open-close

It has been a while since I've updated. Here is something I am working on. (It is not finished.) I have tentatively titled it "open-close."



I leave Earth with a strawberry in my mouth. There are, of course, sirens around me and ambulances rushing to save my life, but it’s too late. I’m looking down at the small figure disfigured and bent splayed across the intersection. A cloud furls and unfurls beneath me, and I squint to get a better look at my own body.

 I feel like my arm is supposed to tingle as they try to fold it back in, down there on Earth, as it hangs from the side of the stretcher board like a limp noodle. I spend the rest of the hour watching the men struggle with dead corpses and the heavy atmosphere. I wonder where the strawberry went.

 I lean forward for a better view as the men arrive at the hospital, now carting me, first, into the hospital (“Hurry up! She’s in critical condition!”) when I feel a cold hand touch my shoulder. I turn around.

 “It’s better to just leave it there.”

 I come face-to-face to a woman in her mid-thirties. I’m taken aback. But you’re so young, I almost say. I ask her how she got here.

 “I had breast cancer,” she says, and she shrugs. I tell her I’m sorry, and it feels weird because we’re both dead and what is there to be sorry about? We’re both here.

I ask her if she misses her family, and she tells me it felt unreal at first, but she’s used to it now. They didn’t really know her that well, she adds hastily.

Unreal, I say, kind of like the way people down there feel that she’s gone. I wonder if people down there think about us missing them. Probably not. They don’t know what happens after people go blank.

 It takes a while before I notice that we’ve been in silence for a while and I look at my hands and realize we’re sitting at a bench now, apparently waiting for something. Things happen like that here, apparently. It’s all on autopilot—your physical body, at least. Only your mind and mouth has autonomy.

 But when I look down at my feet, a strange feeling washes over me, kind of like bitter regret because I’m never returning home again. It strikes me then that I’m dead. I’m dead!

 “Am I dead?” I turn around and ask the woman. Just for clarification, you know. My question echoes in the silence and she gives me this forlorn look. She shrugs.

 “Will I ever go back?”

 She looks off into the distance, then, like she’s waiting for someone else to reply. No one does.

 “Where am I?”

 “Everyone dies twice,” is what she says. “We’re not dead yet.”






We’re in the cafeteria—because apparently heaven has a cafeteria—eating macaroni and cheese. It’s rather bland, the cheese, and I pick at the green beans with my fork. The woman tells me not to eat picky, and I shrug. She is still my only companion. It seems like everyone up here is busy with their work. They don’t welcome me in through golden gates like I had always imagined. It’s quite boring, to be honest.

 Suddenly, just as I begin to convince myself to eat the canned pears that I’ve always avoided on Earth, a person walks by. Only it’s not really a person, because he’s translucent and weak, barely holding the tray in his thin, stickly arms. He takes a few more steps before he suddenly disappears. The tray clatters to the ground and the chicken noodle soup (the soup of the day) rolls onto the ground. A puddle forms. People glance at the bowl clattering across the tiled floor and then resume their busy conversation. It reminds me oddly of New York City.

 I ask the woman what was that and she shrugs and tells me he’s dead now. I ask her what are we then, semi-dead?

She looks at me and says we’re not dead yet. I ask her what she is talking about and she doesn’t clarify, just looks down at her chicken noodle soup and continues spooning the broth into her mouth. I shrug and figure either way, we’re all gone from the Earth, so it doesn’t really matter.