When
I was a child I believed that when I went to sleep a witch arrived to carry me
off to the land of dreams. The means of
transportation was a clattering shopping cart, same as at Ferretti’s Grocery. The witch herself was somewhat craggy. She was downright geologic. In profile she looked exactly like a solitary
volcano on Mars, as depicted on the poster on my bedroom wall from the Boston Museum of
Science. The witch looked just like that
volcano. Her hat was a Martian cloud.
After
death the shopping cart ascended. The
wheels ceased to clatter. The witch only
went part way. In structure the
afterlife resembled two parking garages, one on either side, extending as
far as the eye could see. Worlds were
stacked one on top of each other, all the way up and all the way down, innumerable worlds. Heaven and Hell (there were
many of both) were not above and below but right beside each other. The shopping cart rose in a column of air
between them.
Heaven
was on the left side. Hell was to the
right. Or else it was the other way
round. (Was it possible my shopping cart
was spinning?) Here was the crux of the
problem: Heaven and Hell kept switching sides.
Countless heavens, countless hells.
You had to choose between them.
This
was extremely difficult because Hell mimicked Heaven and did all it could to
seem like a really good time. Hell
promised homemade cookies, unlimited pinball and the company of the Strawberry
Quik bunny. Not until too late did you
learn that the cookies had pond slugs in them, that you were the ball in the
machine, that the evil pink bunny would never ever stop tickling.
Heaven
couldn’t help but seem a little dull. It
was the sort of place you loved once you got there, like Aunt Pilar’s house,
but without the cactuses.
Which
to choose? Which was the real
Heaven? Which was torture? I couldn’t decide. I wished the witch was still with me, perhaps
she could advise.
1 comment:
Being the pinball sounds so cool. :)
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