It was dark, though she knew little better, and she felt numb. There was an excruciating pain that throbbed from her left torso and she felt strange foreign objects stuck onto her skin in various places on her chest.

Her skin.

Lilith, while in this new body, had little control over it. She spent her time in it thinking about how it could move, why it could move and what it would take to make it move. Would it be on the whims of imagination like it had been in her astral prison or does it take more to work the basic functions of the flesh? Questions permeated her very existence, a complete existence, and the questions gave her doubt but joy as well.

The first test, she decided, would be to try and see what her body looked like and visually confirm what she felt – her side, the objects, the numbness. There had to be a setting to where her body now resided, much like in her dreams where the location was usually different and those with the bodies were given free reign in where they would go next.

She opened her eyes and saw life.

It was a white ceiling that first she saw, pure white. There was no misty twilight in it, no ambiguity. It was just white. Lilith had never seen a pure white before, or a pure anything and it filled her with such ecstatic joy that she felt the urge to leap up and celebrate.

She felt extreme pain when she tried.

Wincing at how it made her feel, the sick gut-wrenching feeling it gave her when she tried and the mental backlash it dealt out in retaliation, she turned her gaze to the origin of that pain and gaped at what she saw.

She found that she was clothed in a simple polka-dotted gown. Her chest was exposed openly, the thought of which made her feel heat on her cheeks, and there were wires plastered all over and connected to a device on her right. The most notable function of it was to continually make a beeping noise while displaying a jumping green line on a black screen. The intricacy of it excited her.

Remembering the pain, she returned to scrutinise her upper torso with her eyes, raising her head as much as she could before it would start to hurt again. Then she found it, what must have been the problem. It was a row of thread embedded in her skin, like it was fabric, which ran down her side, slanting down to her naval. It was long and painful and it spurred a memory, like a vision, which she watched with new eyes and strange familiarity.

“C’mon, you bitch, don’t think you can play innocent with me!” a boy, probably just a bit older than she was threatening, a knife in his hand, “You snitched on him, didn’t you? You told the cops that he was selling shit and got him convicted, DIDN’T YOU?”

He was hysterical, an angry and hurt look in his eyes. His face was flushed with rage as he waved the short weapon in front of her face. He wore baggy clothes, much like she did, that had patches and repair work all over it. He was a scraggly youth, but, despite it all, he was fearsome in the darkness of the alley - even more so once he shoved her roughly backwards.

She whimpered from where she had been forced down amongst several cardboard boxes. “I didn’t snitch on Mike, Matt, I didn’t! What would I have to gain from it if I did anyway? It’s not like the cops hand out reward money in this town!” She knew she was lying – there was reward money, and a lot of it, which the police gave to snitches. She knew she didn’t do it but in desperation she had to think of something. Why that?

“Liar!” he kicked her in the leg, the pain shooting through her as she grasped the limb instinctively to soothe it. She knew she was trapped in the alley, apartments on either side of her and a brick wall behind her. No one in this neighbourhood cared about fights anymore, they happened too often and too frequently. They were immune to it and their answer to a fight was to simply ignore it and let it go away.

“I swear, Matt, I swear…” she sobbed. She was helpless and she knew it. She hoped Matthew, a classmate of hers in District School 7 and small-time drug dealer, wouldn’t consider using the knife and wouldn’t consider killing her.

He had come to her to talk, to her, probably the only girl in school who lived in the conditions he had to live in, and told her about his work, about how he began to have doubts when one of his customers OD’ed. Maybe he would remember that she was like him, in the same boat, and come to terms so they could both go home and forget about it.

“How am I gonna get money now? How am I gonna be able to get enough to support my sister? You know my dad’s a drunkard bastard and that he just uses the welfare to go screw whores all night and buy beer instead of food and books for my sis and I! Why’d you do it?!”

“I didn’t Matt, I didn’t,” she pleaded between sobs, crawling to where he was in an effort to try hug his legs, “I didn’t do it…” All she received in reply was a kick that sent her sprawling backwards, her head hitting against the wall. She didn’t know if she was bleeding but it hurt. Then the knife came.

“Stop lying to me, Lily!” he screamed as the blade dug into her flesh, sending new pangs of pain into her as she felt warm blood spurting from the large gash he had given her…

After that it was just a blur. Lilith never lived that experience but it was part of her now in strange way. The boy, Matt, had called her ‘Lily’. Was Lily really the name of this body? It seemed almost ironic in a way how it was so much like her own name and it came with its own sense of satisfaction.

The curtain around her opened and revealed another person. It was a woman, middle-aged, wearing a stethoscope around her neck. A smile crept across her face, just the way Lilith imagined one would grow, and the doctor patted her on the head.

“It’s good you’ve recovered, your mother will be so glad,” she told her, moving her mouth to speak, her voice soft and comforting.

Lilith blinked, perplexed.

“My mother?”

“Yes, she’s been worried about you, she’s sleeping in the waiting room right now,” she smiled even more, as if her personal quest in life had reached completion in that single statement. She misunderstood and was leading herself to a fall.

“I have… a mother?” Lilith retorted, still not fully comprehending what the woman was trying to tell her.

The smile faded. It was replaced by a contemplative frown and a slight shake of the head. “This is worse than I thought,” she murmured, thinking Lilith couldn’t hear her.

What was worse than she thought? This was starting to become worrying, more so when the lady excused herself and closed the curtain again, leaving Lilith alone in her prison of pain. It seemed she had traded one jail for another.

Maybe, just maybe, a body wasn’t as great as she had hoped.