Final Post

I'm leaving. This town is a ball of frustration, a decaying skeleton futilely rattling the bars of its cage. A lonesome wind blows through the desolate landscape, from building to building, but even it has nowhere to go and its bone-penetrating chill is somehow pathetic. It spends itself and dissipates, only to rise again at a later time and repeat the cycle anew. Taking a walk in the park, I spot a bright red slide, glistening with rain droplets. It sends a surge of hope and brightness through my heart, and a perk in my step, until, beneath it, I see a corpse. A hunched, aging old lady, whiter than a sheet, quite dead. She's slouched to the side, her mouth hanging open slightly. There's nothing glamorous about death. Immediately I recognize her as Madame Maureen, the woman who told my fortune a few weeks back. I had looked into her crystal ball when she wasn't paying attention and she snapped at me. The things I saw in that crystal ball – had they come true yet? I couldn't say. Madame Maureen looks...happy. Content in death. Four glass panes. A galloping horse. Swirling colors. This is what I had seen when I peeked into the future. It hadn't made sense to me at the time, but it was beginning to. She looks so peaceful. The rain has reduced to a light drizzle, numbing all extraneous thoughts, feelings and ideas. There is only the rain, the corpse and the playground.

But the silence is interrupted by the arrival of an ambulance, sirens blaring. The paramedics rush out and shove me out the way. Thunder rumbles in the distance. They load her onto a stretcher, grotesquely. There's no doubt that that ambulance is heading straight to the morgue. The ambulance driver cracks a joke to his partner and they both laugh, windows up, sealed away tight in the cab of the vehicle. I wonder if Madame Maureen had foreseen her own death. And how she had felt about it. I wonder where her soul is now. Is it rising, up through the numbing sheets of rain, through the misty clouds into the sunlight and up, up, into the heavens? Is it descending into some rocky, terrifying landscape of fire and demons with three-pronged tridents which they poke the damned with? I find that hard to believe. Even if she preached sin in her lifetime, she tried, like every other human being, to be a good person. Isn't that enough? Or is there a point at which we all must be judged?

Or is her soul not a soul at all? Is her body the same as it was before, when she was alive? I find that hard to believe, too. There must be something, some vital spark that has now left her, making the body a lifeless shell, worth nothing and signifying nothing.

A soul left us today, departing for another world, and yet death is as much a mystery as it was before. But I can still take something away from all this: to enjoy what is in front of me, what I can do when I am still alive. And again my attention is turned to the bright red slide, glistening like a piece of fresh fruit in the spring drizzle. It is luminous, offset by the damp mulch below it.

The paramedics are asking me questions. "Do you know her, sir? How did she die, sir? Did you have anything to do with this?"

I can only smile, and continue walking, leaving them all behind. It's amazing how humans can still cling to their bureaucracies even when they're brushing so close to the phenomenon known as death. Instead of taking a moment to enjoy life, they waste more of it with their endless questions, plans and worries.

I'm leaving. I don't think about it, or worry about it. I walk straight to the bus station and get on, becoming aware of my damp self in the dry, climate-controlled air. But it's all good. I'm off to somewhere, somewhere tropical, where the weather's warm and people take life slowly.

THE END