4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
A Body That Won't Answer
Joel claws his way back from nothing. First thought. Then sound. Then light. Then flesh—actual flesh, floating in water under an impossible sky. He has a body again. He just can't use it. His eyes won't close. His hands won't obey. His voice stays locked behind a throat that was slit open and somehow healed wrong. And the people standing over him? One of them is his father. Joel can't say a word.
The void had no time. No sensation. No self—just the fading ember of a name repeated like a prayer. Joel Gibbons. Joel Elijah Gibbons. The words were all he had left.
Then: a dog barking. Voices. Light so bright it burned through eyelids he didn't know he'd regained. Water beneath him. Sky above. A body that existed again, somehow, impossibly, despite the blood he'd lost in a delivery truck half a universe away.
But the body doesn't work. Joel can see but not look. Hear but not respond. Feel the cool water against his skin but not lift a hand to touch his own face. Something claimed him in the darkness. Something that reminds him, whenever he struggles too hard, that he belongs to it now.
The strangers who find him speak his name. They know him—from his work shirt, from the tents he delivered, from a life that ended yesterday. One of them is Jamie. One of them is his father.
Joel has waited nineteen years to hear that voice. Now it's right beside him, and he can't make a single sound.
