And since I am giving it away, I thought I would resurrect a preview from a couple of weeks ago for you. Here is a sample of one of my shorts:
The Soul Mouth
I imagined that death would be different. I expected to feel sadness as I left, perhaps nostalgia. I expected to find myself reliving happy moments from my childhood in my last seconds, imagined a single tear sliding down my cheek as my lungs filled and my heart beat for the last time. Not a white light, necessarily, but perhaps my soul being torn from my body to rest for a moment just above me, look longingly one last time at the Earth before finding its way beyond.
All I had right was the soul, and even that I was arrogant enough to believe carried on because it was too saturated by the beauty of the world, by our own human goodness, to be blinked out so easily. In truth, there are two kinds of souls, those driven by inertia, or those imprisoned by their own existence. Either way, we all carry on for the same inane reason—we don’t know what else to do. We are so lucky to come to this place, where there is no need to do anything, and yet no boredom either.
But no, there was no painful tearing from my body. One second I was staring into Katrina’s beautiful grey eyes. The splatter of my blood on her cheek spoiled the otherwise perfectness of her face. The next second I was here.
The first thing I did was laugh, overwhelmed by the irony and futility of the world. While alive, we are silly creatures with silly rituals. Like funerals, everyone standing around, making arrangements while they whisper “she would have wanted it that way.” Even the ones here that were the most fastidious, the most over-bearing, the most impossible in life ceased to care about their own the second they came here.
Because here, despite the futility of our being here, despite our very ordinariness, it is brilliant white, and always warm and everyone smiles. I don’t know it if I am in heaven or hell. I can’t imagine why I would care.
