Chances are, you’ll never meet anyone like me, and not just because I’m weird, and not because I’m dead. I’m James Moody. I have abilities you can’t even imagine, skills that serve me well in a place you’ll never go—if you’re lucky.
It’s a long story, but I’m going to tell you how I came to die, but not because I’m fishing for any sympathy. I don’t need any. Thanks. I have Root.
Someone dying doesn’t necessarily make a story a tragedy. Death can be a good thing if it’s done right. And death doesn’t have to be forever, once you know your way around this place. Nothing is permanent in the realms of soul.
Root is not the afterlife. It’s more like a halfway house for souls in transition, a waiting room for places I have yet to experience. Places like Penult and Lethe and the Deeps, which in turn are just a deeper set of anterooms for the real deal afterlife. I have yet to meet a soul who has experienced those rumored and legendary realms we know as Heaven and Hell. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It’s just that the entrance requirements for either are steeper than you might think.
Not that I’m in any hurry to get to either place. I’ve only had peeks, but the Singularity is Heaven enough for me.
Root first came calling when both Mom and Dad were still alive. Those were simpler days, when my greatest angst revolved around how to spring loose to hang with the public school kids in downtown Ft. Pierce. I wasn’t ever happy cooped up at home. My parents weren’t horrible, but they were … parents. It didn’t help being an only child. That kept their focus entirely on me.
I got home-schooled because Mom the librarian was convinced that Ft. Pierce High School was infested with junkies, heathens and cretins. That was totally true, of course, but she didn’t realize she had a kid fully qualifying for at least two of those labels living under her own roof.
Getting out of the house I could manage; but getting one of the Ft. Pierce cliques to acknowledge my existence was a bit more challenging. I don’t know about your town, but around here, society gets ossified once you hit about fourteen.
Being home-schooled made it even harder. The old play groups worked fine until I hit ten, and then as the years went on I found I had less in common with the prodigies, religious nuts and wacko Libertarians that made the bulk of the home school crowd. Creationism was popular among that crowd. Mom, on the other hand, pulled me out of charter school because she was afraid they wouldn’t teach me enough evolution. Remember, this was Florida.
The ice breaking strategy that had worked with grade schoolers—acting all goofy as I butted my nose into cliques of complete strangers on playgrounds—now usually only drew ridicule or worse—blank stares. I kept at it because it was the only tool in my shed.
Sometimes it got my ass kicked. Once it scored me drugs when I linked up with a gaggle of potheads who wouldn’t have cared if Muammar Qaddafi had come to sit with them.
By far, my greatest success was the time I hooked up with Jenny Gallagher’s crowd. This one was notable because Jenny was female unrelated to me. She acknowledged my existence. That, my friends, was a rare combination in my world at that time.
It was a Saturday in June. A bunch of kids my age were loafing around behind the kiddie swings under an old weeping willow. I took a deep breath, walked up to them and went into my little nonsense spiel.
“Anybody see my pet wombat?”
Blank stares. Blinking. Par for the course. The idea was to hit them with the unexpected, knock them out of their comfort zones.
“I’m serious. My wombat got loose. I think it went up a tree.” I gazed up into the swaying fronds of the willow.
“What the fuck’s a wombat?” said this guy with a vacant scowl who was built like an offensive lineman. He outweighed me by about a hundred pounds.
