What's it like, being me? The most unique experience you'll never have. Too bad my mind's broken, and you'll never know it. The doctors, they don't like that I know that. They drug me and send my will-power into somewhere deep in the cosmos, far away from me and far away from them. They've done cat-scan after cat-scan, and it all comes back with the same result. Schizophrenic. I'm missing 25% of my brain mass. They don't know where that mass went, why it's gone.
    I do. It's stuck in the Sixth and Seventh Dimensions, respectively. Tiny specks of my cranial, gray sponge feed me
radio-esque signals from realms humanity never meant to touch. My grandmother died twenty-five years ago, and she feeds me things from
the Sixth Dimension. She calls it home. We, as a species, call it Hell. It's my dearest hope that one morning, I'll wake up (or preferably never again) without a bacteria demon feeding on the
intestines I now lack. That nasty little bugger is Grandma's “guardian”. He festers inside her soul and feeds off its life-energy until she completely evaporates. He slowly rebuilds her with her own energy, but twisted in his perspective. Every time this happens, it's a little harder for her to keep her sense of self. That's why it's Hell; she was the most independent person I know, and she's becoming less self-reliant every day.
    The Seventh Dimension is even worse, because I'll never go there. The Christians call it Heaven. I call it Mundane; all strife and sense of self-improvement is removed. All that ends up happening is a never-ending sense of ennui, but damn if that ennui don't make you feel like the happiest, most loved fellow around.
    My father talks to me from there, sometimes. He keeps asking me to change my mind, to let His Undead Highness into my life. I keep telling him I'd sooner get a lobotomy. He'll laugh in that disappointed way of his, and I blink, and the signal's broken.
    I'm, then, alone again: in these walls where other realms
intrude with never-ending frequency and intensity. I'm their beacon,
the only person on the planet who can hear them. Or so you tell me. So the Other Realms tell me.
    Tell me, Doctor. Do you hear them, too? They're right behind        you. I can hear them. It's your Aunt Natalya, buried before you left the womb. She's whispering. It's hard to make her out. Ah. She says she'll see you soon, Doctor.
    It's your Uncle Rasputin, still fighting the Cold War against entities far older and more bitter than the worst of Russia's winters. His voice, his essence, is wracked with pain. That's the gift of the Sixth Dimension. His gift to you is the desire that his spineless liberal nephew will finally do something brave in his life. He's mentioning a pistol, Doctor. He gave it to you for your fifteenth birthday. Ride the lightning. Pull the trigger and let it all go. His sense of urgency, his intensity, is getting worse. I think he means it, Doctor.
    There are more of them, Doctor. Would you like me to take a message? Ah. Ahaha. Aheheheh. It seems; well, no, that'd ruin the surprise. Sleep cautiously, Doctor. Sleep very cautiously.
    No, you mustn't leave. They're displeased that I've told you as much as I have. Their betrayal, their hatred is ripping at my mind.
    The voices: the voices, they've...stopped.
    Excuse me, sir. I seem to have fallen and don't know where I am. You must be a doctor of some kind, given your white labcoat. Do you know where I am?

I have no intention of lengthening or revisiting First Day. It was always intended to be a flash fiction variant of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, where the reader gets to decide if Zombie Southern Girl survives and gets cured or gets killed by a hysterical mob.

It's like reading one of those Weird Science sections in the back of an old pulp, only better. Had me hooked.

The story underlines both the benefits and the hazards of talking to people who have moved to the beyond. The latter, of course, being locked up and all.