Doris Stockton walked through an endless gray towards the sound of a car door slamming shut. A few steps in one direction, a few steps in another. Her hands clenched into old, arthritic claws as she tilted her head heavenward. “What difference does it make?”
She remembered running when she first entered The Gray. That’s what she called it; The Gray, now a place, not a description. Some unnamed place her god had relegated her to while she awaited the resurrection.
She’d been walking through some deep woods wondering why God in His wisdom brought such an abomination into her home. She thought Al Junior and Blanche were playing on the bed, the way the box spring and frame were squeaking. She opened the door all smiles and ready to tell them to go play outside or go help Uncle Mike, her husband of more than forty years at that point, out in the barn.
Instead she screamed. Not at first. She had trouble making sense of what she saw. How could these two darling children even know what they were doing?
They were just experimenting. That was it.
She remembered experimenting herself when she was their age.
But not with her own brother and not naked on the bed and not staring back at her with such blissful, exhausted smiles on their faces.
She put her hands over her stomach. The memory alone made her stomach churn.
But when was the last time she ate? She couldn’t possibly have anything left to churn.
Nothing Pastor Reynolds or Jacobs said mentioned anything about anything like this.
She figured she’d had a heart attack.
She remembered seeing some dancing lights. She thought they were angels and walked towards them.
She felt hands. Pushing her or guiding her, she wasn’t sure, and she found herself here.
Yeah, that was it. She went for a walk and had a massive heart attack and this was…what?
This isn’t what the Bible promised.
This didn’t even sound like the Purgatory Heddy O’Brien talked about. Maybe if she was a Papist she’d know about this.
She snorted at her own wishful thinking.
The day she entered The Gray she gone for a walk through the deep woods, a chance to pray, to clear her mind. She heard a hiss followed by a blinding flash of light. Suddenly an angel stood in front of her, or at least she thought it an angel. All bright and shiny and twinkling like a cut glass mobile but one that breathed and moved like it was alive, not just hanging in a window and catching light. She thought God sent an angel to call her home. That’s what made her think heart attack. She read somewhere a massive coronary makes the dying person see a blinding light.
She walked towards the light, letting it engulf he, enwrap her, hold her, warm her, comfort her.
She heard another hiss. Then there was endless gray.
Sometimes she heard voices. Kids, it sounded like. High schoolers. Mike always knew they went out drinking on their property. He smiled and told her not to mind, better they got it out of their system drinking in the woods than racing down the highway.
She’d call out to them. Sometimes they heard, she was sure of it.
She stopped and blinked.
There was a light up ahead. A single, solitary light in this endless, unforgiving gray.
She hurried. She ran. Her chest pulled.
She didn’t care. She was dead, anyway. Could a dead person have another heart attack?
Breaths came hard, words harder. “Hello! Hello! Is somebody there?”
The light flickered. It was closer and it flickered. “Doris? Come this way, Doris!”
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