Excerpt

The universe punished me for doubting its powers by arranging a special demonstration.

It dropped me, blindfolded and hamstrung, into a room with locked doors, and gave me four weapons: my paints, my doubts, my figure, and a library.

Then it said: “If you can find the right door and open it with the right key, then you can have your heart’s desire. Oh, by the way — There’s a psychic lunatic running around out there. If you can free yourself before the sands in the hourglass run out, then you can prevent him from corrupting a critical mass of humanity and plunging the world into a new dark age. Have a nice day!”

Okay, the universe didn’t actually say this to me. If it had, I would have answered, “Forget it! I’ll live without my heart’s desire.” After all, I’d been doing so for 27 years.

I expected more of same as I backed out my driveway one August evening, heading for New Atlantis. A cryptic call from my identical twin sister had changed my weekend plans. Unaware I was launching on a preordained journey to entrapment and a psychic battle, I zoomed northward in altruism. Two hours later found me steaming along a fire road through the Green Mountain National Forest. Literally steaming: me in a perspiration cloud from heat and humidity abnormal for the Vermont mountains; my convertible steaming from the hit it had taken a few miles back. It had begun the drive as a pristine vintage roadster — a ‘66 Sunbeam Tiger, my pride and joy and special toy that had taken me from novice driver to winner in autocross. Now it bled coolant and oil as it limped and thumped on a shredded tire, two bent rims, and damaged suspension. Its V8 motor shook the dense woods around us, as half my custom sport exhaust lay behind in the pucker brush while the other half dragged beneat

h the car, carving a trail in the dirt.

Please, please! I chanted internally. Hang in there another mile!

No way would I walk alone through the wilderness in a sundress after dark. Even if the Tiger kept going, at 10 mph I’d still be out here when the looming thunderstorm broke and twilight fell. Already, beneath the foliage canopy, I needed headlights. But one was broken and the other gouged out. I could probably hold my flashlight in one hand and steer with the other. Then again, the increasing flares of lightning could guide my way.

Please, please — c’mon, baby, hold it together –

Aha!

The forest pulled back to reveal a stone wall blocking my travel. Front and center loomed an iron gate backed by chain link and bracketed by cameras, set into masonry taller than I could reach. Along the top, barbed wire coiled like a lethal hairdo. Inside the gate, a guard shack squatted in the murk.

“Trespassers Will Be Teleported to a Hostile Planet!” said signs in four languages. And welcome to New Atlantis to you, too! I thought back. I couldn’t blame the owner, Dru Montclair, for needing to live in a fortress. That happens when you’re a mega-superstar, as was Blanche now that she shared his stage and his bed.

Approaching the gate, I didn’t bother braking — the car wouldn’t have stopped, anyway — sure that the guard could hear me coming and would be ready on the release switch. Indeed, the gate scraped open when my passage tripped a motion sensor and switched on floodlights within and without.

Once safe inside, the Tiger ground to a halt and expired. I dropped my forehead against my knuckles atop the steering wheel as the gate scraped shut behind.

“Hell of an entrance, Miz LaRue!” came a voice from beside me. I jerked my head up and around to find a guy standing halfway between me and the guard shack, backlit by the floods. My brain, still sludgy from adrenaline overload and dehydration, couldn’t manage a snappy comeback. I must have taken too long to respond, for he strode forward and changed his tone to an authoritative calm.

“Ignition off?”

He stood at the driver’s door, hand on the latch, ready to pull if I didn’t answer.

“Um, no, it stalled.”

“Don’t try to restart it. Just click off and give me the key.”

I obeyed, at loss for words, at loss for thought. When he said, “How many fingers?” I counted three. That seemed to satisfy him. He pulled open the Tiger’s door and asked, “You ready?”

“Um, a little gummy in the knees, but I think I’m okay.”

I pivoted in the cockpit and stuck out the legs that had earned me a six-figure income. The rest of the package emerged disjointedly, making me glad that Blanche the Dancer wasn’t around for comparison. The gate guard noticed everything without reaction, just offered a hand to help me stand.

At that, my synapses resumed firing. Those hands! Oil-stained fingers with nicked knuckles, curved around palms callused and thickened from years of turning wrenches. A mechanic! At New Atlantis! Oh joy, the day’s bad luck had just reversed!

I leaned against his solidity, vaguely noticing that we stood the same height, as he walked me across packed dirt to a log bench outside his guard shack. I flopped my weary derriere atop it while he nipped in and came right back out with a water bottle. I took, gulped, then poured the rest over my head, neck, and chest.

“Ahh. Thank you. I had a gallon in the car, but it went into the radiator.”

“And right back out, from the look of things.”

“Oh god, I hope the engine hasn’t seized!”

“Mm. We’ll see.”

He stood before me and finally asked, “What happened?”

I wiped my wrist across my mouth. “Deer. Two. Right in the middle of the road.”

He returned to the Tiger and walked around it, scowling. “Doesn’t look like you hit them.”

“No. I missed them, that’s the problem. Landed in one of those rock-lined drainage ditches along the road. Took out half everything underneath, and punched out the lights on a boulder and a sapling on the other side.”

He nodded. “How’d you get in that deep, then get out?”

“In? Overconfidence, and being mad at my sister. Out? A winch.”

His brows jumped and he stopped circling the car to stare at me. “A come-along,” I amended, pleased to demolish his expectations. “Between that and jacking the nose I got the rear tires on the ground and was able to back out of there. That messed up anything left that hadn’t been crunched.”

He continued to stare, reminding me of a hawk with his expressionless intensity. Then he returned to the bench and sat at my side. The lights caught his eyes, revealing a clear, sky blue often found in pilots and sailors. They regarded me so frankly, so honestly, that I did a double take and looked straight in.

Instantly, a familiar and dreaded rippling began in the atmosphere around us, until his visage was overlapped by a face I knew but had never seen before, with a voice I’d never heard before yet recognized and which warmed my heart. My vision heightened and blurred at the same time, with a golden shimmer around the edges, forming into white and silver curtains like an albino aurora. An ache resonated through my body, swelling until I was paralyzed. I recognized him. I loved him. He belonged to me.

Then the scene snapped back to the wooded gate yard of New Atlantis.

The guard stood and stepped away. Panting, I shook off the vision and wondered how many seconds had passed while I’d been overcome. The flashes I normally experienced were as quick as the lightning still blinking above us. A big vision like this one, which had occurred only once and not for a decade, warped time enough to alert other people that something was awry.

He had noticed, judging by his stiff stance at arm’s distance and that stare through his hawk mask. Now he stood lit so I could see that he was not only my size but my age. He wore scruffy cut-off jeans and a holey T-shirt. His hair, unevenly trimmed, brushed his neck and jaw. It gleamed a tawny bronze, as did his skin over lean muscle. He was a perfect specimen for the Men At Work series I was painting for a gallery feature. However, this was not the moment to invite him to my studio!

After regarding me in turn, his eyes veiled and he pulled us back into the moment. “I’m supposed to tell them when you get here.”

He escaped into the guard shack, almost long enough for me to recompose myself, swatting at mosquitoes. Upon return he declared, “Dru said — this morning — that if you weren’t here by eight-thirty I had to go find you.”

He waited for me to gush, “Oh, Dru must have had a premonition!” When I didn’t, he added with a twitch that could have been a suppressed smile, “You missed by two minutes.”

“Damn. You mean I could have just sat there and the cavalry would have come?”

“Well, just me on an ATV. If you weren’t anywhere on the fire road, we’d've sent somebody out your route with a truck and trailer. No cell reception ’til a coupla towns down.”

He paused for a beat then spoke the question that was bugging him. “What the — heck — were you doing out there in the race car?”

I stifled a knee-jerk anger. Of course he knew the Tiger was a competition car. Who didn’t, when the tabloids tracked your sister’s every move, including her estrangement from an eccentric twin?

So I answered, “Trying to avoid the groupies at the front gate.”

“Nobody told you about the road conditions out back?”

“Blanche said it was ‘rough’ when she gave me the bar-gate code a couple years ago, but only the first mile to discourage sightseers.” I snorted a laugh. “It looked more like a landmine field after everything had exploded!”

“She’s never been out there herself. Neither has Dru.”

“I doubt she’s even driven since she moved here. And she sure doesn’t know anything about suspensions!”

“And you don’t know much about tires if you went off like that on dirt!”

Throughout this exchange, we played peek-a-boo with our gazes, trying to catch the other out around our facades. I welcomed the earthbound topic, though, and rewarded him with the embarrassing truth. “I was practicing four-wheel drifts.”

Again he stopped and stared. I explained. “That nice smooth stretch after the landmine holes but before the two-track? The ess-turns? They’re perfect.”

He kept staring until I finished, “There’s an autocross tomorrow I was hoping to win, which would have given me my first championship. I was planning to get up early and drive there from here.”

Awareness of lost achievement and huge expenses settled like a cement cloak around my shoulders. He concluded, “So you tried your nice, wide tarmac tires on nice, slick dirt then came around a corner sideways and met Bambi.”

“Yep.” I sighed. “Giving me the fun choice of a bucking bronco ride off the shoulder, a bloody hood ornament, or a cockpit full of guts and hooves.”

He dropped his gaze and shook his head, then grinned and barked out in laughter. It changed his face so dramatically that my breath stuck in my throat. I almost blurted, “I’ve got to paint you!” but he pressed onward with reality so I swallowed back my words.

“I’ll check it out tomorrow –” He gestured at the car. “– but for now we gotta get you to the show. It’s already started.”

“I figured.” I glanced at my wristwatch, surprised to find a shattered face. I hadn’t felt my arm hit anything during the bronco ride, though surely bruises would emerge by tomorrow. Already my sternum ached from slamming against the belts. And my dress was sweat-soaked, with oil smears augmenting its floral pattern. Thankfully, I had packed two changes of clothes along with tools and driving gear for the event-not-to-be.

When I looked morosely at the Tiger, the gate guard said, “It will be safe here.”

“I know. Better put up the top, though.” I glanced at the sky, still grumbling and flaring above the treetops. While I might make it to the amphitheatre after all before the storm broke, I doubted the show would run its course. No point changing if I was going to get wet again.

Stiffly I rose while he stepped inside the shack to set gadgets on automatic. Movement chased away the hollow feeling in my limbs, and the simple tasks of unfolding and securing the top, extracting and organizing my baggage, freed me to replay the vision he had stunned me with minutes before.

My mind still reverberated like a bell that had been walloped by a sledge hammer. The visuals had already melted away, but the lingering . . . certainty . . . struck as hard as it had the first time, with Buck. Back then, the vision had convinced me I’d found my soul mate after millennia of reincarnation. Subsequent years of emotional torture had proven me wrong.

I was cured now, though sometimes I saw past people’s skin to their true colours in a snapshot moment that seemed supernatural. But after Buck had left I’d figured it out. The artist’s eye I’d been born with simply interpreted my five senses in textbook intuition. Blanche, however, considered it a sixth sense, which she called “soul-seeing” to avoid annoying me with the term “ESP.” Nevertheless, my gift was why she had called me here tonight.

Nothing strange or sparkly happened when the gate guard approached me again. I wanted to ask him, Why you? Why now? What for? — but he kept us firmly on task.

“We’d figured you’d drive yourself in, so all I’ve got is an ATV. If you want, I can call a car down to take you to the amphitheatre. Or the house.”

A polite way of asking if I would I turn into New Atlantis royalty and refuse to ride a spine-jarring open vehicle up a rough road in a dress.

I chirped, “I’m fine,” and followed him to the ATV, mounting it behind him. I just had time to wedge my tote bag between us before he took off so fast I almost tumbled off the back.

What remained of my French twist unravelled as we churned uphill, spitting dirt behind us, the machine making prolonged flatulent noise in the process. Too soon my driver slowed, when our road merged into another that linked the compound’s main driveway to its residential lodges, The Glen and Valhalla. These I recognized from my previous visit.

Tonight the dirt loop served as a parking lot, with one-way passage between cars jammed along the mowed shoulder. We rode through sounds that shaped into music, then stopped at the loop’s reverse point where sawhorses and traffic cones marked an opening into the woods.

“Here ya go!” he announced with a heartiness that rang hollow.

I swung off the ATV then paused for a long look at him, which he returned without blinking. Who are you? I wondered at him. He didn’t answer. Of course he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. But a new thought blossomed: Might this be the person Blanche wanted me to scope?

In her call, she had said only, “If you know why, Madeline, it won’t work. Just come to the finale and tell us what you see and feel. We need to know if it’s real or I’m hallucinating. The finale is our last chance.”

Click.

I couldn’t call back because she had timed her lure for the last moment before stepping on stage in New York City. That show ran until midnight, followed by parties, interviews, then hours of travel to New Atlantis for rest, rehearsal, and the finale underway right now.

Her only other words, disrupted by people dragging her away from the telephone, had been, “I need — tomorrow — back gate — please –”

– leaving me to think she’d offered “back gate” privilege in delayed remembrance of my vow to never run the front-gate gantlet again. Now I wondered if she’d directed me here in order to “see” this guy. If he were hired security for the tour, then this would be his final night on duty. If he lived at New Atlantis, then tonight’s show would be the last chance — for what? — forever.

I could already tell her, thanks to the vision, that he had a lion’s heart, a warrior’s courage, an artist’s passion, an artisan’s skill, and a teenager’s hormones. If I were in the market, he would be an intriguing replacement for Buck. Blanche probably thought I was still looking, since we had stopped confiding after Dru entered the picture. So was her drawing me to New Atlantis a matchmaking mission in disguise?

Pah! As Buck had taught me, cosmic visions did not identify a soul mate. I was still waiting to find out what did. Blanche had spotted hers on TV when she was 12 and redirected her song-and-dance interests into music videos until she was in the right place when Dru was producing. They had mated instantly. No such luck for me.

I had been celibate, other than a few smooches and gropes with select auto sport buddies, since Buck had dumped me three years ago. Yet my appearance and former career led people to assume I slept with a different guy — or three — each night. In truth, I had abandoned hope that anyone would make my loins quiver again. So why had this gate guard triggered a vision just like the one I had with Buck?

For now I could only translate his face and physique into blocks and planes to sketch later. Then I waved him away and applied myself to the next ordeal.

Copyright 2010 Carolyn Haley. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

This book is directly channeled from the author’s spirit guides and angels. There are reasons we go through suffering and pain. This book can help you to understand much of what goes on in your life and why.
It answers some interesting questions about what we are doing here on planet earth.

Excerpt

Foreword

“Spirit guide” is a term used by the Western tradition of Spiritualist Churches, mediums, and psychics to describe an entity that remains a disincarnate spirit in order to act as a spiritual counselor or protector to a living incarnated human being.

According to theosophical doctrine, spirit guides are persons who have lived many former lifetimes, paid their karmic debts, and advanced beyond a need to reincarnate.  Each is assigned to watch over an incarnate person, not only on this Earth, but on other planets throughout the universe.  Many psychics believe that spirit guides are chosen on “the other side” by us and God before we incarnate and that they guide us to follow our life’s plan because we want them to.

Some people claim it is possible to meet one’s spirit guide in dreams or on the astral plane.

You were drawn to this book because you are ready to undertake a journey to find your true purpose on this earth.  To understand the reasons we go through trauma, illness, pain, loss, poverty and more. This book is to help you look past your ego of self doubt and negative thoughts to discover the light being that exists inside.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Each page came to life by the thoughts and feelings of spirit guides, angels and light beings. I do not take credit for their work, I simply am the instrument and they are the music.

Most of the time, my channeled messages are from a collected group of souls. They have used my hands but these are their teachings.

(The text that has been italicized are the words that have been channeled through me by spirit. Normal text writings are the thoughts and views of me, the author.)

Copyright 2010 Medium Laura Evans. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

The first thing Eleanor noticed when they settled into the limo was the mini-bar. “I hope the driver doesn’t have one of these,” she said loud enough for him to hear.

The driver, a portly, gray-haired man, displayed the carriage of a Buckingham Palace guard.

“He’s a professional,” Janey assured her, hiding her own delight over the mother lode of little bottles, surely a gift from heaven to ease her forthcoming ordeal. “What can I get you, Grandma?”

Doing her best Queen of Sheba, Eleanor studied the sunlight’s reflection off her diamond rings. “Scotch on the rocks.”

Janey went for the ice bucket. The trip to Burbank was only about fifteen minutes and she wanted to make sure there was time for a second round. She handed Eleanor the Scotch and poured herself a glass of Chablis.

“Can we have a drink?” asked Sherri.

“Not unless you turn twenty-one before we get there,” Janey said, offering each girl a can of diet soda.

Candi rubbed the cold can on her chest. “You must save a lot of money on air-conditioning,” she called to the driver. A few moments later a blast of cold air made them all shiver.

“Hey, turn it down!” yelled Eleanor. “I don’t want to have blue skin on television!”

“Why not? It’ll go with your hair,” said Candi, inserting the soda can into her cleavage. Exploding from her skimpy tube top like twin mushroom clouds, her young breasts seemed exempt from gravity. Janey wondered how milk from her flat prairie chest had produced Candi’s endowment.

Unzipping the tote bag she used to carry her dance shoes, Eleanor began tossing in liquor bottles.

“When we get home we’ll all get drunk,” Eleanor promised as the girls giggled.

A few minutes later they pulled into the studio lot where Sherri pointed out Jay Leno’s chocolate Bentley parked by the artists’ entrance. “He has a bazillion cars. He drives a different one every day and keeps them in an airplane hangar.”

Candi yawned. “What a waste of metal.”

“Well, your shoe collection is a waste of leather,” said Sherri. “At least no animals are killed making cars.”

“Unless they’re run over,” Candi said. “I wish we were in New York on Letterman.”

“You’re not going to be on anything,” warned Eleanor. “Just me. Don’t think those big bosoms are going to get you on television. You have to sit in the audience.”

“Whatever you say, Grandma.”

Janey slurped down the last few drops of wine. “‘Come on, come on, let’s shake it tonight’, whaddya say?”

Eleanor shrugged. “I’ll wave to you from the stage.”

As they exited the limo Janey snatched the tote bag and struggled to keep the liquor bottles from clanging.

They were met by Monique, a perky young production assistant with a headset and a carpenter’s belt holding enough electronics to stock Circuit City. Monique promised to make Eleanor comfortable and attend to all her needs.

“You must have drawn the short straw,” Janey said.

Monique led them down narrow, beige hallways to a room with a glittery star on the door bearing Eleanor’s name.

“Take our picture,” Eleanor commanded.

But Monique suddenly froze mannequin-like, her eyes slightly crossed as she listened to her headset. “Be right back,” she chirped and ran off, obviously called away to some show business emergency.

Eleanor grumbled and Sherri, the family photographer, offered to take some pictures.

“Make sure you can see my name on the door.”

While they were assembling for group shots, Janey saw Jay Leno in jeans and a blue work shirt approaching them.

Eleanor noticed him too. “Hey, young man!” she shouted. “We need someone to take our picture.”

“Oh, sure,” he replied. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“That’s Jay Leno, Grandma,” Janey said.

“Did you see my star?”

“Yes, we spare no expense,” replied Jay. “I’m looking forward to dancing with you.”

“Make sure you don’t step on my toes.”

Jay promised to do his best while Janey conjured up frightening scenarios of potential Eleanor faux pas on national television. Good thing she had the little bottles.

“I’m back,” said the re-materialized Monique. She took Eleanor’s arm. “Let’s put your things away, sweetie, then I’ll take you to makeup and the pre-interview.” She turned to Janey and the girls. “You guys can wait in the green room, okay?”

The trio followed Monique’s directions to the green room, which Janey was surprised to discover was not green. Most of the people sitting around did not appear to be celebrities, except for a woman eating lox and bagels from the buffet who looked like Loni Anderson.

“Have something to eat,” Janey told the girls. “It’s free, as Grandma would say.”

The girls helped themselves to finger sandwiches, fruit, cheese and brownies, while Janey’s nerves kept her too jangled to think about food. She stared at the coffee urn, then decided not to mix beverages and poured another glass of wine. She joined the girls in a strategic corner with good celebrity view angles. “Is that Loni Anderson?” she whispered.

Not a hint of recognition on their faces.

“She was married to Burt Reynolds; they had a really ugly divorce, remember?”

“Who’s Burt Reynolds?” asked Sherri.

Janey aged a few years. “You need to watch more television,” she said, peeking to make sure Loni wasn’t eavesdropping. “He’s practically your dad’s favorite actor.”

At the mention of her father, Sherri’s face sagged and she dropped her finger sandwich on her plate. “I wish Daddy was here. He would totally get off on this.”

“He’s probably on his lanai with a big fat joint waiting for the show to come on,” Candi said.

Janey glared. “Knock it off, Candi.”

“You never want us to talk about him,” Candi said, her voice reaching sufficient volume to be heard by all. “He’s our father and you won’t tell us why he left.”

“He couldn’t compete with Bruce Springsteen,” said Sherri. She spat out the sacred name like it was a disease.

In a moment of paranoia, Janey stole a peek at the Loni woman to make sure she wasn’t tuning in. Though Loni appeared to be engrossed in conversation, Janey felt certain she had an ear trained on her family conflict. “We’ll talk about it at home, okay?”

“But we’re sitting here with nothing to do, so let’s talk about it. Maybe Dad read your porno emails.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The BOSS-list. Girls, I had a dream last night. I was in the shower with him and we were making out and oh, I wanted him so bad! And he was…engorged! But we couldn’t do it because my husband was standing there with an ax.”

There was no need to check. No one in the green room including Loni Anderson could possibly avoid their discussion. “That wasn’t my dream. And who asked you to read my email?”

“It’s so embarrassing,” said Sherri. “My mother is in a fan club.”

Candi snorted. “All they do is talk about his butt.”

“I’m warning you,” said Janey.

The look on Sherri’s face made Janey feel like a fresh Chianti stain on a white carpet. “No wonder Daddy left,” Sherri said. “You totally humiliated him.” She leaped up and fired a parting shot: “That’s why he does drugs—because of you!”

Sherri’s attempt to storm out of the green room was thwarted by her headlong crash into Blue Man Group, a trio of royal blue billiard balls in jump suits. They picked her up as if she were a prop from their act and moved her aside.

“Don’t see that every day,” noted Candi.

Copyright 2008 Linda Segall Anable. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Part I
Birth

Chapter 1

     “Don’t you judge me,” Filomena said to Willadean. “Life is a suicide. We all die; we do it by living so long.”
     “You didn’t live that long,” corrected Willadean.
     The girl looked at her friend sadly. “If it wasn’t for the mescal,” she said, “I never would have fallen.”
     “Don’t you mean jumped?” the older woman asked.
     The cavern air was brown, but it was clear. There were no shadows. It was if light came from the air itself, as if each atom suspended there was a light particle. And it was true, what her friend had told her. Filomena felt much too young to be an ancestor.
     “Jumped, fallen, I didn’t think about it like that. I was falling when I was sober, the second that lasted so long, like it was my whole life.”
     She knew, of course, it had been her whole life, or what was left of it. She didn’t remember the part when she left the balcony, or the part when she suddenly wasn’t falling anymore. She only remembered the part when she was flying.
     “The hands of Gravity are the hands of God,” said Willadean.
     And that was true also. The physics of that world were undeniable.
     Filomena exhaled slow, the air with its light and warmth passing through her lips. When she woke up here she had thought herself in hell, the place people go when they jump. But it was not hell. It was just under the mountain. And here the heart of time does not beat steady. She felt young, but couldn’t even say how long she had been here. Some days the two sides go hand in hand, but then a minute would last for days, and a year like an eyelash, blinked out with a tear.
     She and Willadean sat on a cold slate ledge on the bank of a river. The stone step continued across to where water fell over its edge in a little waterfall, one of many, as the water continued from the slopes above down into the earth. There were small pools where bowls in the rock trapped the water, and in one of these pools a speckled brook trout was listening to their conversation. Others had overheard also. There was a man washing his face in the water as it flowed down above where the women sat, and there was a bumblebee the size of a hackey-sack ball hovering next to the fish, cooling its several feet in the little pool.
     “I don’t see what difference this all makes,” said the fish. “You both came to the same place.”
     Filomena knew it had been years. It had to have been many years. She and the other ancestors, and the animal spirits, the kanulob, were living together, and their living together pleased Filomena very much, because in the living she had been unable to kill herself, to extinguish herself, even though her sister Mina and her mother, and the boyfriend who had been celibate for almost a week after she was gone, didn’t know it. Filomena still felt alive.
     The kanulob were her friends, better friends than she had when she was above the mountain, and certainly better than when she was on her own, in the town of the college, and of the balcony, and of the men who were her friend for their own purpose. An animal spirit, a kanul, shares a soul with a living person, and by sharing the soul they share a fate. Animal spirits can be injured and even killed, and when they are dead, as far as Filomena could tell, they were really gone. She had never known her own kanul. She was always busy with other things. She wondered about those days above the mountain, and if a bumblebee like Kasper had been her companion, if she would have hit so hard — if a flying insect could have helped her hover a little above the concrete. It wasn’t a question she was ever going to answer. Her kanul was dead. She had killed him too.
     She saw her friend Willadean trying to ignore the fish, but the little trout just swam in circles. It was Willadean who had first told her about animal spirits, about how they help their people through perspective. Animals are good observers, and the perspective from under Witz Mountain gives them a sense of one’s surroundings. They can visit their two-legged half siblings in dreams, or nudge them in one direction or another, unless the human has the rare talent of puz nahual haleb, of becoming an animal, and being able to talk things out directly.
     In the modern world, this talent is almost extinct.
     “If you can tread water down there and still say we’re in the same place,” said Willadean to Paco the trout, “then you have a better imagination than I do. That’s like saying everyone above the mountain is living in the same place.”
     Filomena thought back to that other life. Her friend was right again. People never live in the same place. Her place had been in the dusty countryside, a land of dirt and scrub and agave. Her only ambition had been to be around people from the other places, the places where people had enough of everything. She wanted friends with enough clothes and enough to eat, enough money and enough time to enjoy it. She had looked for men with enough, but had become just one more of all the things they had.
     And now she was an ancestor, and ancestors help through experience. How many times had her friend told her this? It still seemed absurd, since she had died so young and couldn’t think of one experience that might be useful to anyone. Ancestors are the memory of a life, kept alive for a descendant who, one can only assume, will need to make use of it someday. Unlike the kanulob, the ancestors cannot take the initiative to buzz in the ears or snap at the heels of a human like the animals do. The descendants come to them for help. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and Filomena assumed this one was no different. She took it on faith. Laws of physics are provided for each of the worlds according to its need, but other laws, like the law that laws are made to be broken, are universal, and reflect the personality of God.
     She would never say that to Willadean.
     The older woman was still glowering at Paco, making circles in his pool. “You always think you’re above everybody else,” said the fish, straining to look up at Willadean.
     “Even in heaven,” said the woman, “the deathbed conversion doesn’t go to the same place as the person who was a saint all her life.”
     “You’ve been to heaven?” said the bumblebee, looking wide eyed with all of his five eyes, including the eight thousand compound eye facets.
     “Of course she hasn’t been to heaven,” said Paco.
     The two women stood up and the bee strained to follow their movement. Filomena knew he couldn’t see very far under the mountain. The ultraviolet light he saw could penetrate clouds, but not rock.
     “You don’t need to be there to know heaven,” said Willadean. “I was a churchwoman and a contemplative all my life, and caught more than one glimpse at God’s face.”
     Shocked, his four wings slowed from two hundred to one hundred and fifty beats per second, and the rest of poor Kasper’s legs and his furry bottom were dunked into the water. He began to beat with dizzying swiftness, splashing and sending spray across the ripples in the pool. It was like his feet were glued to its shining surface, and the trout had to come up beneath him and give him a boost with his nose and little lower mandible where the overbite pushes up.
     “Thanks,” said the bee, drying his wings and spraying the women.
     “Hey!” the two ancestors shouted.
     The insect ignored them. “You really saw his face?”
     “It was pure, blinding white,” said Willadean.
     “I don’t see white too well,” said the fish. “Mostly I see blue, and I always pictured him with blue and yellow spots.” He was swimming in circles again. “Something’s going to happen,” he said.
     “Have you seen him?” the bumblebee asked, ignoring the fish, and buzzing over to young Filomena and hovering inches from her face.
     “My mother always said we see him in strangers,” said the girl, “and especially in the poor, and you know, it always seemed like he was usually a she, and his face, I mean her face, was usually dirty; the women were always the poorest, and had the dirtiest faces.”
     The older women just shook her head, the spots of water drying on her long white gown. “It’s no wonder your poor lost soul couldn’t find its way.”
     Filomena was going to point out that, for being lost, she had ended up standing right here hip-to-hip next to the older churchwoman, but she already realized Willadean would not accept that from her any more than she would from a fish.
     The old man was still bent over the swirling pools above them, still washing his face, and the man was laughing.
     The ground shook, and pieces of debris filtered down like dust from rafters. Suddenly, Paco started to jump and swim in circles. “Damn,” he said, the words bubbling out of the now bubbling water. “I hate it when it does that. This one could be a pyroclastic flow. Ouch!”
     The trout flipped out of the pool like a jumping salmon, except he headed downstream through the current, away from the hot mountain.
     The bumblebee was rubbing dust out of his multiple eyes.
     The old man wiped his face, using the tail of his white tunic. He was still laughing.
     “If it’s hot enough old man, maybe you can finally get some of that dirt off,” called Willadean, looking back over her shoulder.
     “It’s plenty hot,” he chuckled.
     “What is so funny?” the woman asked.
     “It’s just funny,” the face-washing man said. “All your life you thought you were going to die and know all the answers, but you don’t know shit.” Something caught his eye in the reflection in the pool and he let his tunic front drop and bent over to see. Filomena stepped up over the ledges of rock and stood next to him, looking into the water. Mancha padded up and sat down next to her. The three of them peered down, blinking, then the dog leaned over and put her muzzle into the pool and lapped up warm water.
     The surface was turned to ripples.
     “Do you mind?” asked Filomena.
     “Sor-ry,” said the dog, with the accent on both syllables. “Don’t you ever get thirsty?” She stood at the edge of the pool and wagged her tail, as the others went back to looking.
     Filomena saw a woman and a man lying next to each other in bed. In river eddies and shallow pools under the mountain you could sometimes see people above, see them and hear them and sometimes hear their thoughts. Just then another tremor hit. The water turned to ripples again as the mountain shook, Filomena almost slipped, and the woman in bed reached up to grab the headboard and steady herself.
     “What was that?” the woman asked.
     “The tremors of our love,” said the man. “You make the world tremble.”
     “I’m getting up to see,” she said.
     “No. Stay. It was nothing.”
     “Javier might come back, if he felt the earthquake.”
     “Forget Javier. Come with me today.”
     “I want to,” the woman said. “But I’m afraid he would find me and kill me.” With her hand she swept the straight, jet black hair away from her dark eyes. “He said he would kill me if I ever cheated on him. I want to leave him, but I’m so afraid around him it’s like I’m paralyzed.”
     “He cannot paralyze you unless you let him,” the man said.
     “He paralyzes me.” She swung her legs around and off the bed, pulling a wrap around her beautiful form and tying it with a woolen belt.
     “Don’t go,” the man pleaded.
     “Please, let me go.”
     “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break my heart?”
     “You should go,” she said.
     Under the mountain Filomena watched the scene above, playing out in the reflection in the pool. The man reached for the woman, but his hand made it only halfway before the universe stopped. Half of the building disappeared, and all the atoms in all the universe he had ever known were condensed down into a single point, a point of infinite weight, and time itself came to a halt. Filomena was more than watching. She could almost feel what he felt, feel the shift, the brief tug at time’s unpredictable fabric, before, slowly, the universe began expanding outward again.
     His legs were gone. There was a roof and a block wall, and a piece of the Witz Mountain the size of a car, sitting where he used to keep them. There was no blood, as if the arteries had been sealed under the tons of rock. If there was any pain, it was not there in his face.
     The woman had just swung her legs off the bed and they had been spared, but in that instant when matter had been folded and unfolded, and sorted out in new ways, the blast had slammed her head against the headboard, her neck snapping and her eyes closing tight.
     The man in the bed watched her. She was still breathing.
     And her beautiful right arm had broken off.
     It was broken off above the elbow, and the sharp edge of bone pushed in that instant between the man’s ribs and lodged where his heart lived. He lay still. It was as if the plug of bone was holding tight, wedged deep in his chest. The woman’s head and neck were awkwardly bent. Blood flowed freely from her severed arm, spurting forcefully, then less forcefully, as the red patches of dimpled skin around her frightfully beautiful nipples began to turn pale.
     The man was careful not to turn his body, and took the tie from around the woman’s woolen wrap and tied it tight around that stub that was left of her arm. He pulled the knot tight, and the pulsing blood eventually stopped.
     He lay motionless.
     Finally, she was his woman. Even when his eyes were closed, his lips almost curved up into a smile. Amazingly she continued to breathe even though she lay unconscious. His breathing was hard and labored. He would turn his eyes to look at her every now and again. When he breathed in, a tear of pain appeared in the corner of his eye. You could almost hear the scraping of the woman’s bone against rib, shooting pain through the man. She was as close to him as any woman had ever been to a man. Time passed. The familiar universe was back, with people crying and the sounds of ambulances outside in the street. You could see him concentrating on his breathing. He never tried to cry out for help, as if he didn’t want the moment to come to an end. How could he know if his woman would live? How could he know if, outside of this moment, there would be anything left of him at all? He couldn’t know.
     And then Javier came home.
     He found his wife on Izek’s chest and in his arms, or rather, found her arm in Izek’s chest. He stood over them, looking horrified.
     “I would kill you,” Javier said to Izek, “if God had not already done it!”
     Only half of Izek remained, and it was breathing so fast he could say nothing. He was trying to breathe without moving his chest, but as if suddenly craving air he would suck it in jealously, only to have the tears of pain well up in his eyes. Perhaps Javier thought they were tears of fear, but Filomena knew they were tears of pain, and only came when the poor man tried to claim a portion of air for himself. Even knowing that the air belonged to a world he no longer had any claim to, that soon he would have no part in at all, there was no fear.
     But he was clearly afraid for her.
     The husband went to pull the woman Melva off the man, grabbing her by the head. When he pulled her head the body didn’t move, like the two were not connected. Then the woman’s arms and legs jerked in rigid spasms, like the legs of a pithed frog. The arm flew up, and, even wedged tightly between the ribs, it pulled free of the man’s chest, leaving the ventricle of his heart open to the wide world.
     It took less than a second and it took forever, to the end of his life. The man Izek saw the spastic limbs of his lover, all three and a half, go flaccid. He saw his blood covering Javier’s work clothes. He saw his woman’s face, still calm, a million miles away, unaware of what was happening in her convulsing body. He must have seen the darkness coming.
     Filomena heard Mancha whimper, and saw tears well up in her eyes. “I knew his kanul,” the dog said, sadly. At that moment, somewhere in the forest on the side of the mountain, an emerald-billed toucanet fell from its tree.
     When Izek woke up, he was staring into the eyes of an old man standing over him. The man was holding the sleeve of a tunic like it was a towel, and he must have looked like he was washing his face with it. There was warm breath on Izek’s face, and a street dog the color of corn masa leaning down to sniff him. It must have seemed a strange way to be welcomed into death. There was nothing so earthy as the breath of a dog.
     “What is this?” asked Filomena, “a morality play? I thought they were a good couple.”
     “Not a morality play,” said the old man. “God’s own physics.”
     And then, with the understanding of an ancestor who had been to college, and had watched the moving world’s actions and reactions, the girl Filomena saw it for what it was, applied mechanics, no more and no less. The compressive load applied by the small surface of broken bone-edge had simply exceeded the elastic limit of the strength of the tissue between the ribs. It was a simple college physics problem, and elastic limits and shear forces were as much the hand of God as the law of gravity, and the forces that her own body had arrogantly and clumsily tried to cheat. She had deserved her death no more than this beautiful man had deserved to have his heart emptied of its blood. It was simply their mortal inability to resist the will of God.
     And Filomena thought of her mother, and something she had said. In old Mexico, the symbol for the present age of man was the same as the Aztec symbol for earthquake. She guessed it was about twenty more years until the end of that age, until that year they spoke about, 2012, and wondered how many more earthquakes she would see, and how many more deaths. Filomena looked down at this man Izek with friendly eyes, eyes that might have had more in them in another world, above the weight of this mountain, but here under the brown sky what they had in them was compassion.

Read more about 2012: Under the Witz Mountain and Michael Weddle HERE.

Copyright 2008 Michael Weddle. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

All places and times are pretty much the same: the demands of human nature cannot be satisfied by nature itself. There is an insidious disconnect between the hopes and dreams of the human mind and the brute facts of human existence. This disconnect creates an inscrutable maze where death looms as a finality which cannot be effectively processed or negotiated by human consciousness.

Don’t think for a minute that death means you’ve crossed over to the other side. That’s an easy way of disposing of the problem. No, death can live right here within the earthly realm. You can see it in people’s eyes. That’s where death hovers.

Some elderly folks harbor the presence of death in their eyes. They sit crooked in their porch chairs and look out at you through faces sallow and drawn, glassy eyes frozen in milky gray obscurity. There’s no life in their eyes. Just a stone-quiet paralysis. A paralysis born of seeing and feeling and thinking too much. Seeing and feeling and thinking too much about life’s desperations. There’s a point where the illusory hopes and dreams that have kept them going just curl up and die. That’s when it happens. Death. The mechanisms of the body continue to bump along. Nothing glorified about it. But down deep, somewhere behind the glassy eyes, is that stone-quiet paralysis. No desire lurks there. No fear. No hope. Nothing.

But it’s not only the elderly who see through death’s eyes. Some people are born that way. These people come into the world under a bad moon where hopes and dreams are stillborn. When you look into their eyes, you see a soulless void. Dead to begin with, they burden the world with destruction and chaos. They are ministers of evil. God bless and keep you if they ever cross your path.

Then there are those rare few who are blessed with some kind of holy prescience. These few die unto life in order to be reborn. This dying unto life can come in only one way: cheating the genetic programming away from the fulfillment of biological necessities and toward the realization of spiritual ones. Death is in the eyes of the enlightened. No doubt about it. But there is a difference. The death in their eyes is bigger than life. More expansive. Downright infinite.

Chapter 1

High on a wooded hillside in Halfmoon, Vermont, in a dense grove of tall white poplars, a bald eagle majestically sits atop the highest of the poplar crowns. It slowly rotates its regal, white head, surveying the earthly realm with prescient circumspection. The large, predatory bird would be considered an incongruous presence, for it is calculated to be endangered in these parts. But incongruous presences haunt Halfmoon and its environs. Shortly, they will make themselves known. And it will seem as if the forces of nature had converged on the innocent like a macabre maelstrom of unwarranted strife.

The bright yellow irises of the bald eagle’s eyes shine in recognition of a human form moving about in a clearing below. The weathered aviator cocks its head, its curved, yellow bill pointing toward the red western sky like a cipher of doom. In a moment’s flash, the bird opens its solid brown-feathered chest and spreads its mighty wings to a full span of seven feet. In this ominous posture, summoning ancient presences of prehistoric wanderings, it witnesses the human form with some distant and mysterious recollection of pity.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alexander Lessing jumped into his Dodge Ram pickup, slammed the gear into DRIVE, and sped off a little too fast down the long, precipitous, dirt driveway toward Snake Hollow Road. It wasn’t as if he had to be somewhere in a hurry. It was just that he was excited. He had made up his mind. Finally.

Alexander slowed down a bit at the end of the driveway and turned left onto Snake Hollow. The truck fishtailed on the turn, but he paid it no mind. After all, he was excited. Taking it up to fifty-five miles per hour on the narrow, backcountry road, he zoomed past two dilapidated farmhouses sitting back off the roadside some thirty yards and an old trailer founded just behind the forest tree line. Long-time Vermonters lived in those dwellings. Alexander didn’t see them much, but they were there. A couple of old widows and a retired New York City homicide cop. Yeah, they were there. Somewhere.

Bearing right onto Riverneck Road, Alexander crossed over the Ottaquechee River on the Riverneck Bridge. As he navigated the wooden span, the sun was setting in the autumn sky, reflecting orange and red off the lazy current of the rock-speckled river. An eighth of a mile later, he turned left onto Route 4 and headed for the Elk Head Saloon. That’s where he liked to be. That’s where he could be himself. Whoever that was.

Chapter 2

“So, would you like to talk about it?”

“No. Honestly, what good would that do?”

“Well, Raymond, that is why we get together for these sessions. To talk.”

“Doc, you know me. I’m not a troublemaker. I’ve pretty much gone along with the program, haven’t I? I’ve babbled on about myself and my afflictions for two years now.”

“Yes, Raymond, it’s been about two years.”

“And I’m tired of talking. Tired of dwelling on myself. I don’t want to know any more about myself.”

“Well, that’s not a very healthy attitude, is it?”

“To me, it’s completely healthy. To me, it’s a sign that I’m ready to look outside myself. That I’m ready to consider the bigger picture.”

“The bigger picture? What bigger picture?”

“Life. That’s the bigger picture. There is life outside the walls of Sheppard Pratt. Did you know that?”

“Now, Raymond. There’s no reason to be hostile.”

“Hostile? I’m not being hostile. I’m just saying that there is life out there. Outside of me. It’s every bit as important as I am. I’m just saying that I’m ready to go and see what it’s all about. I’m ready to contribute to it, become part of it.”

“Well, Raymond, I think you should let me be the judge of that.”

“Well, I’m trying to tell you that I’m ready. I can make it this time. Really.”

“I’m sorry, Raymond. The clock on my desk tells me our time is up. Enjoy your weekend.”

“But, Doc. Don’t you hear what I’m saying? I want to live my life. I want to connect with the world. Is that an unreasonable request?”

“Raymond, we can talk about this next week. I really must be going. I have an engagement.”

“That’s my very point, Doc. That’s it. You’re going out into the world. You have an engagement with life. See how healthy that is? That’s what I want to do. I just want to lead a normal life. Does that sound crazy to you?”

“Raymond, you know we don’t use that word here.”

“What word? ‘Crazy’? I don’t see anything wrong with that word. People do crazy things. That’s why they land in here with you.”

Chapter 3

Alexander Lessing sipped contemplatively on his third pint of Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale. The predominately hopped ale reminded him of the bitter he had so enjoyed during his university days at Oxford. Those were the days. Sitting in the dark shadows of noisy pubs, drinking beer with scholars brandishing large, sloping foreheads and receding hairlines. Conversing about the dimensions of moral experience in Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel. Those were the days…

“You seem quiet tonight, Alex.”

Alex raised his head and looked into the wide, brown eyes of Madeline Kerr, the barmaid at the Elk Head Saloon. Madeline was forty-something. A Vermont girl through and through. Grew up down the road near White River Junction. Orphaned at age seven when her parents died in a freak hunting accident. Raised by her grandparents on a dairy farm. Alex considered her wiry, beguiling frame, her full breasts beneath her navy blue crewneck sweater, her mischievous oval face with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a scattering of brown freckles meandering across her nose from one cheek to the other. Alex wondered if she had freckles on her bountiful breasts. “Oh, I’m just doing some thinking.”

“What about?”

Alex leaned forward, bracing himself on the bar with his elbows. “I’ve made a decision. It feels good when that happens.”

Madeline smiled and nodded in agreement. “So what have you decided?”

“I’ve decided to leave the university. I’m going to quit!” Alex peered into his beer glass and contemplated the brown ale’s frothy head. “I’ve never quit a job in my entire life. It feels good to be decisive. To say no when things no longer make sense.”

“I always thought you enjoyed teaching.”

“Oh, I have. Don’t get me wrong—it’s been a great ride. But now, everything has a nasty political odor. What the administration calls political correctness, I call intellectual dishonesty. Today, teaching is more about coddling the students than it is about communicating the seminal ideas that have shaped the movements of Western culture.” Alex leaned back and shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, I’m quitting.”

Aaron Riley turned his big, burly head to the right and peered out from under the brim of his red Budweiser Beer ball cap. “I couldn’t help overhearin’, Alex. So you’re quittin’ your job? Nothin’ wrong with that. I’ve pretty much quit every job I ever had. It’s not good to let grass grow under your feet. Especially if the grass doesn’t suit you. No, sir. Gotta keep on movin’.”

Alex surveyed the massive torso of Aaron Riley and pondered the remark. Then he pondered the source of the remark. Aaron Riley. A great hulk of a man. Six-feet-three, two hundred fifty-five pounds. Juvenile delinquent at the age of sixteen. Stole cars in high school and set them on fire. Why? Because he liked to. Spent two years in a juvenile correction facility. When he was eighteen, he disappeared. No one in these parts knows where he was. And Aaron never said, either. At the age of twenty-five, he reappeared in Halfmoon. He had changed. Really. He was a good man. Why? No one knows. And Aaron hasn’t pontificated on it, either. Now, he’s fifty-five. Lives alone in a log cabin on a dirt road off Route 4 on the outskirts of Halfmoon. Fixes truck transmissions for a living. When will he quit that job? Who knows?

“Aaron, I’m just tired of all the bullshit. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

Madeline pulled two more pints of Smuttynose and slid the brimming glasses in front of the interlocutors. “On the house, gentlemen.” She winked and sashayed down to the other end of the bar in response to a crowd of thirsty patrons.

Alex watched Madeline’s alluring hips sway to and fro as she strode away. He raised his eyebrows at Aaron.

“Oh, yeah. I get your drift.”

Alex nodded knowingly. “Anyway, I’m going to quit. Think I’ll do some traveling.”

“Hmmm. Where you gonna go?”

Alex considered the question. “Don’t know. Some place where I can find myself.”

Aaron shook his head and groaned. “Jesus Christ! You talk about how you want to get away from all the bullshit, and then you tell me you want to go on some fuckin’ odyssey in search of yourself.” Aaron shifted his bulky frame on the barstool. “You just have no clue, do you? All those philosophy books you’ve read. They don’t help much in real life, do they? Alex, the simple truth is this: If your mind is all fucked up, it doesn’t matter where you go. Your fucked-up mind is gonna go with you.”

Alex shrugged and looked forlornly into his glass of creamy brown nectar. He felt his mind spinning down into a dark chasm where personal demons might very well exist. “Well, I’ve got to do something.”

Unconvinced, Aaron shook his head. “Change of subject. How’s Ray doin’?”

Alex felt a bolt of dizziness cascade through his temples. He inhaled deeply. “That’s another thing I’ve got to get some closure on.”

Read more about Halfmoon Confidential by Edward Fotheringill HERE.

Copyright 2008 Edward Fotheringill. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

“After all, if the spirit of a loving wife can’t nudge her husband in the right direction, who can?”

Chapter 1

I died on a Tuesday when I was thirty-one years old. In November, my least favorite month in my least favorite season. Barenaked trees, bleak skies, and twilight falling before the end of Oprah.
Altogether a depressing time.
Nothing good ever happened to me in autumn. It was September when I got food poisoning at my aunt’s annual Labor Day picnic and spent the remainder of the weekend on my knees before the porcelain god. It was October when I got so frightened by a plastic skeleton dangling over a door at the second-grade’s haunted house that I started to cry and all the kids laughed and pointed. And it was November when I chose to shuffle off my mortal coil. I, Judith Ratner McBride, being of sound mind and body … make that being of sound mind … let’s just say I died and leave it at that.
I was nobody extraordinary. Just a nice Jewish physical therapist, happily married to a nice Jewish professional man with an unlikely Irish surname who didn’t mind that my thighs were chunky and my yellow-brown hair was frizzy. I never won raffles or was the tenth caller with the correct answer to the radio station’s trivia question. So who would have thought my end would come like this?
I know what you must be thinking, but I didn’t commit suicide. Yet I did choose to die on that day, in that month, that year. It was all part of a plan hatched a lifetime ago, but I’ll get into all that later.
Somehow I managed to fall into that minuscule percentage of patients who experience one of those possible-but-improbable complications during a routine endoscopy.
Anyone who has ever undergone any kind of invasive medical procedure is familiar with those caveats we tend to gloss over on the required waivers: This procedure can result in certain complications, including death. When you really think about it, though, what purpose does the warning serve? If the procedure is necessary, you’re going to have it done anyway. And when I died, it wasn’t as though I said to myself, “Well, I can’t say they didn’t warn me.”
In fact, I wasn’t even sure what was happening to me, though I did have the proverbial out-of-body experience. I had the sensation of floating out through the top of my head and rising towards the ceiling, watching as the medical team tried to resuscitate me. Staff members began scurrying at once in different directions to their Assigned Responsibilities in the Event of a Life-Threatening Situation.
“I’m not getting a BP, Doctor,” said a nurse.
“One milligram of epinephrine,” Dr. Kreske ordered without missing a beat.
The nurse prepared a syringe and plunged it right into my heart. The team waited and watched as one– forever, it seemed.
“Still no reading, Doctor.”
Dr. Kreske’s pucker factor must have gone into high gear when epinephrine didn’t do the trick.
He back-kicked a metal stool out of the way; it rolled into the wall and toppled over with a loud crash, but no one even blinked. “Begin CPR,” he ordered while the crash cart was readied. Someone else yanked open my hospital gown to lay bare my breast. Once upon a time, I had fantasized about some handsome Jewish doctor doing just that, after which he would sweep me into his strong arms and carry me off to Nordstrom.
Good Dr. Kreske, unmoved by the bosoms splayed over the sides of my rib cage, situated the paddles and called out, “Clear!”
I arched an eyebrow at such a dramatic warning. It wasn’t as though they were standing in front of an airplane propeller.
The electricity made contact, jerking my supine body several inches off the gurney. Five faces looked toward the heart monitor with anticipation that turned to dismay at the persistent flat line. Dr.
Kreske once more replaced the paddles and gave his throttle-up warning. My torso arched a little higher, thrusting my breasts upward in a macabre imitation of the seductive pose tempestuous vixens assume while in the throes of ecstasy.
I may have been tempestuous, but I was no vixen and nobody there was ecstatic. About forty minutes later, the team conceded the battle. Time of death was recorded as 1:17 p.m.
The whole situation had been so embarrassing from the start. It wasn’t humbling enough in the first place that I had to see a gastroenterologist and describe in great detail my elimination patterns, complete with illustrations. It wasn’t sufficient that I, who usually avoided doctors in general, subjected myself to undignified tests while in humiliating, butt-baring positions.
A couple of visits later, I left Dr. Kreske’s office with a prescription for a type of laxative new to this child of Generation X-Lax. Oh, I was familiar with over-the-counter pills and the fiber powders stirred into water to concoct a gritty, citrusy beverage, but this stuff resembled something in between bird seed and chocolate jimmies. While I was tempted to feed it to the birds, I was not about to sprinkle it over ice cream. So I did as the label instructed, swallowing a heaping teaspoonful of the dry granules and chasing it with a full glass of water.
Once in the stomach, the granules were supposed to absorb the water and spur the bowel into action. But the mission was sabotaged by a condition I didn’t even know I had. A narrowing of my esophagus caused the granules to bottleneck, unable to proceed to their final destination. Gridlocked at this stricture, they absorbed the water I had drunk until swollen twice their volume, blocking the passage completely. It was like having a matzo ball stuck in your throat that you couldn’t get down.
I could still breathe, so there was no need to panic. I phoned Dr. Kreske’s office, feeling silly and distraught as I explained the problem in between dry heaves. The receptionist told me to have someone bring me to the hospital where Dr. Kreske would “work me in between procedures.” I knew what that meant. He was going to push the offending stuff down with– gulp– an endoscope.
Reluctant to drag my husband Saul away from his office, I knew I could count on my friend
Micaela to drive me to the hospital. She had the week off from work, anyway, and said she’d be happy to pinch-hit for Saul.
I worked my way through the hospital’s administrative cubicles: one for registration, one for insurance information, one to find out where to go to wait to be told where to go next. At each stop I was obliged to repeat the mortifying explanation of my Ripleyesque problem until at last I was escorted to the procedure room.
They gave me a lovely cocktail of Demerol and Valium which promptly sent me into la-la-land, a desirable place to be when having a large medical implement inserted in your throat. I was grateful for my particular vulnerability to barbiturates (a single antihistamine could knock me out cold), as I didn’t want to be the least bit aware of the unwieldy instrument about to send my gag reflexes into overdrive.
When it was all over, the staff tried to rouse me but I didn’t respond to repeated attempts. The mood in the room immediately changed from routine to tense. Dr. Kreske maintained an even strain, but
I could almost feel the prickle of anxious sweat starting under his arms. Losing me would not be a feather in his surgical cap. I’m sure no one anticipated such a virulent reaction to the narcotic night-night. Or maybe the barbiturate barkeep was pouring just wee bit too generously that day. Whatever the reason, the result was the same. But there was a bright side: at least I didn’t have to wake up to find a jackhammer down my gullet. As the saying goes, I never knew what hit me.
There was no mystical revelation that I was about to expire, no defining moment when I came face to face with my own mortality. No fanfare of choir voices came to accompany me to the Great Beyond. I simply floated out of the body and rose upward like a balloon, observing the scene below with detached fascination from a corner just a foot or two below the ceiling, while the medical team worked on the body.
Notice that I said “the” body instead of “my” body because the lifeless shell on the gurney with a sheet over its head wasn’t me anymore. The Me that is Judith McBride was still very much alive and aware, encased now in another kind of body. Not flesh and bone, but something lighter and more whole.
A dead ringer, you should pardon the expression, for the physical vessel my soul had just vacated.
My spirit body was as tangible to me as the earthly body had been, yet there were subtle differences I noticed right off. I felt more vital and energetic than I ever had on earth, alert to the slightest stimulus like I’d just awakened from a thirty-one year nap. A sense of tranquility banished any fears or uncertainties of the transition taking place.
Despite the rather odd circumstances surrounding my demise, I didn’t feel angry or sad that I had died. Oh, a little annoyed, maybe. After all, nothing got my knickers in a twist more than the best-laid plans of mice, men, and Judith going astray. All through high school, Micaela had teased me about being a control freak; she would go to town with this scenario. Judith McBride, dying when she didn’t plan on it? Unthinkable.
I took a moment to examine this etheric body of mine and check out the new and improved me. I liked what I found. My hands ran over my hair and felt a silky thickness I hadn’t known before. This wasn’t the turmeric chaff I was used to. I tilted a shiny auburn lock this way and that, marveling at the color and texture. This was the hair I’d always dreamed of having, much the way women with poker- straight hair get perms and dishwater blondes go sun-kissed. Gone was the accursed frizz I’d had to flat- iron straight every morning of my life. I felt like Cinderella after the fairy godmother changed her rags into a ball gown.
My hands slid down the smooth skin of my abdomen to my thighs, where they froze. I brought my hand back up to my belly. For the first time in my life, I had a stomach so flat it was almost concave.
I had never been much of a fashion maven, mind you, but it would have been nice to shop for anything that struck my fancy instead of ferreting out styles to drape over the small pot that made me look like I’d swallowed a papaya, whole. There is a God, and he’s a celestial plastic surgeon. I wondered if they had bikinis in heaven …
I turned to the nurses hovering near the mannequin-like corpse on the gurney. “Hey!” I called to them. “What on earth happened?”
No answer.
I called a little louder. “Hel-LO-O! Hey! Over here! What went wrong?”
No one looked up, and it finally dawned on me that they couldn’t hear my voice. But I heard them keenly, even though they spoke in hushed tones. I could even hear the staff in the next unit, and the receptionist down the hall.
A nurse went out to the waiting room to tell Micaela that Dr. Kreske wanted to speak with her.
Micaela Pressman and I had been best friends since the seventh grade. She was everything I never was: a blue-eyed blonde who had never needed braces or control-top pantyhose. In high school she had been popular with everyone from the artsy drama kids to the cheerleaders. Her academic achievements landed her a spot at Brown University where she drove her male colleagues mad when she studied in the sunny quad wearing a Brazilian bikini. Micaela believed in multi-tasking: no reason why you couldn’t get a tan while reading Fundamentals of Microbiology.
Our relationship spanned decades, longer than many of our friends’ marriages. There were things Mic knew about me that no one else did, not even Saul. We were truly a bonded pair. Now she had the unenviable chore of breaking the news of my death to Saul. Poor Micaela. There’s nobody on whom I’d wish this burden, but I hated that it had to be Mic. We hadn’t bargained for this when we’d exchanged friendship necklaces in eighth grade. The silver pendant was half a heart with a zigzag edge as if it had been broken in two. Each half fit the other to recreate the whole heart. By these tokens we pledged unending sisterhood, come what may. At the time, we were thinking along the lines of major zit outbreaks and unrequited crushes, not untimely death and notification of next of kin.
My next of kin and I had often dreamed about someday buying a really big Airstream and touring the country at will. Now it looked like my immediate travel plans were limited to this near-earth location where newly-departed souls adjust to the afterlife. But how was I supposed to get around? Fly?
I shrugged and put one foot in front of the other, just like on earth. It worked. I was moving as though on a mechanical sidewalk through an empty corridor that looked like a spanking new hospital before any equipment was moved in. I wished there was someone to answer all my questions, but I seemed to be all alone. I blinked at the light glaring at the end of the corridor and kept walking. I had no idea where I was headed; I just kept moving.
In short order I found myself inside a basement room at Goldblatt & Sons Funeral Home, morticians of choice for upscale Jews, the Fendi of formaldehyde. A radio was playing and Lou Goldblatt, Jr. was just putting the finishing touches to my earthly toilette. Lou was short, fat, and bald, hardly the sort of person you want doing your makeup. But let’s face it, he wasn’t Monsieur Louis,
Beautician to the Stars. He was sweaty Lou, costumer of the dead.
Handiwork complete, he stepped away from the table and we were both able to get a good look at the finished product. The makeup gave new meaning to the term “matte finish,” but the hair was the real problem. I looked like a flapper who’d danced one too many Charlestons. I guess Lou’s wife Myrna hadn’t bothered to look at the photograph Saul had provided. The wallet-size snap lay atop a scrambled sheaf papers on the dusty Formica desk behind the work table. She had fashioned a coif that only stick- straight hair could carry off, certainly not my coarse mop. The result was Buckwheat meets Betty Boop.
I flinched at the spit curls on my cheeks, longing to brush out all that Dippity-Doo and restore some semblance of me. What was Myrna thinking?
I gave Saul props for his choice of burial outfits: a five-year-old Evan Picone suit, powder-blue and taupe hounds tooth checks with a blue and taupe shell in a coordinating pattern. He knew it was one of my favorites, even though for the past few years the skirt had been tight around the waist and pulled slightly across the derriere. Guess I wouldn’t have to worry about the ill-fitting skirt anymore. Lou left the back zipper open and even ripped the seam a little to give the front of the skirt a smoother appearance. In fact, the outfit had never looked better on me.
The distant blaze of light flared once, beckoning me. I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when I found myself in a field of headstones with small rocks placed on top. Some had many rocks heaped on in a pyramid; others had only a handful neatly arranged in a row on top of the granite.
A cluster of people encircled an open grave. Muffled crying provided backup for a familiar voice that rang in clear tones.
Micaela was reading something from a book that lay open in her hands. I glanced from her to the plain pine coffin with a simple Star of David affixed to the lid. The scent of new pine struck my nostrils with a clarity that took me back to summer camp in the woods of Maine.
The surreal scene felt like it was a stranger’s funeral instead of my own. My mother’s chin wobbled and Micaela’s voice quavered as she recited the beautiful passage from Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood. It was one of our favorite poems.
… though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; we will grieve not …
Micaela finished the verse and folded the book closed, cuing Rabbi Kalman to begin the mourner’s Kaddish. With each intonation, my body was infused with a sublime rush that spread to the tips of my toes and fingers, a rush that far eclipsed the giddy pleasure of being voted Fraternity
Sweetheart two years in a row, the euphoria of helping a paralyzed patient walk again, or the dreamy elation of my wedding day. I became an ethereal sponge, soaking up love until I thought I could hold no more. If everyone on earth could know that each prayer, no matter how simple, really does reach departed souls and help in their transition to the other side, more people would pray oftener and with greater feeling.
Saul took up a garden shovel and scooped a small mound of loose dirt that he tossed onto the casket partially lowered into the grave. As he handed the shovel to Micaela, the sun’s rays bounced off wet paths on their cheeks. The scene almost had me crying.
The graveside service concluded and the crowd dispersed to their cars. I followed them back my mother’s house, where there was more food laid out than I’d seen since last Thanksgiving. Food in mass quantities is de rigueur on Jewish occasions, a kind of go-with-everything accessory suitable for mourning or celebrating. Mom had ordered some deli platters, but relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends also brought over briskets and roast chickens and desserts. Grieving works up a big appetite. My mouth watered as Micaela placed a cheesecake on the dining room table. I no longer needed to eat, but the sensory pleasure of it wasn’t diminished by death. Happily, such delights are only enhanced in the afterlife. I’d miss the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee in the morning, the taste of chocolate-chip ice cream, the feel of a cashmere sweater against my skin …
People I hadn’t seen in decades were coming out of the woodwork, murmuring platitudes to Saul.
I know how you feel … it’s God’s will … at least she went quickly … now she can watch over you … Poor Saul looked stricken, more so than at the cemetery. This open display of emotion was a rarity for my strong-but-silent man. Saul didn’t always express his love in conventional ways, but I knew it was there.
Now I felt his love at its purest, magnified a hundredfold. In death I didn’t have to regret leaving loved ones behind. I took their love with me; the rest is insignificant.
Saul’s sister Jessica stood by the dining room table with our accountant, a statuesque blonde named Mary Lynn Walker. There were two constants about Mary Lynn. One, she was forever correcting people who called her “Marilyn.” Two, she always managed to find us sizeable tax deductions. I liked her, despite her drop-dead good looks.
Jessica was a different story. She was as pretty and innocuous as an angelfish, but inside she was all shark. Five years older than her brother and with a personality that came on strong, she had always tried to bend Saul to her will. She never asked, she decreed. The word “please” was not in her vocabulary, but somehow she got away with it. Accustomed to people doing as she told them, Jessica resented the fact that she never could manipulate me in the same way. We maintained an unspoken truce for Saul’s sake, but our mutual dislike was undeniable. Saul was as blind to his sister’s true colors as he had been to my too-tight Evan Picone skirt. I knew that, and Jessica knew that I knew it. This enabled her to exploit his ignorance at my expense.
“So awful about Judith,” Mary Lynn tsk-tsked.
“Yes, Saul’s taking it very hard, though what he ever saw in her … I told him I’d take care of her clothes. It’s not healthy for him to hang on to them. The sooner they’re gone, the sooner he can get on with his life.”
Mary Lynn flashed a Cheshire smile. “Why, Jessica, that’s so thoughtful of you.”
“I just happen to wear the same size as Judith, not that I’ll find much in her wardrobe worth keeping.” Jessica gave a resigned sigh. “I tried for years to teach her how to dress, but she rarely took my advice. Even when she did, she never could develop any real sense of style.”
Mary Lynn glanced across the room at the unmerry widower. “Poor Saul looks like a lost puppy.
I’ll see if he wants to come over for dinner next week. He’ll need to get out of the house and be with close friends.”
A strange heaviness in my lower body stole my attention from the conversation. I looked down at my stomach, but it was unchanged: smooth and flat. Nothing about my spiritual body was different from a moment ago, yet now I felt like I was trying to swim to the surface in a waterlogged snowsuit, kicking and kicking but still dragged down. The grey mist swirling around me had become dense and thick with negativity from these two people pretending to mourn my tragic passing.
I bailed on the rest of shiva week, more than ready to move on to whatever awaited me in the spirit world. In retrospect, overhearing the Mary Lynn and Jessica might have been the best way– the only way– to propel me forward to the next level of afterlife.
Don’t misunderstand me; I wasn’t completely cavalier about my own death. I may have accepted the reality of it with good grace, but the idea didn’t thrill me to pieces. I had a pretty nice life on earth: great friends, a fulfilling career, and a husband who never left the seat up. Chunky thighs notwithstanding, I still wore a size eight. All in all, I didn’t have much to complain about.
But here I was, so I might as well make the best of it and get on with this dance known as life after death. But before I left, I wanted to say goodbye to Saul.
I found him alone in the bedroom of our house. I looked around as an objective observer instead of a recent occupant. Everything looked the same: the muted cappuccino walls and carpet, room dominated by the clean, spare lines of the Scandinavian furniture Saul didn’t like at first but came to appreciate. He sat on the edge of the king-size bed, patting our Rottweiler, Max. Ginger the mutt was lying on my side of the bed with her head on the pillow where the last vestige of my scent remained.
Was it my imagination, or did she look sad? Ginger had very expressive eyes that spoke volumes. I always knew what she was trying to say to me.
Saul, on the other hand, never spoke volumes with his eyes or anything else. Even in his solitude, his eyes were dry. But I didn’t need tears to tell me what I already knew: that he was as devastated to lose me as I would have been to lose him. I yearned to reach out and stroke his hair, tell him everything would be okay. But I could only touch him from now on in ways he may not understand.
When a spring breeze brushes his cheek, it will really be my caress he feels. When he smiles at the framed wedding photo on the bureau, it will be my embrace that puts the smile there. He wouldn’t know it was me, but someday he would find out. He would just have to do it in his own time.
Of its own accord, my arm reached down to him. I cupped his chin in my hand, feeling the fine stubble that never waited until five o’clock to shadow his face. He reached up and brushed his neck with his hand as if to swat away a pesky gnat. His hand slid behind his neck to massage the knotty muscles. I took my own hand and placed it over his, sending soothing thoughts of love and peace to blend with his own strokes.
With a final sigh, he slapped his palms on the top of his thighs as if he’d indulged in self-pity long enough. He crossed to the door and paused there, looking around the room as though he would never see it again. The door closed behind him before I realized my hand was still outstretched in his direction. I was the one who wouldn’t see it again. Not the way the room had been, full of the four earthly souls that occupied it. The life we knew together was over.
For now, anyway.

Copyright 2008 Cynthia Polansky. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.