I rested my head on Frank’s lap and closed my eyes and let the voices of the townspeople soothe me to sleep.

“Poor Frank,” someone said.

“He’d had a good innings.”

“What was he doing up on that roof?”

“He was forty-two.”

“Is that my ladder?”

“Forty-two is young. He didn’t have a good innings. He had a shit innings.”

“I’m forty-four next week.”

“What are you doing?”

“Let go of that!”

“This is my ladder. I lent it to him last year, but when I asked about it he swore he’d returned it.”

“What about the boys?”

“Oh geez…the boys.”

“What’s going to happen to them?”

“They’ll be OK. They still have their mother.”

“But they won’t have this ladder. It’s mine.”

Then I fell asleep.

I awoke back in bed, sicker than ever. The doctor said that by crawling half a kilometer to see my first dead body, I had set my health back, as if it were a clock I had adjusted for daylight saving. After he left, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, her unstrung face an inch from mine, and she told me in an almost guilty voice that she was pregnant. I was too weak to say congratulations, and I just lay there as she stroked my forehead, which I really liked and still do, although there’s nothing soothing in stroking your own forehead.

Over the following months, as my condition gradually worsened, my pregnant mother sat down beside me and let me touch her belly, which was swelling horribly. Occasionally I felt the kick or perhaps head butt of the fetus inside. Once, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her whisper, “It’s a shame you won’t get to meet him.”

Then, just when I was at my weakest and death was licking her lips, something unexpected happened.

I didn’t die.

But I didn’t live either.

Quite by accident, I took the third option: I slipped into a coma. Bye-bye world, bye-bye consciousness, bye-bye light, too bad death, hello ether. It was a hell of a thing. I was hiding right in between death’s open arms and life’s folded ones. I was nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all. Honestly, you can’t even get to limbo from a coma.