Short Story: You?

Short Story: You?

Everyone else had told their story: the twenty-something woman in a brand new Chanel skirt with blood flowing on to her pink pumps; fatal miscarriage. The mumbling old coon in raggedy clothes; old age. There was a once handsome former prize fighter carrying his head in his arms; industrial accident. And now, it was my turn.

I looked down at my badly smashed body somehow holding itself together in my best Christmas dress and shuddered. Then I looked around some more and noticed the others.

There were some walking around with rotting flesh still visible on their skeletons; and there were those whose bones were leaving powder traces everywhere they walked or sat. Then there were those I could see but were actually nothing forms: they had lost all the flesh and bones long time ago and were now what people above ground called spirits. I was surprised that I could recognize some of them from pictures I had seen in newspapers or on TV. Some were kind enough to walk up and introduce themselves.

Before I could speak, feeling the pressure from the old coon and the prize fighter, Moses, yes the one with the stick and the Tablets fame, came to me and said, “No pressure here, child. You can talk about it whenever you are ready.”

I smiled at him, feeling a little better. I was already missing my friends; Jay Dee, Kiki and Vicki. I wondered what they were doing at that particular moment, eight hours after my burial. Kiki would be crying her eyes out but the other two were tough…or at least knew how to play tough.

“Moses, let the child speak now, before she starts to forget how she landed here,” said a tall guy with a beard as big as Moses; he was also formless, or rather nothing but in the shape of a human. There were neither bones nor flesh on him.

“Who is that?” I asked no one in particular; the guy looked kind and had spoken in a friendly manner.

“Oh, sorry,” he said. He thrust out his hand, “I`m Jonah.”

I looked at him with a blank expression. In the world I had just left, people gave two names at introduction, at least. I had this friend in kindergarten who had five!

The prize fighter, balancing his head on the stub that was once his neck, spoke before anyone else. “Jonah, big fish fame?”

“Oh!” It was my turn to apologize. Then he interrupted.

“Don’t worry about it, I happened thousands of years before you. Besides, most people on earth think I`m a fairy tale.”

“So where are we?” I asked him.

“In a good place waiting for Judgment Day. There is another waiting place on the other side of the great valley to the east that is not so pleasant; the bad people wait from there.”

“How long do we have to wait?”

“Be patient, my child,” he smiled. “Have you ever heard of the first man on earth?”

“Adam?”

“Yes, he is still waiting.”

There was silence for some time as I thought of what to say to that.

“Could you please tell us?” It was Chanel talking. “This place is so boring; stories of the just-dead are the only entertainment here.”

“You could learn to read the Holy Books,” suggested Moses, leisurely twirling his stick.

“But I`m already here, why should I bother?” she pouted.

“Because, you could still end up on the other side of the valley before JD; or in hell, after. This is just a holding cell, so to speak.” That came from the old coon.

“Okay, let`s hear the new story first,” she said and turned to look at me. “You!”

So I recounted the events that led me here. We had gone to climb the smoke tower at the local decommissioned smelting plant. We had agreed that we would do it one at a time. Jay Dee had gone first, covering sixty rungs before he gave up. Kiki had gone next, making it sixty five. Vicki, the oldest of us all by two years, had made it to seventy three before giving up. I was determined to beat them all this time. I was tired of being last in everything we did together; tired of being the butt of all their jokes.

As Vicki came down, a drizzle chose that moment to wash the earth and everyone said we should run home and finish the challenge next time. I took this as a trick to taunt me later as the usual coward who wouldn`t normally climb the tower so I insisted.

Jay Dee grabbed my hand to pull me away from the tower and in a feat of blinding anger I had never felt before toward any one, I slapped him across the face. He released me and started crying, caressing the burning mark my fingers had left on his face. The others made a huddle and soothed him.

I left them there and commenced climbing, concentrating on counting rungs. At seventy two I noticed bird shit on the next rung, so pulled myself up to seventy four. I went up to eighty rungs and felt my victory was well sealed. So I started climbing down, counting again, not looking around, down or anything. At six, I tried to get to eight without touching seven. That is when everything, including myself, went south and very quickly.

I lost footing, my right foot hit a rung and propelled me backwards. I started jack-knifing in the air, head over heels, tumbling after my own shadow; at least Jill had Jack before her. I kept gaining momentum, I struggled to slow down by grabbing onto something but there was nothing to grab a hold of. I heard screams, four different kinds and wondered who had crashed our party. It wasn`t until the ground was almost upon me that I realized the fourth scream was emanating from my choked throat.

When I connected with Mother Earth, somehow thinking of Father Aloysious and his favorite phrase: Dust to dust, everything in my body shattered.

“I have a feeling they used a shovel to pick me up from where I fell,” I concluded.

“Wow!” said Chanel.

There was a sort of flickering, like when on earth there is a power fluctuation and I looked around apprehensively. Was this it? Was the Day finally here upon us? Would I soon hear the Big Trumpet?

“Dead thing coming through,” said a form that looked disturbingly like something from Nightmare On Elm Street. It had a lot of worms coming from inside the ears, nostrils, eyes and mouth. I shuddered to think I would also have to go through that phase.

A moment later, a young black man landed in our midst. He was putting on a prison shirt and had eighteen bullet holes in his back.

“I swear I did not rape that woman!” he screamed, looking around him fearfully.

“So you escaped from prison,” Moses said. “You should have served your sentence, though. I`m glad I lived way back when…we had swords and crossbows and life was a little less complicated.”

“Yeah,” agreed Johah. “It was more black and white without all the hatred going on.”