I am going to die.
That
was the last thing I ever thought about.
Well, that is until I thought, Where
am I?
Because I swear I was just in the midst of flying out
the front windshield of my old, beat-up Taurus with a splitting
headache and three broken ribs. Probably to be expected of hitting a
tree at a cruise-controlled 71 miles per hour off the highway. Could
it have been about swerving out of the way of something? … A deer?
Either way, that's not where I am now. And wherever this is, it needs
to seriously dim it's overhead lighting.
I squint against the harsh brightness
and look around, trying to discern anything familiar, when I get
roughly shoved in the back of my shoulder. I wheel around angrily to
confront a colossus of a man with dark glaring eyes staring down at
me, his massive hand nearly the size of my head pointing beyond me in
the direction I had been facing.
“The line's movin',” he
grunts, his voice practically echoing straight through me.
I view back over my shoulder and
notice the row of people standing, much like in a line, all adorned
with white robes. I hesitate a moment, about to argue with the man
about where the heck we even were, but then I realized trying to give
the evil eye to a giant is the equivalent to just squinting harder
and not looking nearly as intimidating as I'd like to be. So instead,
I turn about-face and start over towards the people gathered in
single file order. But when I snag the robe I have apparently been
wearing underneath my foot, I stumble and faceplant myself into the
rather soft ground beneath me.
Cursing a number of bad words
under my breath, I struggle to regain some stability as I keep
stepping on this darnable bathrobe and falling back down. Then with a
mighty yank on the hood of the robe, the ogre-man lifts me up and
sets me like a marrionette, finally finding footing. “Might watch
what ye' say around here, boy. Could lose you some brownie
points.”
I dust myself off from the nonexistent dust, feeling
completely embarassed as I finally blurt out, “Well where are we
anyway?” Ogre Man responds with a raised eyebrow, “You're
kiddin', right?”
Now I really try to glare at him, squinting
sinisterly. But after some time of awkward stare-offs, I finally cave
in, sighing heavily, “I was kind of hoping this was ALL a joke...”
I hike up the bottoms of my robe and begin walking over to the group
of people. As I draw closer, my stomach drops and my eyes droop in
dismay as I watch the line grow long, winding upward into the clouds
above.
“Huh, like a stairway...” Ogre Man
muttered behind me.
“What did you say?”
“Er,
nothing.”
“Well, I guess they wouldn't allow cutting in line,
huh?” I jest, covering up the pit of uneasiness growing in me.
We reach the end of the row and I turn
around to look behind Ogre Man to see already a number of stragglers
following our suit. Their faces covered in nearly as much confusion
as was mine or others that seemed complacent with the new
circumstances and simply forming into the end of the line. I mean,
why go anywhere else? After all this is judgement. Holy crap, this is
really happening!What's going to-
“Ehem! E-Excuse me?”
I turn to meet eyes with a scrawny, jittery old man who
continued to peered left and right as if something was after him, all
the while scratch his arms. Force of habit, I suspected.
“Y-You
wouldn't happen to h-h-have any need of assis-sis-stance, would you?”
his eyes finally finding mine, almost filled to the brim with
tears.
I glance up at Ogre Man for some help of understanding,
but he simply shrugged. Some help he is, “Um, I'm not quite sure
what you're talking about.”
The old man grasps hold of my sleeve
with an iron grip, pure fear reverberating through his raspy breaths,
“A-A-Anything you need! To help you w-with moving on. Y-You see, I
haven't really done much time helping other folk, you know, and if I
could get some time in before that, maybe they'll see me in a
different light, you know, and so anything you need help with
would-.”
“We're dead, pal. There's really nothing you can do
for me now...” And that's when it hit me hard, “We're dead,”
and I fell to the floor, tears falling in streams that I just
couldn't stop. The things I had, the things I could be, my life.
Gone. No date Saturday night at the movies with Jennie, no
bar-hopping fests with the guys, no mom calling to check up on me, no
dad calling to check up on my grades, no little brother graduating in
three months from elementary school. It's all just, gone.
And
that's when I blacked out...
ESTIMATED
14 YEARS LATER...
“Rock,
Paper, Scissors, SHOOT!”
“Gah! That's the fourtieth time
you've used Rock in a row!”
“And it's the fourtieth time
you've fallen for it, Pauly. What's the score now?”
“You're
in the lead, do you need to know more than that?”
I start
laughing as the other two look at me sourly. Old Man and Ogre Man
have grown on me for this past...I don't know how long, but I am glad
to have been stuck between them. They've helped me through a lot of
understanding fears.
Pauly was a drug addict who began at the
age of 65 due to his wife's sudden death brought on from a cancer the
doctors had all missed. He was lost and unsure what was left for him.
With his constant ins and outs with the hospital he was able to swipe
anything and everything he needed to start his road of hell raising.
George, on the other hand, killed a man. He knows it was wrong, but
when the guy goes and has an affair with your wife for four and a
half years, you find there's a breaking point. But it didn't rest
easy with George, and for a long time he felt haunted by his deeds
and so finally chose the shortest way out by jumping from the roof of
an old motel. He hadn't jumped far enough and smacked into a balcony
railing along the way, now leaving him with a constant headache.
And there's
me. A kid who hasn't had enough experience in the world to know if
he's done right or wrong. Sure, stealing my brother's milk money to
buy Cheetos every once in a while was bad, and I've wreaked plenty
of havoc on my parents to give them grey hairs, but I've had my share
of heartbreaks, tough stuggles through college, and repetitive work.
And as much as I could have stewed on these things, I knew that it
wasn't up to me but up to someone else.
“Paul
Haddley,”
came a echoing intercom.
We had come to the end of the line.
Towering before us, a large skyscraper gleamed with the sunlight
radiating off it's dozens of windows, and at the base stood two
sliding doors that reached nearly fifteen feet in height. The
building itself went farther up into more clouds (and seriously, the
amount of clouds I have seen, you'd think we would have gone past all
of them by now).
The doors now slowly slid open, revealing a
dark hallway within. We had watched this atleast a million times
since the skyscraper appeared in our view, but it was still
terrifying to watch people go through, and now it was Pauly's turn to
enter. He shuffles forward slightly, looking back at us with a
nervous smile, “See you guys on whichever side, I guess.” And
then he had made his way in, the doors sliding slowly closed and
coming together with an ominous clang.
I
gulp and in that instant the intercom came booming in my ears the
name I wasn't ready to hear yet. My name. I look to George but he
nods solemnly and urges me forward, like he had the first time I came
to this place. That made me smile and I nod back to him, falling into
a slow stride toward the doors that were gradually parting to make
way for me. Each step seemed to be with the beating of my heart and
as it sped up, so did my feet. Before I knew it, I was running
headlong into the tower, past the giant doors and down the long
hallway. I wanted this over with. Give me love or give me pain, I
wanted to feel something, and I was tired of standing around to find
out which.
At the end of the hallway there's a flashing green
arrow pointing to my right and I follow it around a corner and into a
large office area, where men and women are sitting at desks and
typing out paperwork or sifting through documents on computers. I
come racing through the aisleways, papers scattering after me and I
hurtle over a woman's table causing a loud scream to shriek
throughout the spacious workplace. I laugh heartily as I see the
larger office at the back of the room and the name printed in fine
black letters upon the door:
Judgement
Officer
St.
Simon
Peter
I
rush the door, ready to simply barrel into it, might as well make an
entrance for my trial. But just before reaching it, the door opens on
it's own and I go flying through it and smack into the wall across
the other side of the office. After catching myself on the hardwood
floor, I look up to see an elderly fellow closing the door behind
him. He looks down at me through his small half moon spectacles as he
pulls out a pocketwatch from his waistcoat pocket.
“Well, Mr.
Elden,” he checks the watch, “You're right on time. Please, if
you would prefer a seat, there is one here in front of my desk.”
I
grumble as I shift my robes from getting under my feet so I can stand
up. I walk over and sit in the suprisingly comfy chair and realize, I
haven't sat since I came across the line that I waited forever in.
And sitting felt great.
“Now, there's a set of questions I
must work through with you and then we can let you be on your way,”
the man scratches at his scruffy beard as he sits down behind his
large desk, looking up to me quizzically, “I'm guessing you already
figured that, eh?”
He stole the words right out of my mouth,
“eh-er...yeah.”
Smiling
widely he shifts his gaze to the paperwork splayed out before him. He
sorts through a few of them before clearing his throat and reading
off a small parchment, “Marcel Elden, this is your name, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Do
you feel like your life was fulfilling?”
“No.”
“Heh,
I suppose not, being only at 26 of age,” he looks up to see my
nonchalant expression and returned to his questions, clearly his
throat once more, “Did you enjoy your life?”
“...Yes.”
“Do
you have any regrets?”
“Doesn't everyone?”
“True
enough. Now, last question. Do you believe you deserve to go to
Heaven?”
“...What?”
“Do you believe you deserve to
go to Heaven?”
“I...I don't know,” I stutter. The man
across from me lifts his head, peering over his glasses and giving me
a questioning look. I become infuriated, “Now wait just a second.
I've waited patiently for God literally knows how long to be judged
on my life experiences and choices so that I either can or can NOT
get into Heaven. And now you are asking me what I
think? What does it matter what I think?!”
The man wrinkles
his forehead and rubs the bridge of his nose before scooping up all
the paperwork and taps it on the desk to make it into a neat pile,
“Well, son, I'm sorry to say this but it seems...” He goes and
opens a book that sat next to his right hand. It's hollowed in the
middle, replaced with a small red button in the center. He presses it
and continues, “...that you are going to need more time to
extrapolate on things.”
The chair beneath me shudders and I
feel myself falling as I call out to him, “Wait, just hold on!”
“You
should be ready by the time you float on back, Mr. Elden. Until such
time, stay safe, and farewell,” the man had gotten up and walked to
the edge of the trap door as I continue to fall into darkness,
shouting at the top of my lungs. The chair suddenly stops, set
perfectly into some sort of strange contraption that was cold iron to
the touch. Then, with a loud click and a grinding noise, the
contraption launched me off and out in a flurry of bright light...
AT
THAT VERY MOMENT,
ON EARTH...
A
young girl sat in her window, staring up at the night sky. Her
parents had just gotten into another argument and shouting and
yelling came drifting up through the floorboards in her bedroom. She
was crying, covering her ears, hoping it would all just go away. She
knew she shouldn't have gotten into the cookie jar, but she didn't
think that it would create such a disaster within the house. She
blinked wearily up at the stars, when one swiftly shot across the sky
in a twinkling blaze. She knew these were called shooting stars, and
that you could wish upon one of them for your dreams to come true.
She stared after it, clamping her hands together and wishing, with
all her might, that Heaven would forgive her for her mistake this
night...
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