[ WP ] '' Death Insurance '' is a paid subscription service that brings a loved one back to life for the next 24 hours after their death in order to say goodbye . You awake after your death to discover you were a recipient of a gift subscription from an unknown benefactor .

There was no motion to the dying, no sickness or exhaustion, just a lazy shadow creeping through my senses as my nerves shut down, collected their severance, and went home. My last few seconds of sight beheld the burgundy pile of my hotel carpet, the pink suggestion of a fingertip, before it all became bland warmth and blindness. These hateful thoughts became slower and ever slower, the last few putrid phonemes funneling into a beautiful silence. And then I wake up on a fucking couch, and God damn it all, I feel *fantastic*. Something cool and light is surging into my veins from an IV somewhere. I've never felt so motherfucking alive. 
 
 `` Mrs. Hammersmith?'' says a voice. I feel the electric heat of a body standing closer than I'd prefer. I crack an eye, absolutely unwillingly, and there's a bald-headed old man with servile eyes and a bright patch of siver foil pressed over the bridge of his nose. I hate him, powerfully and completely voluntarily. I spent close to three hundred dollars on the coke, the percocet, the decent wine. By all accounts I should be dead, unbeleivably dead, quietly dead. My blood was poison. My body was failing. It was quiet, you son of a bitch, it was so quiet inside of me. 
 
 I try to speak, but it does n't work out that way. All I do is breathe, this unwanted ragged breath, like being raped in the throat by the Universe. My slitted eyes shiver wider, revealing more of the room: a dark, wood-paneled study packed with old and beautiful books. I dreamed of having something like this, back before. My asshole savior is thin and shrunken, sagging with skin the same color and elasticity as wet pork rinds. He's wearing some kind of apron over an absurd powder-blue coverall, and has two more of those silver tape strips at the sides of his neck. 
 
 Eventually, I find the voice to swear at him. 
 
 He looks over his shoulder, and speaks at someone I ca n't see. `` She's conscious,'' he said, `` Appears to have full rationality. Do you want to take it from here, or should I...?'' 
 
 `` No,'' says another voice, a deeper voice, one that could originate from no other source than the deep chest of a perversely wealthy human male. `` I'll take it from here. Just get her into the chair.'' I feel thin, old arms under my own, lifting me as gently and carefully as a priceless artifact. I try to fight him, but the signal gets lost en-route to my limbs and I flop helplessly into a padded, upright chair. I see a door, askew. I see a man's leg wearing grey pants. My body has figured out how to mouth off, it seems, but I ca n't even lift my head. 
 
 He leans down. A square-jawed man's face, attractive, thirty-five. Clean-shaven. No, that's not right - hairless, as hairless as the back of my hand. Something about his icy-blue eyes seems off - his iris keeps expanding and contracting, and there's a reflective quality there. Like a soap bubble... or a camera lens. 
 
 `` Welcome back to the waking world, Mrs. Hammersmith,'' he says, `` Do you know what happened to you?'' 
 
 `` I tried to kill myself,'' I reply. I had assumed that this was some sort of hospital-cum-psych ward, somewhere to dry out and fix up failed authors when they tally up exactly how little they're contributing to society. But this guy just chuckles, this small patronizing laugh, like what you'd give to a child who insists that two plus two equals banana. 
 
 His face moves away. I feel the presence of his body slide behind me, and the chair I'm on jerks forward and slides into a silk-smooth motion. Some kind of motorized wheelchair, mirrored in its automation by the study door swinging automatically open, emptying me and my patronizing companion into a large, smooth hall exalted with thick carpets and butter-yellow marble. Something at the end of it, a great dark square of a portrait that I could n't even hope to see without my glasses. 
 
 This is n't a public hospital. I doubt this is a hospital at all. There's *money* here, baked into every gem-polished golden panel. And I spent almost every dollar I had on my suicide. 
 
 `` The medical sciences have improved vastly in recent years,'' said the voice behind me. `` Recently, the practice of resuscitative policies -'death insurance', colloquially - have made it possible to resurrect the dead for brief periods post-mortem. Usually no more than a day, sometimes less. Typically, this allows the recently deceased to spend one last day with their families in the case of sudden or accidental death. Typically, this resuscitative property only works on the recently deceased, and is never attempted on anyone who perished before the process was perfected.'' 
 
 As we drifted closer, the portrait resolved more and more. I could see an overweight person hunched over a desk, one hand entangled in a mass of straight, light purple hair. I could see the white bulk of a marble railing and the portrait dipping below it, a vast two-storey oil-paint monstrosity obviously commissioned at absurd expense. More and more details sprung up as we drew closer: the torso-sized glasses perched at the tip of the gigantic nose, the expression of frustration and disdain, the black square of an open laptop. The wine. The cocaine. Oh. Oh, no. 
 
 `` Of course, there are exemptions in the case of persons of vast cultural importance,'' said my trailing attendant. 
 
 I had regained enough muscular power to be able to look back over my shoulder, to hopefully arrange my facial features into something resembling indignation. `` Where the fuck are we?'' I spat, and he smiled down at me, patient, beatific. 
 
 `` The Georgia Hammersmith National Museum, of course. It's all here. First editions of your most influential works. The laptop you wrote them on. Your birth certificate. Your death certificate. You were laying at rest beneath the cornerstone of this structure. Until we exhumed you, of course.'' 
 
 `` So I... was dead?'' I sputtered, stupidly. My head is filled with a thousand stories, a thousand fictional ways this could have come about. Science. God. Fairy magic. `` And now I'm... not?'' 
 
 I was treated to another one of those patronizing chuckles. `` For around twenty-four hours, of course.'' My body slid along, numb and rocked with inward explosions. I was dead. I succeeded. It was quiet inside of me, so quiet. It had worked, until... 
 
 `` Why?'' I murmured. I could see the portrait more clearly now. My own face. My own room, or a distorted represenation of it, at my own shitty apartment. Every degradation of my own failed life, brought beautifully to life in classic oil and canvas. 
 
 `` It was as true in your era as it is in every one, I think,'' said my resurrectionist, my private clean-chinned Jesus, `` that great artists are not appreciated in their time.'' 
 
 Through the great glass windows of the golden marble atrium, I could see the people outside. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe. And a great, gleaming world behind them, taller and darker and clad in stranger shapes than the world I had grown accustomed to. 
 
 I can practically feel the man's smile. I ca n't keep my hands from shaking. I ca n't keep my eyes from weeping. `` Mrs. Hammersmith, would you like to meet your fans?''
