It came like all the others; a drifting almost disembodied sensation like someone else’s nerves. Another soul’s suffering. The pain – whether it was tearing, bruising, or crushing – was replaced with dull acceptance. She often felt that the emotional trauma, the sorrow of mourning, stinging heartbreak, were the worst of it. But she’d never felt fire before. She’d never been burned alive. 

In these strange borrowed moments, she was rarely in control. But this was different. Why couldn’t she move?

It was suffocating, the lack of power. The almost claustrophobic restriction of movement. She had the pain of the recipient, which was normal, but for some reason, she, too, was panicking. Even in a world of shared torment, she usually had more freedom than this.

Were they bound?

No one would choose this. People often said that they wished they could trade places with another to spare them their pain. They didn’t know. If they did, they would never say such things.

She smelled it first—something savory, rising in the air. An aroma of grotesque familiarity. But familiar to who? She was more than a passenger here, and it was never clear how much she brought with her.

It doesn’t matter. Focus!

She tried to. She wanted to listen to that voice. Wanted to cut through the fog and the darkness and make sense of this, but it was so distant, so detached.

She snapped back into place, suddenly laser-focused on the moment and seemingly fully in tune with the patron to whom this pain was owed. She was fully in sync, gasping for ragged breaths as the temperature began to rise.

First, they sweat; great beads of sizzling moisture quickly evaporating in the stifling heat. They couldn’t see it, but their skin was cracking as if left exposed for days in a desert, desiccating while her aching lungs tried in vain to maintain their consciousness.  More sweat beaded, though it could no longer be felt as it rolled over her destroyed and unfeeling husk.

It’s not sweat. Trust your senses.

Through the agony, she tried to focus...

If she could have retched, she would have. It was too sweet. Too delicious.

That was the smell of fat sizzling on her charred, crispy, skin.

The heat continued to rise and, as the pain subsided with the almost complete shutdown of their nervous system, she finally heard it.

The screaming, now barely a whisper, had been so constant and draining that they were now nearly out of oxygen.

She focused. It was ending, and…

Could she? Hadn’t she done enough?

She fought her lack of focus, her agency, and her displacement.

I can take more.

As she bore more of the weight, she once more felt the seared flesh, the terrible dissolution of fibrous being, and the rupture of self inside that crucible of pain.

She could see the victim, too charred for even her closest friend to recognize. They were cracked and ruined not only from the heat, but also the agony.

Why had this happened?

She tried to hold on to the question as the pain came in. Wave after wave crashed over her, threatening to drive her mad.

Who could do this? She was a young woman, in the prime of her life, suffocating in her own smoke.

But this, too, was only temporary. She lost focus again as the victim’s clothes caught fire, brightening the space and snuffing out what remained of their connection.

Lucy woke, sweat-soaked skull and crossbones pajamas clinging to her freezing body. She tingled with the residual tingling pain from her dream.

Dream. If that’s what it was.

Her dark hair was strewn across her face. She must have been flipping in her sleep.

The sheets were tossed, too, clumped up at her feet like she’d been kicking and thrashing.

But why wouldn’t she have? She had just joined someone in burning alive.

Lucy rolled to her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. Her eyes met with the little corkboard she had over her desk. It was covered in newspaper clippings. Obituaries, some crossed out, others not.

The crossed ones were confirmed – deaths she had seen. Deaths she had felt. The rest were unknowns.

Sometimes she experienced them before they happened, sometimes after. It was as if whatever force she connected to had no concept of mortal time.

Her parents though the board was morbid. Why would she choose a hobby like this?

No one would choose this.

But she knew that wasn’t true. She could turn away from it, she could pretend they were dreams.

I could let them suffer alone…I have before.

It probably sounded easy. If she could tell someone, they’d say they could do the same. They would lie, and say they could take the pain for a stranger. No one would want to take that burden on for another. For a stranger.

If they said they would, it was because they had one luxury that Lucy didn’t.

They didn’t know what it felt like to die.