Free Needles & Sins by John Everson

itself out of balance.
    For some reason, on that day, I took a longer walk than usual, and found myself at the edge of Death. There, against the invisible glass that reached to the sky and into the subterranean depths, I saw her again. My heart leapt at the sight of her short-cropped hair, almost white in the ever-twilight that is our day and night. Her waist was narrow as a girl’s, and her hands clutched helplessly against the transparent, but impassable wall between life and death. Her fingernails pressed against the invisible, white with tension. I wondered what she saw. The window, vast as it seems, is individual; one sees the places and people one’s soul begs to see. Its view then is different to every eye.
    “How could he?” she whispered to herself, as I walked closer. She was crying.
    I put my palms over her hands, and pried her from the wall. “Come with me,” I insisted. It was like moving a statue to drag her from the precipice of eternity.
    “With my best friend,” she said after a while. Her voice was raspy, as if she’d been screaming at a sports stadium for hours. “I trusted him.”
    “You’re not there anymore,” I reminded her. “Life goes on.”
    She flipped around in my grasp and beat a fist against the iron of my chest.
    “Well what did I do to deserve being here?” she yelled. “Why was I sent to hell, what did I do wrong? I took care of my husband for more than 30 years. I never complained when he stayed out late and didn’t tell me where he was. I washed his socks and cooked his dinner and bore his children. I lived for him and our family and never asked for anything back.”
    “Did you love him?”
    She shrugged. “I guess so. What’s love anyway, after the lust is gone? I did what I was supposed to do, that’s all.”
    “What about your children?” I asked, leading her away from the edge and towards the square. A brief smile lit her face. “We had two. Jonas and April.” Her face clouded again. “But they grew up and moved away. They had families, but never brought them to visit. I loved them more than life itself, and they walked away from me and never looked back.”
    “There’s something to learn in that,” I said.
    She put two bony arms on her hips. Her nostrils flared. “What—to spurn those that love you? That’s not what I taught them.”
    “No,” I said, and patted her shoulder. She bristled and pulled away. “Sometimes you have to learn to let go.”
    “I did let go,” she said. “I felt the pain in my chest for months, but I didn’t take the chemo. And now I’m here.”
    She was crying.
    “You’re not in hell,” I said.
    She laughed. “Well it certainly isn’t heaven! There are people murdering in the streets, the food turns to poison in your hands and people watch bloody skinned corpses fuck for entertainment. I didn’t read about that in Revelations.”
    “No doubt. Nevertheless…look at that.”
    I pointed to the Gossamer Cathedral, one of the key landmarks of Irish Square. Its base was built of perfectly glossed white granite, and golden towers rose from its four corners, with a final fifth glimmering with blinding beauty atop the center of the structure. All of the stonework was wildly etched with amazing filigrees and designs. As we walked towards the church, I pointed out the intricate detail of Christ’s passion, told in Technicolor beauty via three-story high stained glass windows spaced along the main wall of the building.
    She wiped the tears from her face presently, and stared. “It is beautiful,” she admitted. “How could they raise a church in hell?”
    “There is no hell,” I corrected. “There is only here. If you sit watching long enough at the Wall of Life I just pulled you away from, you’ll realize pretty quickly that every soul that dies on earth awakes here. You can see them coming.”
    “So this is limbo,” she said. Excitement beamed in her eyes as the idea bloomed. “This may not be my final stop.