The Next Thing I Knew (Heavenly) (2 page)

Kyle and I returned to the grassy plain, aka Not Kansas, in search of my parents.  People milled about aimlessly.  Some clumped around the natural organizer types, asking advice from those who were just as ignorant but made up for it by being high energy and supportive.  Where the heck was Oprah when we needed her the most?

Kids ran free all over the place, digging in the dirt and dodging through the discombobulated adults.  The plain seemed changeable to us ghosts unlike Earth.  I recognized one of the filthy tikes laughing and screaming with pure joy as he chased another child in an impromptu game of tag.

"Robby!"  I caught up with him and gave my dirty little brother a hug.  I felt warm tears streak down my face.  He squealed with joy as his little arms wrapped around me.

Breathless, he rattled off a list of questions about the sky's color, our location, and why there were panicked naked grown-ups looking for fig leaves.  Finally he asked one thing I could answer with something other than a shrug.

"Lucy, where's Mommy and Daddy?"

"I don't know.  I'm looking for them."

"Angie says we're dead and this is Heaven.  Is she right?"

Angie seemed to have it right as anyone.  "I don't know if this is Heaven, kiddo, but we aren't on Earth anymore."

"I like being dead.  We can play and the grown-ups don't yell at us and nobody's made me take a bath either."  He held up a grimy hand as evidence then looked back to the crowd of manic kids, his attention span for me all but gone.  I wasn't quite ready to lose him back to the insanity just yet.

"Want to see something really neat?"

His eyes lit up and he nodded.  I wished to hover a few feet off the ground.  So I did.  Robbie squealed high pitched enough to shatter glass and grabbed my dress, leaving muddy handprints.

"Show me, show me."

"You just have to want to do it really bad, and you can."

"Like Peter Pan?"

"Exactly."

So he did, and bobbed a few feet off the ground.  "Can I fly?"

"Umm."  I hadn't considered that possibility.  He didn't wait for an answer but started zooming across the plain just a few feet off the ground.  The other kids chased him in a riotous laughing mob.  One by one they lifted off the ground and joined him.

Nearby adults watched, some in horror, others in fascination.  Most of them looked plain jealous.  It didn't take long for one of them to snag a low-flying girl and demand the secret from her.  Kyle shook his head and laughed at the wingless angels swooping through the sky.

"Maybe things won't be so bad after all," he said.

Death became fun, for a while.

More people learned to fly.  Teenage boys pretended they were super heroes and fought brutal battles worthy of major blockbuster films or video games.  The old adage: "It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt," didn't apply anymore.  None of the old rules did.  We were free from war, disease, famine, all that Old Testament stuff.  There was no economy, no money to worry about.  No need to apply makeup, no need to floss and brush.  There was also no need to use the bathroom or pass gas either which severely limited Kyle's favorite scatological activities.

I felt hungry those first few days in the afterlife but I think it was the memory of hunger that triggered the feeling.  Memory seemed to trigger a lot of things, like pain and longing and missing your favorite TV shows.  Grrr.  I looked everywhere for my parents but couldn't find them.  I tried thinking of them in the hope my willpower would take me right to them, but it didn't.  The one person I had no problems finding was Ms. Tate.  I ran across her every few hours.  I wondered if she was stalking me.

She remained in a foul and frightened mood most of the time despite the flying, laughing children.  She remained firmly rooted to the ground with a frown that sagged like her, uh, other parts.  She cornered the Baptist preacher who'd lived a few houses down from me and demanded answers.  He was clueless as the rest of us.  I think she frightened him because got out of there really fast for a chubby guy.

Ms. Tate wasn't the only religious person scared out of her mind.  A lot of people were worried to death, mainly those who'd expected to find St. Peter at the heavenly gates waiting for them or a chorus of angels singing as they stepped up to be judged by the Lord himself.  Someone claimed they had seen angels watching us and another person claimed to have seen Jesus.  The closest thing I'd seen to Jesus was Freddy Parson, the skater dude who never shaved his face or cut his hair and was seriously bummed by the lack of skateboards in the afterlife.

Ms. Tate told anyone who'd listen that Jesus was on his way to judge us and that this was just a waiting period for the dead.  She quoted some other Bible verses to me.  I nodded to make her feel better when she got all up in my face.  Inside I was secretly glad that people like her had ended up in the same place I did.  My family never went to church.  My mom was Hindu and my dad had been raised Methodist.  Sometime before I was born they'd left religion behind and never looked back.

I thought of all the nasty things people like Ms. Tate had said about my mom's religious background and all the cruel things their kids would say to me about being secular or agnostic or whatever you want to call it when you don't believe in some magic man in the sky.  Now we were the magic people in the sky but we still had our old notions, fears, and self-limiting beliefs.  Kids like Robby overcame the limits faster than any of us once we told them they didn't have to listen to the adults anymore.  They were one big happy multi-colored, multi-racial mob.

Day and night cycles didn't happen on the grassy plain.  White light from the strange sun bathed it constantly.  For variety's sake, Kyle and I ventured to Earth just to keep track of time.  We tried to figure out where exactly the plain was located in relation to Earth but didn't have any luck.  When we wanted to go there, it was like stepping through a portal in thin air and being back.  Kyle figured it might be another dimension in the same place as Earth.  I'd never been into science fiction but it seemed as good an explanation as any.

On the third day of life after death I saw my first animal on the grassy plain, a brown field mouse.  One of the kids chased it down and scooped it off the ground.  It bit him, but he shook his hand and laughed.  A few hours after arriving in the afterlife, the mouse vanished.  More animals flitted in and out of our strange purgatory.  Some stayed longer than others, dogs especially.  Wild animals didn't stay for longer than a few hours.

A chocolate Labrador that had belonged to the McElroys from down the street appeared one day.  Poor pooch probably starved to death, locked up in the house with nobody to feed him.  I never saw a dog grin so much as he did, romping up and down the plain, tongue lolling, as he chased flying kids.  Robby later told me that a few days after arriving, the dog sat down, barked a couple of times at the kids, and vanished.  Maybe he was saying goodbye.  Maybe he wanted to fly too.  Our grassy plain might have just been a way station to doggie heaven.

It made me wonder if we all had an expiration date when we'd vanish.

Ms. Tate organized religious gatherings.  The number of people that showed up to hear her ramble on about a book she could never again pick up in her ghostly hands creeped me out.  More than anything, though, people wanted to ask questions and figure out how everything related to the big picture, the biblical end of days.  I wanted them to go find something productive to do, like stamp the words "Epic Fail" on their foreheads and crawl back into their holes.

Kyle noticed some familiar faces at the edge of the knot of worshippers one day and whooped.  My parents and his stood outside the group, scanning faces.  Mom heard Kyle's exclamation and turned toward us.  She tugged Dad's shirtsleeve and they rushed over to us.  Mom looked younger, more vibrant than I remembered.  Her copper skin glowed, her black hair gleamed in the white light, and her brown eyes were large and liquid.  She wore her favorite red sari with gold embroidering.

My mom was looking pretty hot for someone her age.

Dad looked like a kid again, blue eyes sparkling and his dirty blonde hair now clean and golden.  My parents looked radiantly happy.  Kyle's parents, on the other hand, looked wary and frazzled.  George's usual scowl had deepened, and Margaret's stern gaze locked onto Kyle in an instant.  I was surprised to see my parents in their company.  Despite the fact Kyle was like the older brother I never had, my parents had never gotten along with his folks very well.  They'd tried, but Dad was a book worm, a professor, and loved to talk literature.  Mom did upscale interior design and ate mostly vegetarian Indian food.  Nasty stuff, by the way.

George worshipped NASCAR, worked as a mechanic, and redefined the word "redneck".  He usually chugged down a case of cheap beer before lunch on the weekends.  Margaret was a southern belle who thought she was a hot little Georgia peach.  I thought she looked like a withered pear with the sun-damaged skin tone of a rhinoceros.  Needless to say I
never
let Kyle know those wicked opinions of mine.  I wondered if either of his parents had learned to fly yet.  The thought of George and Margaret flying almost short-circuited my brain from the improbability factor.

I flew into Dad's arms.  He picked me up and swung me around.

"How's my baby girl?"

"Mostly dead, Dad."

He laughed, but I noticed a twinge of sadness in his eyes.  I hugged Mom after he put me down.  She still smelled of flowers and her hair felt like fine silk on my cheeks.

George shook Kyle's hand.  "Hey, boy.  Good to see you alive and kickin'."

Margaret somehow still had makeup caked on her face highlighted by her signature powder-blue eye shadow and glossy red lipstick.  She smooched Kyle on the cheeks.  "We've been worried sick about you two," Margaret said.  "Just sick."

"Nothing can hurt us now," Kyle said, wiping his cheeks and smearing the lipstick his mom had left.

Margaret started crying.  Her tears washed enough eyeliner down her face to form an environmental hazard.  "We thought you didn't make it here."

"Oh."  Kyle gave his mom another hug.  "Well here I am."

"I'd give my left eye for a damned beer," George said.

What he really needed was a damned clue.  We weren't in Kansas anymore even if the afterlife looked just like it.  "Where have you guys been?" I asked.

"We went home," Mom said.  "We mourned our babies and ourselves until we realized that what was done was done."

"I went home right after everyone died.  I didn't see you there."

Dad rested his arm around Mom's shoulders, his fair skin a stark contrast to her brown tone.  "We didn't go right away.  We looked everywhere here for you and Robby.  We found him a little while ago eating dirt with some other kids, if you can believe it."

"Them kids is happy as pigs in shit," George said as a swarm of tykes whooshed by overhead in a cyclone of squeals.

Eating dirt, eh?  Kids could fly and yet they still took pleasure in such little things.  I envied that.  "He's enjoying himself for sure."

Dad watched the kids for a minute then looked back at me.  "After a while, we started looking everywhere on Earth you might have gone.  The school, the mall, Kyle's house."

"They ran into us there," Margaret said.  "You'd think Kyle might have the sense to go home and wait for us."

"I did go, Mom," Kyle said.  "But I didn't want to sit around watching our corpses putrefy."

"We've been exploring, learning what we can," I said.

Kyle studied his parents expectantly.  "What now?  We've been in the afterlife long enough for whoever's in charge to tell us what's going on."

"I don't think that's going to happen," Dad said.  "Just like Earth, I think we have to figure this out on our own."  He reached out and touched my cheek.  "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

I laughed.  "Mark Twain, huh?  Are you telling me to be bold, Daddy?"

"I'm telling you to go for it, sweetie.  Enjoy yourself.  We'll be around if you need us."

Dad showed me how to keep in contact.  Once you found someone in the afterlife and touched them, you could talk to them just about any time by thinking of them.  I heard a faint whisper in my head and smelled fresh ink when Dad contacted me.  With Mom, I smelled the herbal teas she always drank.  I wondered what it would be like if someone who'd shoveled horse poop for a living contacted me.

I could call them too but couldn't tell if it was working until they answered me.  I thought of my iPhone, Facebook status updates, and the countless tweets I'd sent over Twitter.  Forget all that stuff.  This was like having your own social network built into your head.

The only time this form of communication didn't work well was if one person was in the afterlife and the other was on Earth.  At least we didn't have to pay long-distance charges.  If someone called and you didn't want to answer, you didn't have to.  Kyle kept bugging me with it like a kid with new walkie-talkies.  He'd make me walk a distance then talk to him.  We found it easier to talk out loud even though conversation came into my head as if Kyle's voice originated in there.  He tried thinking the words instead of talking but random thoughts, some of which I did
not
want to hear, kept muddling things.