text: It had started raining. Jodie hadn't actually realised it was, until the folds of her shirt had begun clinging to her stomach, rapidly chilling, sticky ice, now noticed- unbearable. It must have been a while since the sun had disappeared and the clouds had covered the sky, but more worrying than the precipitation was the expanse of sodden ground she had covered without notice. Jodie picked at her damp clothes, annoying sensations of gripping fabric mixing with her worried retrospective about all the roads she had crossed outside of cognisance. Evidently no car had mowed her down though as her vague body auto-piloted through town. A shiver ripped through her, partly due to the chill, the other part- the dread of what could have happened to her while her mind had floated out of her body, so frequent an occurrence these days. What would Matt have said? He would have rolled his eyes at the very least, she knew it. So many times he had lamented her daydreaming. Back then though the fantasies were cotton candy pink hued clouds of hopefully adorned plans, barely formed but beautiful future ambition. He would summon her back to her body with a sweet smile and kiss on whatever part of her he could reach. Now her blinding fixations were nightmares, living doom and barely survivable sorrow and she remained unwoken from her insides for what felt like days, with no one to pull her out. Jodie's left thumb rubbed the inside of her bare ring finger. As happened periodically, a jolt of loss and guilt prickled from her core and sent pins and needles to the ends of her fingers and toes as she noted the continued absence of her wedding ring. It's disappearance had felt like a cruel joke when first acknowledged, and now- now it was a ongoing punishment for some unknown crime. Karma seemingly wanting to chip away her soul until there was nothing left. Matt's own ring lay under the earth with him. Whenever she had visited his grave before her band went missing, she had poeticly buried her hand into the loose soil atop the burial site, cool dirt pressing tightly around her fingers, feeling the imagined connection of the two pieces of metal through the earth, her last link to her dead husband reduced to a pathetic metaphorical gesture. A widow. The label was gross, unfitting, surely a lie. Jodie was sure it would never slot neatly into her psyche. Sometimes she hated Matt for slapping that label on her, more annoyed by the redefinition of her own identity than her actual loss. Ridiculous, she would tell herself as she shook off the resentment and sunk back into classic, uncomfortable yet acceptable grief. When the ring had first gone missing she had assumed it had slipped off her finger on one of those occasions in front of Matt's headstone. Running back to the cemetery in the dead of night, Jodie had rattled at the gates like a ghoul, the tall iron bars locked and immovable. Scaling the adjacenct wall, driven by feverish, agonised desperation, Jodie had ripped most of the skin from her knees and palms on the brick but didn't feel it, didn't know it until she returned to the light of home, mud-coated and bloodstained from her grave digging escapade. Scrabbling around in the wet earth in the perfect darkness she had suddenly become aware of how obsence her behavior was. Horrified, Jodie froze, kneeling in the pit- realising she had stopped searching for the ring a while ago and instead was throwing handfuls of dirt over her shoulder, imagining she was about to reach the coffin that lay six feet below, almost yearning for her finger nails to scratch the wood of the box that held her beloved, the idea of it both intriguing and unbearable. As she recalled this uncomfortable memory the trusty autopilot completely failed for the first time and Jodie experienced an utterly new kind of pain as she was thrown into the air then slammed impossibly hard into the tarmac, the screeching brakes of the car reverberating around her head. The cliché idea of time slowing became reality as she flew through the void and knew the impact with the ground was coming so impossibly long before it did. Detailed information of what that meant circulated her brain, awareness of all the potential harm that was milliseconds away from being a possibility. What an interesting kind of freedom- the inevitability of the next few moments and an absolute clarity that there was not a damn thing she could do to change the outcome of this event. It felt... nice- to know that control was robbed from her for that time, a kind theft of responsibility and intent, just the universe, universe-ing regardless of her wants or wills. By absolute chance, the collision caused no damage and Jodie was back on her feet almost straight away, pulling her arm away from the grip of the worried driver who was insisting a hospital visit and shouting desperate pleas after her escape. Maybe she was actually dead, maybe the car's impact had ended her life and the ghost that stalked through the world was just a shadow of she, who was formerly Jodie. This possibility was unimportant, the end goal was Matt's grave and it was to be, living or dead. The pull towards him was stronger now and Jodie pondered if there was a reason for that. She had often wondered when the last time she would visit his grave would be, maybe that was today. Everything has a last, for one reason or another. There were so many things that Jodie had already done for the last time that she had not known at the time was her last. Had she had already eaten her last peach? Maybe she had been to Spain for the final time when she visited her aunt on the continent the year before last. Then again, maybe she would be reclining in a deckchair on the sand in Barcelona next month, a juicy piece of fruit in hand, feeling the prickle of the Catalonian sun on her skin. Everything felt unwritten, everything tasted of... blood. Jodie spat onto the path in the cemetery between the graves, ruby splatters coating the ground as she continued to beat a path onwards. The glint of the reflected light hitting the object that sat on top of the headstone was visible from a distance. Flashing either like a lighthouse beacon warning her away from danger or like a green light at the end of a dock calling her in with promise. Either way, she knew exactly what it was that glinted in the returning sun long before she got to his grave, even if it seemed impossible. The ring was alive, like it had placed itself there, as if it had located and presented itself to where it knew Jodie would find it. Caught between the urge to snatch it up and hold on tight and the horror of what exactly it's reappearance meant, Jodie froze, gazing at the circle on top of her dead husband's headstone and it gazed back at her. All the times she had wished to possess the jewelery again, she had never imagined that it's reappearance would make her feel so uneasy and it took her a moment to realise why. This was it. This was the last time. There was no rhyme or reason to why she knew, but once she reached out for the ring, whatever happened, this would be it, this would be the last time she visited Matt's grave. Maybe the ring was setting her free, maybe it was heralding her end, there was only one way to know. Stretching her fingers out, she spoke silently to the universe. "What's next? I'm ready."