My new Fantasy Life

The beeping of the heart monitor was her only company now. Slow, steady… but fading.

Eleanor Carter stared up at the ceiling tiles, counting the cracks out of habit. Seventeen. Always seventeen. The same pattern she had traced for weeks. The antiseptic scent of the hospital filled her lungs, sterile and suffocating. IV drips, tubes, and machines kept her tethered to life, but only barely.

“Any day now,” she whispered, her voice barely more than a breath.

Forty-two years. Forty-two years of existing. That’s what it had felt like. Existing. Not living. A string of moments blurred into one another, a cycle of waking up, going to work, coming home to an empty apartment, and staring at the same damn cracks in the ceiling.

When had she stopped dreaming? When had she accepted this quiet, lonely descent into nothingness?

Her body ached — not just from the illness ravaging her liver and pancreas, but from the weight of regret. Missed chances. Lost time. The family she never built. The love she never found.

“Eleanor…”

A soft voice broke through the haze. Nurse Clara. She had been kind — too kind for someone who had seen so much ****. But Eleanor knew that look. The one where pity dripped from every glance, every carefully chosen word.

“It won’t be long now,” Clara murmured, adjusting the blankets around her frail body.

Eleanor’s lips twitched into a ghost of a smile. “Good,” she whispered. “I’m ready.”

Was she?

She didn’t fear ****. What she feared was that her life had meant… nothing. No one to remember her. No one to miss her. Just another name scribbled in a forgotten medical file.

A tear slid down her cheek. She had cried so much over the past few months that she thought she had no more tears left. But this… this was different.

“I just… wanted more,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Just… something more.”

The heart monitor slowed. Her vision blurred, and a quiet numbness spread through her limbs. The cold seeped into her bones as the light around her dimmed.

But just before the darkness claimed her, something stirred.

A whisper. A pull.

And then…

Nothing.

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then Eleanor’s eyes snapped open.

The cold stone beneath her was not a hospital bed. And the chains around her wrists…

This was not the afterlife she expected.