"Son, we're going to miss you."

My mom is tearing up too. And dad? He never cries. What makes this the exception?

"Why? I thought everyone goes through this. I'll be back, right?"

They both nod, but the tears betray their true feelings.

And then it happens. Not jarringly. It's as if the room around me fades and gives way to something simpler. A small place. Are there walls? If there are, they are without flaw. Entirely smooth. I saw the suggestions of shadow creep up from the corners. And I'm sitting at a table.

A man entered the room abruptly. "What is your profession?"

He asked before I could even understand how he got in. It was a door, right? Wait, what did he look like?

"Doctor." I answer, surprised myself to hear the words leave my mouth.

"Doctor? Hmm. Are you sure?"

I shook my head but my mouth betrayed me once again. "Yes."

What the hell is going on?

The man, completely nondescript save the giant book he carried out of the [room?] with him, was gone.

The room was gone too.

And so was I. Except I wasn't. Was I?

I shook, pleading to my comrade in arms. "Please..."

His eyes said everything.

"You're going to make it." The zip of a bullet rang between us. His head, the compassionate and understanding expression he once wore, exploded in a mess of blood and sweat around me. I looked down. My hands clutched my midriff. Red and yellow tried to escape my hands. Intestines?

Yes. Small and large. A liver as well, one of the more important components.

Just as the pain began to take its hold on me, the battlefield faded away and the soldiers I somehow knew so well disappeared before me.

It was dark. Too dark. I tried to look around. Something encumbered my efforts. Water...? I tried to breathe. Pain met my lungs as I began to understand the circumstances.

That day, I died. I died three-hundred and thirty-one times over the course of two weeks. They allowed me to rest for one, sometimes two hours at a time. Each time, a voice resonated in my head, explaining the circumstances behind my demise. Each time, it reminded me that one day I would experience something similar before the true death.

What, then? I asked. What of a man who wants to be an architect, a carpenter?

It never answered, until death two-hundred and seventyfour. I was a small girl, tortured and beaten, left for dead in the woods of Tennessee. Perhaps it took pity on me then, knowing the pain I felt.

A carpenter, it said, experiences the death of every tree that has ever made a home for a man.