The Everafter by Amy Huntley

I’ve read them, well, probably a hundred times. Perhaps I’m anticipating my own exit from this world into the next when my parents see my English grade—minus this one-hundred-point assignment.
    No time to think about it now. Must write down whatever I can remember about my original paper.
    My fingers fly over the keyboard, rattling away in a manic rhythm. Memories of words and phrases skitter through my mind. I wrestle them into sentences: “It is ironic that Emily Dickinson inquired of the journalist Higginsonwhether her poetry was ‘alive’ when the subject of so much of her poetry was death…. Her obsession with exploring the nature of individuality in the face of death demonstrates her belief in the power of the individual to transcend the boundaries of life itself…. Her poetic narrators face down a certain knowledge and understanding of their demise as they grapple, beyond the barrier of death itself, with a diminishing awareness of life….”
    What was that line about the “Tragedy of the Flesh” that I’d written? Something about how she believed something atomic lived beyond that tragedy? Wait…no, I closed the paper with that line, didn’t I?
    Ten minutes left….
    Hold on. I wrote something about how she isolated herself in life, her reclusiveness being a form of dress rehearsal for death itself, and its “partings” of hell…. How did I put that?
    Words continue to patter their way onto the screen. Organization? What’s that? No time to get these thoughts to build on one another.
    Five minutes left….
    A sudden sense of déjà vu strikes me. It’s like I’ve been through this moment in my life before, but…
    Must just be the weirdness of trying to write about death.
    Twice.
    And about a poem with the line “My Life closed twice before its close”—I mean, who wouldn’t be freaked out about that?
    I ignore the sensation and go back to writing: “Dickinson’s ‘letter to the World / that never wrote to her’ is a collection of poems that explore the depths of human emotion and its enduring ability to extend beyond the boundaries of any one life and into the experiences of humanity. Her body of work is the atom she left behind after ‘this brief Tragedy of the Flesh.’ That atom causes within readers a nuclear chain reaction of human connection.”
    Print…print…print. It’s not printing fast enough.
    Gabriel honks the horn at me. I swipe the papers out of the printer tray and then carefully open my folder. I can’t lose this paper again. I will place it right here in the pocket where I always keep assignments that are due for…
    I freeze. Then shiver.
    There it is. The original paper.
    Right. There. In. Front. Of. Me. Exactly. Where. It. Belongs.
    It’s staring at me with the all-seeing eye of Emily Dickinson.
    How is this possible?
    Gabriel honks again.
    I’ll take both papers and compare them in the car. I shiver once more as I pull the old paper from the folder—
     
    I shouldn’t have done it. And I know it the second I return to Is .
    It seemed like such a small thing, letting myself find that original paper. Vanity, I know. The first version was so much better than the second. And, yeah, I wanted the better grade on it, but even more than that, I wanted my AP English teacher, Mrs. Bevery, to know how brilliant I was. I needed to hand in that first paper. I thought.
    But now things are changing. A lot. More than they did when I messed with the whole handbag thing. That time it felt like the key in my song of life jumped up a half note. Now it seems like a whole different song is playing. Everything about space and time seems…different. And scariest of all…I’m forgetting who and what I was in the first version of life, the me who never found the original version of that Emily Dickinson paper. I’m afraid of losing her… that me.
    It’s like dying all over again. I’m going to the funeral of someone who I both hated and loved. And it’s scary because I’m