Hey friends! This week’s blog post is going to have a different format than my previous posts. My other posts have all been of the anecdotal / “advice and wisdom” variety, but I wanted to try something different this week. As I’ve stated in previous posts, one of my goals of this blog was to get my creative juices flowing again, and to work on making my train of thought more cohesive and streamlined. With that in mind, this week’s post is going to be a very short bit of fiction I thought of during the week. I’m going to maintain my rule of doing very little to no editing, so it might be pretty clunky, but I figure it’s going to be good practice for me if nothing else.
This is also the first time I have ever (if memory serves me) put a creative piece of mine in a public forum, and honestly…that fact has been absolutely terrifying me all day. So this is also good practice for me in that regard as well. Without further adieu, here is (at least the beginnings of) a story I thought up this week. Also, just an obligatory fair warning to anyone that may be offended, there will likely be a couple of uses of crude language.
“Ugh, I am definitely going to sleep good tonight” Jonathan mumbled to himself as he waited for his chamomile tea to finish steeping. All week he had felt a bit under the weather, and it had gotten steadily worse each day, but he hadn’t thought much of it. It was his busy season, and he had been working long days to make sure his warehouse didn’t become buried in unfulfilled customer orders. It was only Thursday, and he’d already put in 60 hours, so he wrote his fatigue and persistent dull headache off as nothing more than exhaustion and stress. He had considered logging in to his work computer to get a head-start on tomorrow’s orders, but decided it was more important to actually get some rest than it was to get to his weekend a couple of hours earlier tomorrow.
He finished his tea – it was a peach-chamomile tea which dubbed itself SleepyTime Tea, so he hoped it would help him rest easier – programmed his coffee pot to start brewing at 5:30 the next morning, brushed his teeth, and all but fell into bed. He supposed the SleepyTime Tea must have been doing its job because instead of tossing and turning for an hour before falling into a fitful sleep (as was the norm for him during this time of year), he felt himself dozing off almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. As he was drifting away to what he knew would be a dreamless slumber, he became aware of just how exhausted and sore he was. Despite his job not being very physically demanding, his muscles all ached as though he had spent his evening in the gym, rather than on his couch sipping tea and watching Jeopardy. I really hope I’m not getting sick. Now is not the time for that he thought. And with that thought, Jonathan Reed fell asleep.
He awoke the next morning without his alarm. As he lay in bed, eyes still closed, he thanked past-Jonathan for making the decision to go to bed instead of working more last night. He felt great! The aching in his muscles was completely gone, his nagging headache was gone . . . actually . . . he didn’t really feel much of anything the more he thought about it. He decided to check his phone to see how much longer it was until his alarm went off. However, as he opened his eyes, nothing happened. He was still in pitch-black. His mind immediately jumped to panic-mode – there is no way he had gone blind overnight! He sat bolt upright in bed, but immediately wished he hadn’t. As he sat upright his sight came back to him, but what he saw was almost incomprehensible. He saw his body remain motionless on the bed, and he was now hovering over it.
“Whaaaaaaat the fuck was in that tea!?” he asked nobody in particular.
“Looks like chamomile, spearmint, lemongrass, natural peach flavor . . . ” came a voice from the doorway behind him. Startled, Jonathan jumped and turned toward the unknown visitor.
“Jesus Christ! Who are you and how did you get in here? And what the hell is happening? I must be dreaming.”
“Nope, not Jesus Christ, just Peter. And no, not that Peter either. He’s still hanging out at the gates, playing bouncer.” the man – apparently named Peter – said lazily. “And hate to break it to you bud, but you aren’t dreaming.”
It took a few seconds for Jonathan to understand – it had been some time since he’d been to church. He and The Big Man hadn’t been on the best of terms since his mother’s untimely passing some years ago. “You can’t be serious. You’re saying I’m . . . dead!? There’s no way, this must be some sort of mistake.”
“Said everyone I’ve ever encountered. Trust me, if it was some sort of mistake – and it DOES happen from time to time – you’d be talking to someone above my pay grade.”
“I just don’t understand. I wasn’t even sick, how did this happen?” Jonathan asked. He hadn’t exactly been in Olympic-athlete shape, but he was more active and had a better diet than most mid-30’s bachelors he knew of, and hadn’t even caught a cold in a couple of years.
“That dull throbbing headache you were fighting with all week? Aneurysm. Burst in your sleep. At least there wasn’t any pain! That’s a win, huh?”
If he had still had his corporeal form, Jonathan knew his knees would have just completely buckled in that moment. He was in complete and utter shock. Partially because he couldn’t believe he had died, but even more so that he was aware that he was dead, and was talking to this . . . angel apparently? The two of them sat in silence for a couple of moments. In normal social interactions, prolonged silences can become awkward, with both sides feeling a need to say something, but not knowing what to say, but Peter had had plenty of practice with this type of thing. So instead he stood in silence and gave Jonathan all the time he needed. After a few moments, Jonathan spoke up.
“So, I’m guessing since I’m still in my apartment, and I’m speaking with you instead of standing at the gates pleading my case with that Peter, that I’m in purgatory?” It had been quite some time since he’d been to church, but Jonathan still knew the basics: if you were good, you went to Heaven; if you were bad, you went to Hell; and, if you were somewhere in the middle (like Goldilocks), you were in purgatory until you proved yourself one way or the other.
“You would be correct sir. And as I know that you’re aware, you will remain so until you’ve ‘proven’ yourself worthy of Heaven or suitable for Hell.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Jonathan blurted out, forgetting who he was speaking to. As he remembered, he clasped his hands over his mouth. “I’m so sorry, please don’t count that against me.” To his surprise (and relief) Peter laughed.
“Oh please. If cursing alone precluded someone from Heaven, we would have some incredibly empty Fish Fry Fridays. Words are just words. It’s the context, meaning, and intent behind those words that matters. For example, what you said had no intent on belittling or berating me or trying to ‘put me in my place.’ You were simply expressing your disbelief at what I was telling you. On the other hand, had you replied with something like “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you stupid fuck,” the intent behind that statement would have been to belittle me or make me feel inferior to bolster yourself, and that would have been a problem, regardless of the actual words used. I hope that makes sense.”
“It does, but I guess I still don’t understand why it is that I’m in purgatory. I’m not saying I’m perfect by any means, but as a general rule, I feel as though the good I did in my life far outweighed the bad. Sure, I told some white lies every now and again, I’d occasionally cheat on the golf course when nobody was looking, and I had sex before marriage. But I also volunteered at the Soup Kitchen every month, donated to the Red Cross, helped my friends when they needed me, and tried to be kind to strangers. Is it because I lost faith after my mom died?”
“No, contrary to what some people will have you believe, not believing in God doesn’t keep you out of Heaven. The beauty of the truth is that it exists whether or not you believe in it. No, the reason you’re in heaven goes back to your motivation behind why you did those good deeds.”
“What do you mean?” Jonathan asked, confused. “I did those things because it made me feel good to do something nice for other people.”
“That’s exactly my point.” Peter said.
And that’s where we’re going to leave off this week. Thank you for bearing with me during this experiment this week. I hope it wasn’t too unbearable to read – sometimes train-of-thought-writing can be really clunky. I haven’t decided if I’ll use next week to build on this further, or if I’ll go on to something different. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to leave them below, and thank you again for dropping by, it means a lot! See you all next week!
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 