The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
The Last Will Have to Wait
7-17-1998

I was in a wheelchair, rolling through the main foyer of this really nice hotel. I was looking for the restroom. I went into a little hallway that looked like an elevator at the end. There was an elevator operator there, but he pointed me toward the special handicapped elevator just to my left. I entered it. It immediately started to whisk downwards at an unbelievable rate. I fell out my wheelchair, but managed to hook some kind of securing strap to a bar on the wall, which stopped its downward motion somehow.

I was still lying on the ground, but I found that my legs were in a puddle of water. Looking around, it wasn't just a puddle, but an entire pond! And it was suddenly FREEZING water. "I was going to stop in the arctic anyway," I told myself. I rolled out onto frozen grass. The elevator was gone, but my wheelchair and the small metal section of elevator it was originally resting on, were still there, part of the ground. The pond was perfectly square, with a perfectly square path of frozen grass outlining it. Snow beyond. Past one side of the pond was a nice little house. I had no idea the restrooms in the arctic were so nice.

Then I felt myself moving upward again. Someone was operating the elevator or something, and dammit, I hadn't relieved myself yet. When it stopped, I started floating. Zero gravity. I hit the ceiling, then pushed off it. Floated around for a while. I noticed the room, while metallic and obviously space-age, reminded me of the gym in my old church. I landed, and put some space boots on. Another guy entered the room. Said something unintelligent, like if you were shooting hoop and some guy arrived and made a stupid comment about how you were shooting hoop. I humored him somehow and continued to put on my boots. I somehow gathered from the guy that I would be going into space soon. How wonderful that sounded. "I can finally see a sunrise from space," I thought to myself. "My life gets more complete every day!"

I floated around for a while. Faded out...I then found myself in a very small video arcade, looking for something to play, but failing to find anything that interested me. I was convinced it was the same arcade I'd been to a long time ago (in another dream over 10 years ago now), but it didn't have Space Ace anymore. Some people walked by, apparently looking for me, and I joined them. We walked through the complex...like the dingy interior of a baseball stadium (no, not the field, but the actual interior). Something happened that I don't remember. I was walking in the other direction within the complex, by myself. Reese appeared. We were hungry. We saw someone peddling something I decided was called "milon." A kind of synthetic, or obscure, but in any case nasty, noodle. "There isn't much of it," said the peddler. "I advise you to get some potatoes and mix them in, if you want a full meal out of it." I envisioned several potatoes above a plate of this stuff, magically mashing themselves and covering the plate. Nah, didn't sound too good to me. In that fleeting moment, Reese had mixed the milon with a sauce and some spinach or something, shoved it all onto a plate, and started to eat it. He made some comment, but I don't remember what it was.

Other people arrived. They couldn't find any food. It was time to go. We went outside, and it was freezing. Worse than freezing. The entire landscape was an iceball. Snow for as far as you could see. We trudged along. Some conversations and comments, something, not sure. We trodded up over an icy ridge and saw water down below, opening up to the sea. I glanced around behind us (not that anyone else was out here) and spotted a tidal wave of snow! A big wave of solid snow was rising up into the air in the distance. It would crash down, then build up again, each time gaining ground. It was hard to walk, let alone run or take any sort of action at all. Someone else spotted it, too, and started to run away. Three other guys had slid down the ridge to the waterbank below, however. I stumbled over to the top and warned them. It was futile and I knew it. The wave was too close, and they were too close to the water. It would push them in and they could freeze and/or drown to death. Nonetheless, I didn't have much choice, and I slid down there, too. As I did this, big chunks of snow came loose to reveal a small hovel (sp?). "Cmon guys, up here!" I shouted as I uselessly tried to climb back up to reach it. There was no time, however, and the snow wave came crashing down upon us.

I got lucky. It only pushed me to the edge of the water. My elbow touched it, and it stung really badly, gnawing through my jacket. One of the other guys seemed to be ok, further down the bank, having avoided the main barrage of snow. The two other guys miraculously crawled out of the water. Most of their clothing had disintegrated (guess it was more than just cold water, eh?), as had most of their skin. They were gruesome. Blood spurting out of various orifices. One of them no longer had a nose. They were simply completely bloody and dissolved beyond a description that could possibly do justice. Their teeth chattered, and I heard something like, "Thanks for the warning, " though it didn't sound too reassuring. I started climbing back up the ridge, and someone from above helped me. "If only I could have reached that place, " I explained. "Yeah, I know, " said the other guy, as if to just forget about it. I looked at him for the first time, and his face had been entirely ground away. He "grinned" at me through lips that weren't there. Blood and puss oozed down his face. He was missing his right arm, where more blood poured out. The others never made it back up.

We made it back to the complex. A few other people were there on cots or beds, bandaging themselves up, nursing themselves. I hadn't seen them before, so they must have been from a different troupe. I had a vision of an angel watching the snow wave scene from above. I saw myself and my companions get washed away. I heard the angel's thoughts, "Those two, Steve's boys, they will go to Hell. That one will go to Heaven. The last will have to wait (meaning me)."

I looked down on a counter where the guy who helped me up was writing someone down, and saw a slip of paper, like a receipt. Reading it, I saw a list of four names...one of them mine...there was a mark by one name denoting Heaven, a different mark by two other names denoting Hell, and an ambiguous mark by mine. I took the paper, grabbed a pencil, and tried to mark it myself, but my hand couldn't move. I put it down.

I then remembered that the angel had other thoughts directed towards other tasks it had to do. I earnestly thought/wondered how things were going for it, how those tasks turned out. Then I found the pencil and paper in my hand again. An outside force directed my hand to put another mark by my name, meaning "Heaven." For once, someone else had cared about the angel and not themselves (or something...in any case the angel was thankful).


posted by Phlegm at 11/24/2003