The first time I died.

To my fellow outlaws, outcasts and misfits,

Normally I publish biographical stories about Chicago. Every now and then I publish new fiction. Today is one of those days. Enjoy.

So without further ado, away we go!

The first time I died, it cost me twenty bucks and a funnel cake.

I want that on the record, because nobody ever tells you the price. You think it’s free. You think you just stop, like a song ending, like somebody pulling the plug on the jukebox at the bar. But there is a register. There’s always a register. I found that out on a Tuesday, in the parking lot of Cermak Plaza, face down in powdered sugar, a paper boat of fried dough still warm in my hand, my heart doing the thing my dad’s heart did, which is quit.

But I was forty-four. I sold walk-in freezers. People go; you must be cold all day. Nah. The freezers are fine. It’s the drive home that gets you. Nobody laughed but me. You laugh first and you laugh loudest and then nothing anybody says can land, because you already threw the punch.

So. I’m dead. Face full of powdered sugar. On a Tuesday.

And then I was not in the parking lot anymore.

I was in an office. Beige. Drop ceiling, the kind with water stains shaped like countries that don’t exist. Carpet the color of a wet dog. A water cooler in the corner with no cups.

There was a counter, and behind the counter a woman with reading glasses on a chain and a lanyard, and the specific tired of a person who has explained the same thing four thousand times and is about to explain it a four thousand and first. The woman looked at me over the glasses and said, you’ve got about five minutes, so listen.

She didn’t have a robe. She didn’t have wings. She had a clipboard, and that was somehow the scariest part, because a clipboard means process. Somebody printed a form.

She laid it out flat, the way you read an allergy warning off a menu. I was done. Dead. Card punched. But there was an offer, and the offer expired in five minutes, because the offer always expires in five minutes, that is the whole design, they don’t want you thinking, they want you wanting. And her offer was this. I could go back. Twenty-four hours. Real body, real coffee, real time. One full day on the house.

Then she told me the catch, and here is the thing. I sold for a living. Twenty years across a table from people, and the one thing you learn, the only thing, is that there is always a catch, and the size of the smile tells you the size of the catch. Through a large toothy grin, she said to get a single day, you must take a single life.

I laughed. She did not.

By take a life, you mean I gotta kill somebody? I asked.

You will get an address, she explained. You go there, and someone will be waiting. You process them. You can do it right away, you can take your time, totally up to you. The only requirement is that sometime in your twenty-four hours, you process who we send you to.