grieving. I bounced up from where I was sitting to follow after Mattie. “Can we teleport?”
Mattie nodded. The two of us walked in silence through the graveyard until we reached a flat headstone made of smooth granite. “Welcome to my grave,” she said with false cheer, waving her fingers in a jazz hand gesture. “To answer your question, this is how we teleport. You need the permission of the person whose grave you want to teleport to though, which is part of Dr. Muller’s job to document.”
“No wonder she was so busy. Where are we going then?”
“Well, once I find Frida… I guess we’ll go visit your family first. Show you how to teleport. We’ll have fun, I promise,” Mattie said, counting everything off on her fingers. “After that though, I’ll take you to some of the darker places. Death isn’t fun, remember that.”
There was no way I would have ever dreamed of death working as an organized system. I went to church on Sundays, even if I was usually daydreaming more than I was praying. I always thought that I would be reincarnated, live out the rest of my afterlife in some separate heaven, or be snuffed out into an infinite state of blackness once I died. This was better than my wildest dreams. I could talk to Albert Einstein, I could travel around the world at the touch of a headstone, I could do anything forever.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the familiar unibrow and floral headdress of Frida Kahlo. “Oh my god Mattie,” I breathed. “It’s really her, I can’t believe I’m seeing Frida Kahlo in the flesh. Wait, not the flesh, but you know what I mean.”
Mattie looked up from her gravestone, seemingly deep in thought. She turned to see Frida and whistled appreciatively. “Even in death, she’s radiant. I love her outfit, especially the texture and pattern of that dress.”
“I learned all about her in AP Spanish last year,” I said. “She dresses in the traditional style of Mexico and she’s just my icon.” Without a second glance at Mattie, I ran through the grass towards Frida.
I couldn’t hear Mattie’s footsteps pounding behind me, but I did hear her screaming, “Wait!”
When I reached Frida, I was out of breath but not exhausted. I made a mental note to myself to find out just how death worked with my body. “Hola,” I began, then froze up. It had been a year since I spoke Spanish, and even after six years of conjugations and practicing tenses, it was like I could barely speak the equivalent of a toddler. “Cómo… estás? No, cómo está.”
Frida Kahlo raised one eyebrow at me, then broke out into rapid Spanish. I could barely catch a word of what she was saying, so I only nodded in response. “Sí,” I said pathetically when she finished.
“I can speak English,” she answered with a close lipped smile. “You must be Cara. I was there when you saw my self portrait at the MOMA. I also saw your artwork once. Quite impressive.”
I was trembling with excitement, I could barely contain myself. “You? My artwork? Impressive?” I squeaked. There was no way I was keeping up the robot charade this time. “Oh my god, thank you, gracias, you have no idea how much I worshipped you and your story.”
“I think I could tell when you made a pinata of me for your final project,” she answered, clasping her hands together and nodding as a way of thanks. I cringed at the memory, remembering how I substituted Frida’s skin for white because I couldn’t find any tan tissue paper. “Well, we should be off on your tour. I have a few more to do tonight, then I’m back to Mexico.”
A part of me yearned for home, for college, for the life I could have lived if things had been different. Yet there was another part of me that was brimming with excitement, planning out the possibilities for a life I could only have dreamed of living.