The Middle

The Middle

For Louise (see her prompt here)

 

Heaven comes down with the crash of heavy wood on stretched skins. There are no ethereal, angelic choirs descending from above. The thunder of heaven falls heavy as rain, the beat driving the departed into the hands of their maker.

 

Or so They would have us believe. I don’t buy it.

 

When the truck hit my first-life body and propelled me into the empty street of this middle-life it may have been a shock, but the beating of this rain, this beckoning siren from above, terrified me. I watch countless souls travel up the rhythm towards the afterlife. They seem willing. I’m not.

 

The bible hadn’t mentioned a beating death march to welcome the righteous to heaven, and I couldn’t help but wonder: had I been righteous enough? What if the churchies were wrong? What if heaven was actually down, not up? What the hell was up there?

 

I ran and became a Nothing. There are a few of us, struggling to make a middle-life for ourselves. It isn’t easy, always running towards the first-lifers, always running from the last-lifers. The former won’t acknowledge us; the latter’s always chasing us.

 

I’ve set up a little place in an otherwise empty shopping centre. It allows me to use the one skill I seem to have carried in to the Middle. Back in first-life I had been a knitter. All of my grandchildren had my thick woollen blankets. In fact, they had insisted I had one wrapped across my shoulders in the coffin.

 

I had watched them.

 

Here though, I don’t knit rugs to keep people warm. What the middle-lifers need from me are blankets upon which a rich middle life can be woven. I create cohesion, common sense to wrap around them and upon which their own imaginings can be laid.

 

Back in first –life I was a granny, quietly dying for twenty years, but now in middle-life I’ve been reborn. I’m an outlaw. There isn’t a mid-lifer here who attracts the type of vicious rain I do. Sometimes I have to lash myself to steel fixings to keep from floating up into the intoxicating beat.

 

Once a Gran. Now a half-dead outlaw.