Glory Days

 Today’s prompt from Michelle at WordPress: “Write the blurb for the book jacket of the book you’d write, if only you had the time and inclination.”

This is a bit off the cuff but I took up the challenge and this is what I came up with in 15 minutes:

            If she was dead, why was she in this classroom listening to a professor drone on about the linguistic beauty of the workaday language of English? She had often been told when she was alive that when you went to hell you were trapped in the circumstance you hated most on earth. And the circumstance she hated most on earth was being bored. And doing paperwork. She was bored but at least the paperwork, which had been her nemesis when she was alive was not present—so maybe, just maybe she was not in hell. The prof wore a belt with a peace sign buckle. He had wild gray hair and a suede vest—why was she back in linguistics class at university listening to Dr. Ivy? And why was she in her least favourite class?

            Cecelia had crashed into the back of a semi that jack-knifed on a foggy day in September, 2010. Even if she had seen it, there was no way to avoid the massive truck. She was returning from an unsuccessful business trip to Toronto and was eager to get back to home and hearth. The midday sun had been bright, the radio loud, and the trip slowly becoming a memory until she reached Cambridge. A grey curtain of heavy fog descended on the 401. It was not just a haze—she was caught in clouds of billowy pewter. She was disoriented—but she continued on in her quest to get home.  She knew that she should pull off the road but she did not know what she would be pulling  into.

            Then she was no longer in the car. She had been escorted to a ledge where she was allowed to see through the fog to the chaos below. Her body was slumped over the steering wheel………..

            In this tale of death come to life, Cecelia gets to relive what she often thought of as the best part of her life—her days at university. But relived again with the wisdom of decades behind her, would those days turn out to be the great time she remembered, or was the life that had been taken away from her not so bad after all.

            In this novel of second chances, the main character gets a chance to do what many of us dream of doing—returning to our glory days. Was she reincarnated? Was it a miracle? Was it all a dream? Or was she really dead?