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Barney, male terrier mix

Photo: A small, scruffy gray dog with hair hanging in his eyes.

Caption: I’LL FALL FOR YOU IF…you’re looking for a project boyfriend. Barney is a fixer-upper. He needs a bath, a haircut, and some confidence. He’s looking for someone who likes (giving) long baths and is willing to overlook his grunge aesthetic to find the diamond under, let’s face it, a ton of wiry hair.

PAX

Being dead wasn’t so bad.

A golden-haired angel with cool hands caressed my skin. Her halo blinded me so I couldn’t see the details of her face, but I knew she was beautiful. I meant to ask her what I was supposed to do, now that I was dead, and why my body hurt so much, but language seemed to work differently in heaven. So what came out was, “Marry me.”

As a celestial being, she didn’t seem to mind. She must deal with mortals confused by the transition from life to death all the time. The only sign she heard me was that her hand stilled. I nudged my cheek into her palm like one of the kittens at the shelter. My cheekbone was the only part of me that wasn’t on fire, likely because of the contact it made with her cool angelic fingertips. A rasping gasp came from behind her. I could vaguely make out a pink-haired figure. Had I somehow ended up in anime heaven? I hoped it had subtitles.

A third figure approached, this one dark-haired and wearing black. It seemed strange for Death to arrive after I’d already seen an angel, but thinking made my head hurt, so I let it go. Reluctantly, I closed my eyes, shutting out my angel. I drifted on spiky waves of pain until a word called me back to reality.

Ambulance.

“No ambulance,” I muttered. I’d spent years paying off Grandma’s medical bills, including the ambulance that took her to the hospital that last time. I couldn’t afford expenses like that. Not now.

Louder, I said, “No hospital. No health insurance.”

Death’s voice wasn’t nearly as melodic as my angel’s. She said, “You can’t lie here in the street for someone else to run you over, and you’re too big to carry. If you can’t walk, I’m going to call 911.”

Fuck, I wasn’t dead. Angels didn’t talk about logistics. Caregivers did. And I hated to be a burden to anyone. I blinked my eyes open. It was like I was looking at the world through goggles smeared with Vaseline, but I picked out a woman in black next to the gorgeous woman I saw most Saturdays when I rode past her house. I’d mistaken her short blond hair for a halo. Behind her was an older woman with hair the color of my grandmother’s bougainvillea on the trellis by the back door of my house. I rubbed my eyes and looked again.

Still pink.

I struggled up onto my elbows.

“Hold on,” the woman in black said. “I’ll help you. Grip my hand.” She grasped my left hand.

A second, cool hand slid into my right. The blond woman’s. Now that my vision was clearer, I noticed a thin white scar on her upper lip. They pulled me up to sitting and pain shot up my right wrist. I gritted my teeth and held onto my angel’s hand.

“What hurts?” Businesslike hands prodded my neck, my chest, my ribs.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“What’s your name?” The woman in black lifted my eyelid, not ungently, and shone a light into my eye. The light stabbed through me, intensifying my headache.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Pax. Pax Warren.”

She asked me a few more questions, like the date and where I was. Finally, she said, “Concussion, I think.” She dropped her light pen into her backpack. “You need to rest for a couple of days. Who can we call to pick you up?”

“Blanche,” I said. It wasn’t exactly an answer to her question, but the dog needed insulin, like me, and if I didn’t get to the shelter, she’d miss her dose. Most of the volunteers were squeamish about administering her injections.

The pink-haired woman squeaked, but the woman in black, who I could tell was a doctor from her bossy demeanor and her scrubs, said, “Okay, we’ll call her for you. Where’s your phone?”

“Don’t have one,” I mumbled.

“Do you mean you dropped it?” the beautiful woman asked. “Gramma, do you see a phone in the street?”

“No phone,” I repeated. And right now, my head ached too much to pull Alana’s number out of it. “No one to call. Gimme a minute. I’ll bike home.” I needed to get back to my blood glucose meter and my insulin supply. Teaching my early-morning spinning class was good for my glucose levels, but I’d skipped lunch at work, plus blood loss was bad for it. My head hurt too much to do the calculus I needed to judge whether I was headed for a blood sugar spike or an equally dangerous dip.

There was a chorus of noes from the women. The doctor said, “He seems harmless. He can rest in our guesthouse for a couple of days. I don’t have another shift until Tuesday.”

“He should stay with Justine,” the older woman said. “He’s her fiancé, after all.”

What? Maybe I had more than a concussion. My high-school girlfriend made me watch a movie where a woman had an accident and when she woke up, she’d forgotten she was married to Channing Tatum. Which was totally relatable, but did I have amnesia? Did it mean something that I couldn’t remember the name of the movie?

“No, Gramma, we’re not engaged,” the woman named Justine said, flashing me an embarrassed smile.

“You said he’s your boyfriend, though,” the doctor said.

“That’s not—” Justine glanced at her grandmother, closed her eyes, and sighed. “He can stay with us.”

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