Free Escaping Heaven by Cliff Hicks

Doris looked up at Jake, who beamed as he placed his paperwork on top of the counter. The woman looked back down at it, her face inscrutable. It wasn’t as though she was deliberately hard to read; she simply had the face of anyone who’s been stuck doing the same job for much longer than they would like – filled with apathy and sadness. “You finished?” she asked, her voice a nasal whine that grated on Jake’s last nerve.
    He forced a smile and then nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
    She looked up at him for a second, as if she was not accustomed to being spoken to with respect, then looked back down at his forms with a satisfied grunt. She glanced over the collection of odd, disorganized one-sheets before opening up the massive book and checked three or four pages at random. She then nodded, pushing the massive collection of paperwork back in his direction. “Go to door #3.” From this point, Jake could see that each of the doors was numbered, although he noticed with a slight bit or irony that there was no six anywhere on any of the doors. Four, five, seven, eight…fourteen, fifteen, seventeen… it was odd and yet somehow humorous to Jake at the same time. Apparently Heaven was full of numerologists. (There was still a door thirteen, though, he noted with a smile, so they were clearly picky numerologists...)
    He slowly pulled the paperwork back to him, scooping it up into his arms. He hadn’t realized quite how much of it there was until he was holding it again. The people behind him were tapping their feet impatiently as Jake worked to tuck the loose pages inside the front cover of the massive form and then picked it up with both arms, starting to walk over towards the door, apologizing to the Frenchman, the Eskimos, the bushman and the like. He had to pin the book between him and the wall so he could free a hand up to open the door, pulling it back and tucking his foot behind it to keep it propped open before he let the book fell back into his arms. He moved into the small room, backing into it, watching the door close and latch behind him before a voice called out from behind him.
    “ Come on in, siddown,” a shrill male voice said from behind him. “I’ve got tons of people to see today and the last thing I need you doing is holding up my line.” Jake turned around to see a small, thin man sitting behind the desk with a beak of a nose. He turned his head for a second, and then decided that it was entirely acceptable to find it odd that there was a Jewish man, whose name was “Gilbert” based on his name plate, sitting behind the desk. “What, you’ve never seen a Jew in Heaven before? You some kinda racist?” There was thick annoyance in the nasally voice.
    “ I just assumed that because of different religions…”
    “ It’s a big shock for everyone,” Gilbert assured him, standing up, which didn’t make him much taller. The annoyance was gone as quickly as it had arrived. “Come, come, siddown. Lemme start looking through that form. We don’t have… well, I guess we do have all day, but still,” he said with a smile, which indicated he was trying to be funny. Jake didn’t see much humor in it. He started to say something, but Gilbert cut him off. “You should imagine the response we get from the reincarnationists. They’re positively livid, but whaddaya gonna do? Okay, let’s get started.” Jake put the stack of forms on the desk with a loud thud. “It always amazes me how big these things are, when they don’t have to be. It’s a lot of useless information that really just gets condensed into a sheet of tiny checkmarks. You bring me this,” he said, waving his left hand over the stack of paperwork, “and I give you this.” In his other hand was a single clipboard with a single sheet of paper. “Depressing, isn’t it?” Jake started to answer but Gilbert cut him off again. “Yes, well, it’s a rough deal for everyone. But we all learn to just move on about it. Sit, get