Fall From Heaven -

First place 2003

© 2002 Terry Ollila
All rights reserved.

"Now if there's an afterlife, you be sure to come back and let me know."

Those were the last words Barry Nice had said to his wife Bernice over five years earlier, right before cancer had put an early end to her life at the age of forty-seven.

He hadn't meant them to be his last words to her, of course. He wished somebody had told him the end might be so sudden so he could have ended on "I love you" or "I'll never forget you." But no, it had to be that stupid comment. It had been a joke, of course—only meant to lighten the moment when they knew the end was near. That had always been one of Barry's strongest points, after all: lightening a tough moment with a dumb joke. He was no comedian—the jokes were always bad, never remotely funny. But timing is everything, as they say, and that was the important part. Even the worst joke, told at the right time, could dispel a dark or sad moment like the sun dismissing the last traces of night. But that one, that one stupid crack, had haunted him ever since. She had smiled at his attempt to keep the moment from getting too sad, then . . . gone. She had slid peacefully into oblivion.

But that was life, and here he was now—fifty-four years old, hoping for an early retirement he knew he probably wouldn't get, and getting along more or less as one would expect: he missed his wife, terribly at times, but he went right on living the life of a good American, plugging away at his job and whiling away the years he had remaining as best he could. The two of them had never had any kids, so there were no other close family members to mourn with, though Barry and Bernice had had a host of friends and colleagues—mostly from the university where they had both taught for most of their lives (Barry was in philosophy, and Bernice taught American literature—two specialties that assured them a lack of employment outside of academia).

It was that last comment, Now if there's an afterlife, you be sure to come back and let me know, that he thought of now as he stared at the computer screen in front of him.

He had turned the computer on right before going to the kitchen to make some coffee, readying himself to type up a brand-new test. It would be his first new test since before Bernice had died—previously he had simply recycled old ones, but they were getting outdated and it was time to overhaul all of his classes. It was summer, after all—best to do it while he had the time.

While he'd been making his coffee, the screen saver had taken over the monitor. As he'd sat down, the screen had shown falling digital rain. Then, as he'd moved the mouse to clear it, he'd gotten the shock of his life.

The computer had opened automatically to the word processor program. There was nothing strange about that—he'd set it up specifically to do so on startup. What wasn't normal were the words already printed on the blank sheet under the Untitled heading:

There is.

His coffee mug was still clenched in his left hand. As he looked at the screen, his hand started to shake. The mug, filled dangerously high with hot coffee, began to quiver enough that rivulets began spilling over the sides. One of them reached his hand, but he didn't even feel it when it started to burn him. His attention was all on that screen.

There is.

It was an innocent enough couple of words. Not really so different from any other pairing—say, It was, or, Go here. Just the same, his stomach clenched nervously.

Could it have been something he'd written before shutting down the computer last time? It had been a while since he'd used the old Macintosh . . . but no, that couldn't be. The word Untitled at the top proved that this was a new document—not something he could have saved previously. Besides, why would he have simply typed There is, only to quit? He wasn't a writer. He wasn't prone to beginning fanciful stories, only to give up on them after two words.

And that was why the first thing he thought of upon seeing them was the last thing he had said to Bernice.

Now if there's an afterlife, you be sure to come back and let me know.

There is.

He set the coffee down carefully beside the keyboard on the desk and took a deep breath. There was an explanation. He'd feel stupid when he realized what it was. Stupid.

And yet, as long as he sat there staring at the monitor, he couldn't think of one.

After looking around the room for a moment, trying to notice if anything else was strange, he placed his hands on the keyboard and typed, There is what?

The cursor blinked on and off, but nothing happened.

He hit return to give it a new line, but after he sat waiting for five minutes, the cursor still hadn't moved. Finally, reason began to take a firm hold in him once again, and he decided it was a fluke. He deleted everything on the page to make room for the new test.

An hour later, he still hadn't been able to get anything done. He was having a hard time staying focused. So he got up and wandered around the house, searching for a possible intruder who could have typed the words (it was a stretch, but still more believable than, say, thinking your wife had come back from the dead just to say There is). He found nothing, but in the process he did manage to come across a photograph he had taken of Bernice. In it, she was sitting at the computer, working on the historical romance novel she had never had a chance to finish before she'd died. Looking at the picture as he thought of the words on the page gave him the shivers, so he quickly put it back in the closet where he'd found it and shut the door.

He didn't turn the computer back on for the rest of that day. Around noon, he went for a walk around the block to clear his head and settle his nerves, but it did no good. When he came back home, all he did was sit and stare at the blank monitor, thinking about turning on the computer but unwilling to do it. It wasn't just that he was afraid of seeing more words. More than that, he was actually afraid of not seeing any more words. What frightened him more than anything was that it had been just a fluke—that a glitch in the computer had called up a random piece of some document buried deep in its hard drive. If that were the case, well . . . it would destroy that little germ, that seed of hope, that had been growing in his chest all morning. He dared not even give conscious thought to it, but it was there just the same—that there might be a way he could speak with his wife again.

Grumbling, he finally cast aside those thoughts as foolishness and turned on the computer. When the word processing program came on the screen, he gave it just thirty seconds to do something weird, something spooky or supernatural, and when it didn't, he set to work on the test. He'd already blown half the day—there was no need to waste any more time.

At six that afternoon, the sun was shining through the western window of the office and he was still hard at work. It helped to keep his mind off other things. But then, in the middle of typing out an essay question on Utilitarianism for his intro class, he heard the voice.

He stopped typing in mid-sentence. He hadn't heard what the voice had said; in fact, the only thing he could tell for sure was that it was female. Was it Bernice? Was he hallucinating? Surely if he had been hallucinating, it would have been clear enough that it was her voice. He heard it in his head every day, telling him that it was time to take out the garbage, or making sure he ate his vegetables. The voice he would have ignored most times while its owner had been living went equally unobeyed coming from his imagination, like an echo of the original. But this voice wasn't like that. It could have been her voice, but it was hard to tell. It was as if he had heard it over a great distance. And it had been more light, more ethereal, than something coming from his own mind.

As he listened, he heard it again, but he still wasn't able to tell what it was saying. And this time, yes, it was definitely beginning to sound like Bernice—but still with that disembodied quality that made it so hard to understand.

The hum of the computer was making it difficult for him to hear properly. Too impatient to go through the proper shutdown procedure, he yanked the power cable out of the socket. There was a little blue spark at the outlet, then the computer and monitor shut off together.

That was better, but the refrigerator was running. He went across the hall to the kitchen and unplugged it, too. The compressor slowed and then stopped. Except for a dog barking somewhere in the distance, the house was silent.

It was over a minute before he heard the voice again. When he did, he could finally understand what it was saying: "Where are you?"

"What?" he asked the air.

"I'm trying to find you . . ." The voice didn't sound as though it was coming from a long distance away—at least, not in the conventional sense. He knew that if he opened the front door and listened, he would hear it no better. But in a way, it was coming from a great distance. It felt close, yet somehow small. As if its owner were infinitely tiny and had to call as hard as she could just to get him to hear.

"Say something so I can find you," the voice called.

"Okay," he said, feeling awkward. "Um, I'm right here . . . here in the kitchen, can you hear me?" He couldn't shake the feeling that someone was playing a terrible prank on him, but the possibility of something more was too much to pass up. He would play along, and if it wound up being a joke, he would beat the crap out of whoever was responsible.

"I can almost find you, don't stop talking." It couldn't be a prank. That voice . . . it was getting closer and sounding more familiar all the time. His heart hammered violently in his chest.

"Okay, well, here I am . . . still in the kitchen . . . I, uh, don't know what to say really . . ."

Then things got strange. His eyes began to play tricks on him—or at least, so he thought. On the other side of the kitchen, the colors started to blur and move. After only a few seconds, they began to come together in the shape of a person. Barry quickly shut off the lights. The sun was still up, but the kitchen was on the east side of the house, so it was fairly dim this time of day. Now he could see the shape a little better.

It was Bernice.

There was no doubt. He recognized her shape. They say that everyone has a perfectly unique face, like no other in the world. But the same can be said of the body, as well, and he knew that body perfectly. Relatively flat-chested, with narrow shoulders, an even narrower waist and disproportionately wide hips—it was his wife.

"I . . . I see you," he said, and took a few steps forward. In the gloom of the late afternoon, the figure had an eerie luminescence that brightened the room.

And it was getting stronger all the time. The longer he watched, unable to speak now for he was so astounded, the more clearly he could see his wife. Her facial features came into detail—not as they had been when she died, but as a sort of original print. It was like looking at the face that had been behind the face all along. Only . . . only . . .

Only it was in anguish. She wore a tortured look that he had not seen on her even when she had been in the clutches of her cancer. Seeing it, he instinctively took a step back.

Then she collapsed on the ground. He tried to go to her, but his hands went straight through her body. He could see the floor right through her.

"What's wrong?" he asked, accepting the strangeness of meeting his wife's ghost for the first time with the remarkable calmness of a lifelong philosopher.

"Everything," she said, still in that ethereal voice that was like the voice he remembered from her life, but still different. Like with her face, it was like he was hearing the voice that had been behind her voice all along.

"How did you come back?" he asked, unable to get past the natural philosophical questions that were brimming. "I mean, what happened when you died? And how were you able to get here? I asked you to, I know, but it was a joke, I never—"

"I fell," she said.

"You fell?"

"But it wasn't like falling down. More like . . . falling sideways."

"From where?"

"From heaven, of course."

Barry had to take a deep breath at that. So there was a heaven? And she had left it, to come see him? The darling girl!

"Then it was you, doing the thing with the computer! I knew it was, I just knew it! Why didn't you say something more?"

"You were in my seat," she said as she sat up, mustering her strength. She was obviously fatigued (if such a thing were possible for a spirit). The trip back to Earth must have really taken it out of her, poor thing. "I had to come back a little at a time, it was very difficult, you have no idea."

"So why . . . why did you have to come back? I mean, if we were just going to be together in the end, anyway . . . and . . . and my God, what's it like?" He knew he ought to be discussing something more important—reassuring her of his love for her, or something of that nature. But he simply couldn't get past his natural curiosity. This was the chance of a lifetime. The chance to finally find out what life was like after death.

"I had to come back," she replied. "To warn you."

"Oh," he said. "What? To do good? To follow Jesus? What? What do I have to do to get to heaven?"

But then her face twisted into additional anguish, and she tried to grope for him, but her hands passed right through and he felt the coldness of her spirit as her arms went through his torso. "No!" she said. "I came to—"

But she stopped as another figure began to appear in front of the stove. Then, as Barry looked, another one began to materialize in the doorway next to the refrigerator.

Bernice drew herself as close as she could, renewed urgency in her voice. "I came to warn you not to die! Heaven isn't what you think! Avoid it if you can!"

Those figures were taking on more definite shapes, now, and Barry didn't like the looks of them one little bit. They were large and impossibly bright—that was all he could tell about them, but it was enough. Bernice couldn't stop looking at them now, and it was clear that she was frightened of them beyond measure.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"They're coming for me. The angels—they know I escaped. Barry, whatever you do . . . stay alive as long as you can. They only want your spirit so they can put you to work . . . oh, it's horrible! It's absolutely horrible what they do to you in that place!"

Something occurred to Barry, and it made him feel cold. "You don't mean heaven, then," he said. "You mean hell."

"No Barry, I mean heaven. They're all there—every good person who thought they were serving a greater power; well, now they ARE serving a greater power—for all eternity, we will be slaving our lives away . . . our flesh is our only protection . . . that's why they despise it so much . . . they can't have us until it's gone, and then . . . oh Barry, your spirit never needs to sleep, and so they work you without rest—I'd say twenty-four hours a day, so you'll understand, but there IS no day there, or night . . . just an endless stream of time . . ."

"Then what can I do about it?" he asked frantically, but the bright figures were almost fully through now, and they were moving closer.

He wasn't watching them, but he could feel them approaching, and finally a powerful, resonating voice of that ethereal quality said, "Enough. You must come back with us."

"NO!" Bernice wailed, but each of the figures bent down on either side of her to lift her up.

"You can't!" Barry cried, but they barely seemed to notice him.

"It's none of your affair," the one to his left said dismissively.

"Best if you forgot all bout this," the other one put in. Then they were hauling Bernice away as she kicked and screamed and cried.

"Barry!" she yelled. "Live as long as you can! You've got nothing to look forward to after death! NOTHING!"

But she was fading away now, and the beings which held her were going as well.

"I . . . I love you," he called after her, knowing it needed to be said before she was gone.

"Don't die!" was her only response, then she was gone.

Barry stood right where he was for a long time, stunned beyond all comprehension. Don't die? How could one do such a thing?

How?

He sat down at the kitchen table, dejected and heartbroken. One day, those spirits, those angels, would be coming to take him away, as well. Would he even get the opportunity to see Bernice again, once they'd put him to work? What reason did he have to hope they would do such a thing?

There was no hope.

None at all.

But he would be eating his veggies from now on.

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