JUDGMENT DAY in Adventures From Prison

“It’s time”, my father said then leaves the room. I stare up at the ceiling as I have for the entirety of my life. The paint is cracked and old. Once it was a pale blue, like a summer sky at sunrise, but is now a soft gray. I can still see a few darker patches where for a decade glow in the dark stars were affixed to form constellations extant only in a child’s mind.
I sit up.
I’m already dressed, have been for awhile now. The walls are bare, their eggshell white having weathered time’s wrath better than the ceiling’s hue.
Once, not so long ago, my dresser was pressed tight against the far wall. My desk was beneath a wall-mounted bookcase and beside the room’s only window. At different times of my youth the shelves were home to books, matchbox cars, model rockets and a microscope. I would spend hours at that desk engrossed in mental pursuits as other children’s squeals of physical play drifted through my open window.
Now, I walk to my desk and run my fingers over its scarred surface. I have a brief flight of fancy and nearly sit down in its child-sized chair before something outside my window draws my attention.
A crowd is gathering, women in long dresses, and grandmothers in pant-suits, men in shirts and ties and grandfathers in nappy tweed. I recognize most of them. Each smiles brightly, their eyes lit with amusement and joy. My parents know how to throw a party. I leave my room and head into the hall.
Downstairs, the living room is already filled with people. They turn to me and smile. No one says a word. I find my family gathered around a coffin.
“About time,” my father said with a grin. My mother slides her arm in mine. Her warmth is familiar and welcome. She had been dead nearly five years now and I’ve missed her touch. She guides me to a small step stool and helps me climb inside the casket.
Samantha, my fiancée, looks down at me with love in her eyes. She has already gone through this ritual and knows how it feels to be put on display.
I lay in repose as the party begins. Most everyone I’ve known and lost stops by to say hello and ask about my demise. They wish me luck and tell me stories of their own journey to Judgment. Obviously all of them have been found worthy of permanent Residency in the Community, no one knows what happens to those who disappear. Some think they are returned to life to try again, others think that they are raised to a place of even greater reward, but most feel that if the casket is reopened and found empty then the soul had debts that required payment and they were taken by the Darkness. It’s amazing that even in death there are mysteries.
Every so often, as the crowd lulls, Samantha comes over to kiss my cheek and tell me of her love. She apologizes over and over for the accident that killed her and kept me in a coma for months before I passed on.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she reassures me. “You’re a good man.”
I want to believe her, but there are many things about me she does not know. I have secrets I dared not share, things I’ve done for my country that even Sam could not forgive. The government has told me they were all “righteous” killings, but will those who Judge feels the same way? Will they forgive the fact that each time my finger stroked my trigger, each time my gun ejaculated a wad of death, and I felt pleasure? Would they know that after coming home I would lie in my childhood bed and pray that those years of war were only a nightmare of the boy I used to be?
The party was winding down and the shadows of night were darkening the windows. It is time for the Closing of the casket.
Each member of my immediate family leans over and wishes me their luck. Samantha, of course, is the last.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she tells me. “Then we can be together forever.”
“I hope so,” my voice is shaking.
“Neil, love, you worry too much,” she said and closes the lid.
The Judgment begins immediately.
I am standing in a beam of light, the world around me dark.
I am not alone.
Things loom just out of sight, felt in my skin as pinpricks and tickles. There is nothing human about these beings. The sound of their breathing, the rustle of their garments (or skin) as they move has no familiarity to me.
I feel a fear unlike anything I’ve experienced on or off the battlefield. This is not the same Judgment the others described to me. This is something new and different. Suddenly, the image of Samantha throwing open the casket lid, the radiant smile of hope on her face melting to despair as she sees an empty space where I should have been, drives itself into my mind. I cry out at the grief it will cause her.
I can feel the minds of these creatures pushing into me, probing for memories, violating the one space that should be mine and only mine.
I fight against them.
And lose.
They tear my mind apart, shred my soul and peer into the destruction for some sort of meaning.
I see the faces of the men I’ve killed, some no older than 12 or 13. Over and over each trigger pull is relived and I feel my grip on sanity slipping, slipping and slipping.
From the collage of violence one image emerges again and again: Samantha, tears running down her face in the moonlight. It happened only hours before my deployment. We had spent the evening making love and talking. At that moment the weight of the situation had grown too much for her to bear and she had wept.
“Come back to me, Neil. Do whatever it takes, just come back to me.”
And I had.
Suddenly I understood the pleasure I felt with each pull of the trigger, with each death I caused. It was not from some sick perversion that had burrowed into my soul and corrupted it, but because each drew me one step closer to her. They died so I might live for her.
I felt a surge of disappointment radiate from the things in the darkness.
The light went out.
I floated into oblivion, wondering if this was to be my eternity.
Then the casket lid reopened.
Samantha stood above me, smiling and crying.
“Welcome to forever,” she said.