“...Come.” said Agnes. My...Cornelius’ wife of six maybe, seven years and because I had no other real recourse besides staying in that little steel tub of salt water and blood, I obediently did as she asked.

We walked through a house that was far bigger than the original Cornelius should have been able to pay for. From what I saw there were four bedrooms, two baths, a den, a living room, a kitchen and a separate dining room, which was where our little tour through the house stopped.

It wasn’t the biggest houses, but it was far from tiny and just looking at it was all worth far more than my...his...piddling paycheck could cover. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t sweat the details until he does and then I sweat them a lot.

Seeing the semi-tasteful furniture and tidy, almost lovingly arranged decor it was starting to bug me. At least it did until I looked into my,... his memories and recalled that the house was a wedding gift, from his over indulgent parents. Then it made more sense.

“How’s your body?” said Agnes.

“Good...I think.” said I.

Rolling my shoulders a little, craning my neck, doing the kind of tiny stretches one did after being sedentary for a long time. I could feel things popping into place, and was surprised to find that all my aches and pains were steadily fading. More surprising than that, was finding how nostalgic it was to have aches and pains again. Well, I’d had pain, in that place where I’d been, but it’d been more of a mental, spiritual anguish sort of deal.

Physical pain, was something simpler, something easier to deal with and its presence confirmed that everything that I was seeing and experiencing was real. In short though it hurt, I found I didn’t hate the feeling.

“How do you feel?”

“Not bad…” I said.

“No sense of crushing despair, or paranoia or a feeling that something is calling to you from a place of icy shadow?”

“Huh? Um...no.”

She sighed in relief.

Then she turned and sat at one of the chairs of the dining table and then gestured.

“Well...Your dinner’s there, like usual. It’s probably cold by now though.” said Agnes.

Again, either because I was unsure of what my options were, or maybe because I was too overwhelmed by the current state of affairs, I did what I was told.

I sat at the other end of the table and I ate. It wasn’t bad. Macaroni and cheese, with grilled asparagus shoots and baked chicken. It was mundane fare, but damn if I couldn’t do with a little more of the mundane in my life. As I sat gnawing on a strip of breaded chicken, I almost cried.

It wasn’t like the food was ‘that’ good or anything, it wasn’t bad either, mind you. It’s just my feelings of that moment had nothing to do with what was actually on my plate.

That meal, was the kind of meal I’d already given up ever having again. And I don’t know what else to say about it.

When you’re in an unfamiliar place, you get homesick. If its unfamiliar but there’s enough for you to get used to, with enough time that becomes your new home. However that assumes that there’s at least a few points of familiarity for you to settle into.That assumes some measure of commonality.

That assumes that the new place fits within your common sense and ability to think, if not your ‘way’ thinking. The people might speak a different language, but at least they speak a language and at least they’re people. The food might not be what you’re used but there’ll be enough palettes and flavors that you’ll eventually find something you can eat. Experiences that were truly alien and strong were nothing like that.

There’d be no commonality. You’d simply find yourself in a situation so far removed from your own reality that you kind of have to go insane to be able to cope. Giving up any reasonable expectations on what should be and would be, just to be able to keep moving forward.

That’s what an entirely alien experience was like. It was a world where love was cannibalism and hate was calculus, and you died and were reborn, every time you blinked...Except entirely different. Entirely beyond words. That’s what it meant to have to deal with something completely outside your wheelhouse.

That’s the kind of place I was in, for a fairly indeterminate amount of time. That's kind of place I was inexplicably torn to. A place so far from home, that I almost forgot that homes were thing. So I feel no shame in telling you that I almost cried because I assure you that anyone else would have felt the same.

The meal ended, with the plate cleared, save a few remaining splotches of cheddar sauce. I sipped from the cold, frost covered glass of soda at my side, chewing on the ice. As I contemplated the worlds that were lost to me and the life that I would have lived if I hadn’t suddenly been torn from my former mundane existence.

Then I looked up and saw her, Agnes, my wife, sitting on the other side of the table. One hand folded atop the other while she stared at me. Those deep dark eyes of hers unblinking, unyielding in their scrutiny.

“Um...First of all...This was delicious. Second of all I’m afraid I have to apologize.”

“Apologize? About what?”said the woman. Seeming slightly startled, when I spoke, as if she hadn’t expected me to speak. As if she’d forgotten that I was there, despite of how intensely she was staring.

“I’m afraid that I’m not….I’m not your husband. My name is…*****....and I don’t really know why I’m here instead of him, I’d didn’t mean for this to happen, but that’s what happened, but I didn’t want to mislead you. Or make to this whole thing worse than it already is. Anyway, I’m sorry things turned out this way and I’m sorry for your loss.”

She froze, her look unreadable, her body language tense and tight and small. And then she sighed. A small sad smile spreading across her face.

“That’s...Isn’t it fine, then?” she said.

(.......!?!)

For a while neither of us said anything, and there was a lull, a silence so dead and dense that it was almost deafening. In the interests of full disclosure, let me say I’ve never understood people. Whether it was their feelings, their decisions and their belief, and culture, and all the other little things they say don’t matter until they inexplicably decide they do.

I’ve never gotten people. I didn’t get people even when I was still able to consider myself a person. Which is probably why my relationship with my parents and relatives was as distant as it was and why, when I effectively died, by being removed from my own reality, I died friendless and with no significant others of either sex. And why I can be sure that the only ones who actually mourned my disappearance were my cactus and my digital ant farm.

“Uh...run that by me again?” said I.

She took a deep breath, he expression severe but almost peaceful.

“From what you’re telling me, the resurrection serum, didn’t work as planned, but I kind of knew that that was always a risk. The whole process of bringing someone who’s very well and truly dead back to life is a tricky thing. And to that end actually, it’s me who should apologize.” she said.

“I…”

“Please let me finish.” said Agnes.

“Er..sure..” said I.

“To bring someone from the night back into the day, you have to have someone or something from the night push them through. Unfortunately human souls are fragile. Thus there was always a forty to thirty percent that you’d squish, my poor dead hubby and end up falling through instead. If it so happens that you were in one of the better afterlives, dreaming sweeter dreams, then you have my utmost apologies. And even if that wasn’t the case, its still a fact that I’ve inconvenienced you by inexplicably bringing you here. So once again….”

“Uh...er… no...it’s-, it’s fine really. But what about your husband?” I said.

She smiled again and then she shrugged.

“Considering that you have all his memories, and experiences. Considering that you’re sitting in his skin. Considering that everything is the same save for the core bits that are ‘you’, Mister…..Mister....I’m sorry I couldn’t quite catch your name. Anyway the point is, save for the parts of you that are still you, you’re pretty much him. Which is all that I need.”

“But I’m not him.” I said. Shaking my head.

“Yeah, but you probably know enough that you can imagine my feelings for him and the kind of relationship we had. I don’t need him. I just need him to be alive.”

I did understand, and I winced as the details entered my recollection. Did I mention that Cornelius Dacre Douglas was a bit of a bastard? Cause he was. I could remember him...me, coming home, drunk out our minds. Swearing, shouting, singing. Throwing the bottles I was still holding when I was asked to maybe keep things down to keep our kid from waking up.

I could remember coming home stinking of smoke and smelling of other women’s perfume. Indolently scowling, because we thought it’d bother Agnes we’d get a good row out of it, but she didn’t seem to care.

I could remember angrily demanding sex like a child, using a mixture of threats and begging, and the emptiness I felt when I got what I wanted. I could remember one day insinuating that I’d do something to the kid and could recall a very long sleepless night where we lay in our bed.

Keeping our eyes closed and feigning sleep, even though we could feel our wife sitting at our side. Staring. Staring at us in away that she’d never stared at us before. Filling our usually stupidly fearless self with a wariness and unease that till then we’d thought, only our mother could make us feel.

I could remember how we met, how she’d seemed so pretty walking hand in hand with some guys who’s face I never bothered to actually look at. A guy who’d turn out to have just been her brother, but who I’d already quietly arranged to have roughed up. Asking a few of my more criminal friends to deal with him.

A decision that would ultimately result in his death when the town we were in, was overrun by monsters. I knew that the kid that we’d had together might not be mine.

I’d never bothered looking into it, because I, Cornelius thought of the girl as the one thing he’d ever done right. With her mother being fiercely protective enough to ensure that a screw-up like me...him, didn’t ruin her. Thus even though she didn’t look a thing like me. I told myself it was just because because she looked like the spitting image of her mother. Taking solace in the fact that she shared the same yellow eyes and that she seemed to at least be a little tan, if not quite as dark as I was.

I’d never ask because I was aware that whatever I had, I had stolen. Taking advantage of Agnes during her moment of grief, plying her with brandy and a sympathetic ear, that only lasted till the brandy had done the job. Later I took advantage of the pregnancy that followed, to pressure her into marrying me.The loss of Agnes’ family and friends and the lack of any kind of financial support of foundation, being just enough to push a young woman with a baby on the way into the waiting arms of scoundrel like me.

I felt a very convoluted mixture of yearning, rage and despair in my chest and nausea in my stomach and I didn’t like feeling any of it.

“I….Sorry.” said I. Sheepishly apologizing, because it was the only thing I could think to do.

“No...It’s not like it was actually you, but I...let’s just say that I think that at least with that insight you could understand why I’m not exactly mourning. It wasn’t exactly a happy marriage and Cornelius and I had or differences. Some of them, of extremely irreconcilable sort...Nonetheless that has nothing to do with you.” said Agnes.

“But then…?” said I.

(Why the hell was I here then, if she’d hated her husband? Why had she gone to the trouble of trying to bring him back?)

The thoughts came, and those thought became words. She smiled again, even laughing, the sound dry and somewhat musical. In a way that old Cornelius could never get enough of.

“Well, that’s quite simple. You see. My dear departed husband Cornelius is a class-C citizen with rights of residence in this Kingdom. I on the other hand, am just a Class-D citizen. And citizenship classification don’t automatically transfer or change with marriage. At least not with the in our sort of marriage. As such without that man, whose face your wearing, I can’t live here, I can’t work here, I can’t provide for our daughter. Should you actually die without putting the measure in your will, in the best case the state would take her, and in the worst case we’d be evicted and either sent to the slums or deported to the outside.”

(Yikes.)

I blanched, realizing for the first time that not only was this was not the same life I’d left behind, this wasn’t even the same world. If it was. I could only imagine that things had changed drastically from what I remembered them being. For one, mine had been a world of republics not kingdoms.

There was a pain in my chest, but I wasn’t really worried about it, I knew what it was, it was just ‘his’ heart breaking. Shattering like glass, as every doubt, fear and supposition he’d had about the true nature of his relationship with his wife was confirmed.

“I...er...okay then. So is there anything else, I should do?”

“Well, no. Not really. So long as you don’t divorce me, I’m pretty golden.” said Agnes.

I nodded, feeling like my head was made of wood.

“Okay then...Er...I’m kind of tired and I don’t really know this place so do you mind if…” I said. Feeling awkward as I asked if I crash, feeling drained by the longest conversation I’d had in decades.

“No it’s fine. The house is in your, his...name after all. Consider it your home, since it pretty much is.”

“Oh..uh...cool.”