After

What happens right after death?

The room decided how you would leave it.

You weren’t thinking of rooms when you died.

You were thinking about rhythm—the rhythm of breath, the motion of life: inhale, hold, exhale, repeat; the small accounting of steps from the bed to the door; the way the pulse in your wrist insisted on like a metronome even when the rest of you wants to stop.

When the metronome failed, the apartment kept time for you, and whatever kept time there learned you fast.

At first, nothing changed because everything changed too slowly to notice. Gravity stayed polite, walls stayed in their lanes, the clock in the kitchen hummed its cheap battery hum. Your body lay where it landed, sideways, slightly curled, as if sleeping through a bad dream.

But you were no longer inside it. You were hovering in that narrow seam between last breath and the next impossible one.

You didn’t drift upward or downward. There was no bright light ahead of you. Instead, you stayed in the room.

And it was watching you.

---

This can’t be happening, I think, and the thought felt childish.

The words are like paper in my mouth and the wallpaper leans as if it can hear better than I can. The light over the stove blinks in the interval of my heart used to keep and then stretches into something that feels like an accusation.

Steam from the kettle, rising in wispy columns, writes my name on the window in slow, patient letters and the radiator coughs the rest in a hiss that smells faintly of onions and old tea.

I try to move and discover my movement had been re-educated. My limbs obey with an awkward courtesy, joints turning like someone else’s hinges.

In the corner, shadows dance.

They edge and pivot with a patience that feels like calculation, folding themselves into the exact silhouette of the chair where I used to read, the arc of the lamp I tilted with my left hand, the dent in the rug where my feet pressed.

Then the tallest shadow leans out of the parade and finishes the motion it had been practicing.

It wears a hood that eats the wallpaper. Where a face should be there was an absence so black the cheap kitchen light seems to reach the edge and hesitate. The silhouette’s shoulder is a scythe blade, absurdly precise, catching a wink of reflection from the kettle.

“You keep good time,” it says. The voice is a page sliding closed.

I laugh because there’s nothing else to do and the laugh comes out thin and useless. “What are you?” I ask, because questions feel like currency here.

The hood tilts. “Necessary,” it says. “Accurate.”

From beneath the robe a contract is passed—a thin, folded page like a receipt, edges feathered as though handled by careful fingers that never fumble. It lands in my lap without sound.

My name is at the top in the same neat hand that lives in the body; below, columns breathe: Term, Duties, Duration.

Then, at the bottom, Signature.

Another banger prompt from Bradley Ramsey