Judgement in Fours

I died.

Not the worst thing that could happen at 87 years old, I suppose.

Nothing really remarkable about my death. It was quiet, neat, tidy even, like the sun slipping behind the horizon on a cloudy evening. I was no Hollywood starlet gone out with a bang or an overdose. The world did not mourn my death only to forget about me the next month, and then add my name to a list of people the year took away from us. I had a good life, married early, had 2.5 kids and a dog, went to church on Sundays, and prayed before meals with my family. Thought, 'hey, I'm a good person. I don't swear, don't hold a grudge against my neighbors who let their dog piss on my flowerbed. I'll get to Heaven no problem!'

Purgatory.

One time I told my friend I couldn't possibly get hit in the face with a baseball standing far left field.

What an idiot.

Purgatory isn't this wasteland filled with monsters trying to kill you and anything that moves; it's not what the Greeks thought either, it's not an empty field filled with the moaning spirits of the dead who weren't good or bad enough in life. It's quite a lot like Earth. There's things to do, people to meet, food. I went to the new Star Wars the other day. Pretty good.

Purgatory is a verge, the edge of something; to quote Gandalf, "it's the deep breath before the plunge." Doing things doesn't distract you from this feeling of waiting. You know something big is about to happen, but you're just waiting. Endlessly.

I hate waiting.

I don't know how I knew, but one day I woke up and just began walking. Somewhere in my mind I thought This is stupid, I don't even know where I'm going, but I just kept walking. I wasn't waiting anymore. I was done waiting. That I knew without a doubt.

I'd tried to leave before, but the walls surrounding the city were too high and the guards, who looked like buff grim reapers, never let me pass. They barely looked at me when I walked past. A man tried to walk out behind me. He started screaming when the reapers stopped him from leaving.

"My daughter! I need to find my daughter, please."

The reapers didn't say a word. They pointed pitilessly back to the city. The same thing happened to me when I tried to find my daughter who'd died 41 years ago. I heard one last plea from the man and turned my eyes toward the land beyond Purgatory.

I'd never left the city, where all the dead people are; but I'd seen, through grainy windows the outside, where the sky turned black on the horizon and the land stretched beyond what I could see. Sometimes, I'd make a game of trying to identify features through the glass, but all I could see through the filthy window was the black sky and a suggestion of lighter colored land below it.

Out in it, however, I saw a crayon-drawing, blue river winding sluggishly to my right. A brown creature crept along its banks. Even from the road, perhaps four hundred feet away, I could hear it huffing.

It didn't look like a bear, too skinny. I thought it might be a dog, but when I stopped to look at it, our eyes connected. Its face curled into a grotesque image of my own with a thick, gaping, and drooling mouth.

I'd never been a real looker in life, but dear God, that thing was hideous with its wrinkled skin, flat silver eyes, and swollen purple tongue. It made the zombies in The Walking Dead look alive. All over its brown body were gross lumps; oozing clear, yellow, and white liquid every time it took a step toward me. Big, webbed hands slapped the ground with each step until I could see individual hairs on its mangey skin.

"You killed me," it snarled.

I'd like to say I didn't scream like a little girl, but I screamed like a little girl and fell on my ass. The creature's laugh was a cross between a hyena and a phlegmy witch. It even coughed up a whitish glob.