Thresholds & Reflections: An Empty World Anthology

From Limbo Straight to Seventh Street

Jericho Heath was the most plain of females. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She lived alone in a Noho third storey walk up, and she wrote for the radio news team at WINS. She had a few friends made at work and fewer schoolmates to whom she could still speak. Jericho had no surviving family that she new of. And at thirty-three she was content with her mediocrity and her maidenhood.

Then the taxi hit her.

There was a flash of pain, of noise and light, then nothing. A strange new sort of feeling that wasn't quite temperature and a darkness. Jericho felt something not unlike freedom in that space of time and she took pleasure in it. And then there was the light, distant and not-cool, but not hot, not-temperature. Jericho was nearly queasy, upset. That light wanted her and she did not want to go toward it. It pulsed insistently. It drew her in. Not-searing, this lightness. Jericho was almost in it when the voice spoke to her from the darkness.

Jericho Heath opened her eyes on the pink-grey New York sky, smelt the carbon monoxide, the flowers from the corner market, the scent of urine and rainwater in the gutter. Then noise returned. The word "sue" thrown overhead several times, something in Spanish, the abrupt beeping of car horns and a distant Doppler-stretched siren.

Jericho turned her head to one side and saw many pairs of shoes and trousers turned away from her. She sat up. A wave of nauseous dizziness hit her, but she was standing, and she could move without any sharp pain. Jericho lifted her hands to her temples to assure herself of her balance then focused on the building ahead. LIMBO, over the door in colorful letters.

Perhaps she was dead, she thought. Jericho could remember taking the subway over to the East Village; she had been looking for a certain shop that sold candles someone at work had recommended. She'd never found the store. Jericho had walked back toward the numbered Avenues from Alphabet City, nervously clutching her purse under her arm and scrying at the smudgy address her friends had written on the back of a Tower Records receipt. So many of the stores along the streets lacked proper signs and so Jericho surmised that she had passed by the store and would never find it alone. And then what? The taxi running the yellow light, and she had just started walking without judging its speed.

Jericho couldn't make herself turn back. She had never been particularly religious, or even very superstitious, and so this feeling shocked her. Jericho feared she might turn and see her body still lying under the front of the cab. She studied the city block before her as she stepped cautiously forward. It looked like all the blocks in this neighborhood, so many diners and coffee houses, shuttered bars, and corner markets. But that sign: LIMBO, it really stood out.

Jericho stepped over an abandoned orange traffic cone onto the sidewalk. A vagrant shuffled by, uncomfortably close. He lifted greasy ginger-blond hair from his eyes and held a shaking hand forward, the paper I 'heart' NY cup rattling with change. Jericho wished to pass, but she had made the mistake of looking at his eyes; she couldn't pretend she hadn't seen him. She dug a Subway token from the pocket of her overcoat and held it up so that he could see it then dropped it into his cup. He said something that sounded like, "Little Sister," and smiled slightly giving Jericho a glimpse of his eyes as his face was turned upward.

They were so strange looking, pupils dilated but irises also quite large and a color she identified with old computers: cyan. They were definitely cyan and very bright. He mumbled something and pointed an unsteady hand toward the door before her. Jericho grimaced as the man passed by. She supposed she had to go in. She had to go to Limbo.

It was a sort of coffee house, or her afterlife, she wasn't sure. A sandwich board with the specials listed, many small tables with chairs that looked like survivors of the fifties, some artwork, and the ominous looking counter with a menu overhead. She imagined a wizened old man might appear from the door behind with a book as in television commercials and movies but it was a young man in slim black clothing that materialized to stare expectantly at her. "I'll just have a coffee for now," Jericho said and reached into her purse for her wallet.