Stitched Above the Pocket

"Funny thing about work uniforms—you never think the name badge will be how strangers identify your corpse."

Suddenly, my tranquility was shattered as shadows cast over me, pulling my consciousness back to the fore.

The sky was gone. Replaced by something darker—canvas, maybe, or the interior of a structure. The light had changed, softer now, filtered.

I found myself staring up at an unfamiliar environment.

Not the open sky anymore. A ceiling of some kind, supported by poles or beams I could see at the edges of my vision. Voices murmured nearby, discussing things I couldn't quite make out.

The blonde European woman appeared over me again, her previously slurred words now coming into sharper focus.

Her face resolved as my eyes slowly learned to adjust focus again. Middle-aged. Strong features. The kind of face that suggested competence, authority, someone used to making decisions in difficult situations.

A doctor, perhaps. Or a nurse. Someone medical, given the way she had examined me, the clinical quality of her observations.

"I'm not sure how he could have lost all his blood if not through major artery damage," she mused aloud.

Panic surged within me.

Is she talking about me? But I have blood. I can think. I can see.

The logic didn't work. You couldn't think without blood. Couldn't see. The brain required oxygen, required circulation, required the constant flow of life-giving fluid through its delicate vessels.

And yet.

And yet I was thinking. I was seeing. I was here, in whatever way that meant.

"His throat was definitely slit. There was a lot of blood," Luke's voice added, confirming her observation.

Lot of blood.

The phrase triggered something—a flash of memory, vivid and horrible. Red spray against cardboard. The wet gurgling sound. The warmth flowing down my chest before everything went cold.

I wanted to react, to gasp in shock, but my body remained unresponsive, betraying my desire to express the horror that gripped me.

Images began to flash vividly through my mind—a rough, stubbled face, hostile voices, the glint of a blade edge, and that wall of swirling, magical colours.

The Portal.

That's what it had been. The gate in Luke's backyard, the one Henri had run through, the one Luke had walked into like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then the men. The attackers. The one with the scarred head and cold blue eyes. The one who had held the knife.

The pieces of memory were like fragments of a nightmare, disjointed yet terrifyingly real.

My mind grappled with the images, trying to piece them together, to understand what had transpired. The revelation of my throat being slit, the loss of blood, the surreal experience in Clivilius—it was all overwhelming.

Lying there, unable to communicate or move, I was a prisoner within my own body, forced to confront the horrifying reality of my situation, with more questions than answers.

As Luke spoke, fragments of my memory began to weave together, forming a clearer picture.

"Joel was the driver that delivered the tents back home," he said.

I was? I questioned internally, grasping at the fleeting memories.

The depot. Garry loading the truck. The manifest with six deliveries. More tent boxes for 2 Wallcrest Road Berriedale.

I am! I affirmed to myself, recalling the truck and the boxes with a newfound clarity.

I was the courier driver. I had delivered the tents. I had gone into the house looking for evidence of my father and found a photograph and then watched reality dissolve into impossible colours.

"I was surprised to see him. I didn't recognise him at first. Not until I saw his name sewn into his shirt," Luke continued, painting a picture of our unexpected encounter.

My name. Sewn into my work shirt. The standard-issue uniform with JOEL stitched above the breast pocket.

Had Luke known? Had he realised who I was—Jamie's son, the child his partner had never met? Or had my name meant nothing to him, just another courier, just another delivery?

"Joel," the woman whispered softly, leaning in closer to my face.

Her presence was both comforting and haunting, a lifeline to the world I could no longer interact with.

I wanted to respond. Wanted to say yes, that's me, I'm Joel, please help me. But the words remained locked inside, prisoners of a body that had forgotten how to speak.

"Henri and Duke coming here was all an accident," Luke explained. "Joel accidentally let Henri outside and he ran through the Portal when we tried…"

The pieces clicked together in my mind.

Fuck! I remember! I think.

The image of the small Shih Tzu, Duke, flashed through my thoughts.

The little dog escaping when I came out of the house. The chase across the vacant lot. The treat trick. Catching him and carrying him back.

Or were there two? Definitely two. A fat one and a skinny one. But I caught the cheeky bugger. Didn't I?

I had caught him. I was sure of it. But then... Henri had run? Into the Portal? And I had—

The memory blurred, fragments refusing to coalesce into coherent narrative.

"I found him lying in a pool of blood in the back of the truck," Luke's voice broke through my reverie, bringing me back to the grim reality of my situation.

In the truck.

So I had died there. In the CityDirect truck, surrounded by tent boxes and cardboard packaging. A delivery driver who had made his final delivery—his own body, transported to another world.

As the voices around me grew louder, so did the chaos in my mind.

The memories came faster now—the scarred man's questions, the blade at my throat, the command to take care of him. The pain. The blood. The darkness.

I desperately wanted to touch my throat, to confirm the reality of what they were saying, but my body remained unresponsive.

I could vividly recall the sensation of blood gushing from the wound in my throat, choking on it, the sound of my own bloody gurgle.

The sound of dying. The sound of my life ending in wet, horrible percussion.

"Stop it!" the woman suddenly shrieked, her voice thunderous, breaking through the tumult of my thoughts.

Instantly, my mind went silent, as did the voices around me.

The command cut through everything—memory, fear, pain, confusion. It was like a switch being thrown, a circuit being broken.

The bright light intensified, enveloping me in its glow.

Not sunlight. Something else. Something that came from inside rather than outside, building in my vision until there was nothing but luminescence.

It felt like being cocooned in a luminous void, a place of both peace and emptiness.

The light grew, overtaking my vision, until all I could see was a brilliant expanse of nothingness.

I was suspended in this luminous vacancy, a state of being that was both calming and unsettling, leaving me to ponder the surreal journey my life had taken.

As the world around me seemed to stabilise, a sudden, violent shaking jolted me back into a tumultuous reality.

The peace shattered. The light collapsed.

I was back in my body—or rather, back to awareness of my body's helplessness—and something was terribly wrong.

It felt as though an earthquake was ravaging my very being, my body tossed about with a callous, unrelenting force.

Not an earthquake. Something else. Movement. Speed. The sensation of being transported rapidly across uneven terrain.

The sensation was disorienting, a chaotic blend of movement and terror.

I couldn't see what was happening—the images were a blur of brown and blue and flashes of light. I could only feel the terrible vibration, the jarring impacts, the sense of being thrown about like cargo in a truck going too fast over a rough road.

The wind, fierce and unyielding, tore through my throat, its intensity feeling like it was rearranging my insides.

My throat.

The wound. The slit that had killed me. Wind was passing through it—through the gap in my flesh, through whatever remained of my airway.

It was a sensation that was both surreal and painfully tangible, a reminder of the fragile line between life and whatever existence I was currently enduring.

I was alive. Impossibly. Incomprehensibly.

But I was also broken. Wounded. Changed in ways I couldn't yet understand.

In the midst of this chaos, the warm, comforting light that had enveloped me, offering a brief respite from my tormented state, suddenly extinguished.

Gone. Snuffed out like a candle.

Leaving me in terror. In darkness. In stillness.