Something a little different.
It's not a YA or MG fiction. I found this today and had a laugh.
One Star Review of the Afterlife.
The crack of a windshield, cold damp leaves. Lights. Rolling wheels.
Someone whispers, “You’re going to be Okay.”
Who the hell is that? Sure doesn’t sound like Arthur?
Up and down, my back arches. There’s no air. Blinking lights, aren’t they pretty, following like pearls on a string?
Up, up and away.
I open my eyes.
Where am I now? No one is around. Then someone pushes past me—hey! I shout. Don’t be so rude. But they don’t hear me.
“Are you going up or down?” A string of lights waves behind the blob without a face.
Where is Arthur?
I turn where the lights trail and catch a glimpse of my surroundings. Blank white.
“Mrs. Joan Ruckwin, please come forward.” I hear in the opposite direction.
There’s no one anywhere near me-–except that voice, a cavernous, reverberating voice, telling me to come forward. But there’s no forward. And where is back?
I spin until I’m a dancer on the top of a music box and stop.
“Mrs. Joan Ruckwin, there may have been a mistake?” It’s not a God it’s the voice of my fifth-grade math teacher addressing me.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Where am I?” I don’t see anything. “A mistake?” Arthur? He was in the car with me. He’s not here. He must be alive. “You’re right, there’s been a huge mistake. I don’t belong here. I belong with my husband and he needs me.”
“Everything’s transparent,” my fifth-grade teacher answers.
“Well, get me down. I want off.”
“Look inside this,” I’m told.
I see Arthur. Arthur is not in the hospital. He’s laughing and having fun, with—with another woman?
I step back. “Why are you showing this to me? “
Suppose I suspected it. We watch Arthur drinking bubbly with another woman.
I turn away. “I don’t need to see any more.”
“You still want to go back?”
“Wait, so this isn’t hell, cause it’s not too shabby.”
“A midway point before total departure.”
Before I have another thought, swirls of compression land me onto the table with Mr. Ruckwin, and his new, soon to be, Mrs. from what it appears, admiring her new ring.
“Oh, hello, dear. I know you weren’t expecting me."
The woman spits up wine. My dear husband coughs, gasping until it overtakes him, and into a frenzy; coughing and choking with no one to give them the Heimlich maneuver.
Such a pity.
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written in 2015
