Jim Slevann was somewhere strange. Not quite Earth, definitely not Heaven, and way too weird to be a dream. The ground was like cracked desert, endless and silent, but the sky? The sky was water.. rippling waves swirling overhead like a calm ocean flipped upside down.
Off in the distance, like voices underwater, he heard them. Familiar voices.
His mom. His brother.
"Matt… he's gone."
Even there, wherever there was, that hit deep. Jim had always sort of believed there was something after death.. but honestly, he never spent too much time thinking about it. He hadn't exactly lived, so death felt more like a cancellation than a conclusion.
Then he sensed it.
Not with his eyes, he wasn't even sure he had eyes at that moment.. but with something deeper. Something that could feel the air breathe.
The voice.
"Jim… do you want to live?"
Jim didn't even hesitate.
"Yes. At least for once."
Suddenly, he could see.. not just forward, but in every direction at once. Like he'd gone full 360° vision mode and someone had hit "play" on the highlight reel of his life. Every hospital bed. Every awkward silence. Every joke from Matt. Every tear from Mom.
"I chose you, Jim. Yes, I did" the voice said. "Because you're pure. I'm offering you the day. I'm giving you power. But in return, the night belongs to me. And you'll serve me when the sun goes down. Deal?"
Jim didn't fully understand the terms, but he understood the weight of it. It was a negotiation and weirdly, it didn't feel scary. It felt… fair. He'd trade the unknown for a shot at real life.
"Yes, voice. The night is yours," he said.
There was a beat of silence.
Then that word again.
"Live."
Before he could blink if blinking was even possible in this space... he was flying. Or falling. Or shooting through something faster than light, like someone had just slammed the "resume game" button on reality.
And just like that—eyes open, heart thumping, lungs gasping.. Jim was back. In his body. In his mom's arms.
Alive.
__
Everything comes at a cost. Life's no exception. Every time something's born, something else quietly takes its final bow. Cosmic balance, or just really dark math, either way, it's how the world spins.
The doctors couldn't explain what happened to James Slevann. Medically, it made zero sense. One minute, he was a whisper away from the grave. The next, he was awake, breathing, and cracking jokes with a little more color in his face than anyone had seen in years. The professionals were baffled. But what they could confirm was that Jim seemed… alive. Like, really alive. More energy. More alertness. More sass.
And on the other hand, if there was one person Gloria loved almost as deeply as her sons, it was her father—Duncan. Stubborn, loud, a little dramatic, and completely impossible to argue with. But she loved him the way he was. He was her anchor, her backup generator when things went dark.
That same night... the night Jim somehow cheated death. Duncan died in his sleep. Quietly. No drama for once in his life.
Gloria found out the next morning, still half in disbelief from what had happened with Jim.
She didn't scream. She didn't even cry at first. She just sat on the edge of her bed, phone still in her hand, and said:
"Of course."
Because of course the universe couldn't let her have a win without throwing a punch.
She looked up at the ceiling like she expected God to answer for it personally. "Couldn't give me one good day, huh?"
Still, somewhere deep down past the grief, past the exhaustion.. she knew. Something had shifted. A trade had been made.
And if anyone would've volunteered to go in Jim's place, it would've been Duncan. No hesitation. No second thoughts.
The old man always did have a flair for the dramatic.
And there was Jim, really seeing for the first time in over a year since they slapped him with that glioblastoma multiforme diagnosis.
Thirteen years. Thirteen whole years of hospital beds, IV drips, weird smells, and endless checkups. A life on pause. But now? Now he was blinking at the sunlight like it was some kind of miracle—and honestly, maybe it was.
He could see.
Not in a blurry, half-there, medicated kind of way but see see. And feel. He was talking, slowly, like his mouth had forgotten the rhythm, but he was talking. He felt... alive. Not totally back to normal...his body still bore the marks of everything it had survived. But this? This was something new.
He blinked at the sky like it owed him money, stretched like a cat who'd just remembered it had a spine, and declared.. internally, of course.. that today, he was getting his life together
It felt like a second birth. A cosmic do-over. A re-roll on the dice of life.
He stood there for a moment, just soaking it all in. The breeze. The stillness. The rare sense of peace that had eluded him for so long. Everything around him felt... normal. It was the kind of ordinary that was almost too good to be true.
It was daytime, and as far as he could tell, the day was his.
Finally.