Death is Really Boring

She was drifting in nothingness. There was no light. No cold or heat. No sound. No smell. No pain. No sense of touch at all, not even the pull of gravity to tell her if she was lying on her back or her face, or hanging suspended somehow.

'Where am I?' she wondered, and then, 'How did I get here?'

She frowned in thought. No, that wasn't right. There was no feeling of a furrowed brow or narrowed eyes, or down-turned mouth. Better to say she concentrated. Yes, she concentrated. Concentrated on remembering on where she was and how she'd gotten here.

Maybe this was some sort of sensory-deprivation chamber? Were those a real thing? Or were they just a flight of fancy that existed only in the world of movies and novels? If they were real, why would she be in one? They had to be expensive, and she wasn't wealthy. Nor did she know anyone who was wealthy. Or anyone who was think stuffing in her a box was a good idea.

There was an idea. If she was in a box, it had sides, and she could find them. All she had to do was stretch out her arms. So she stretched. But she felt nothing. Not the flow of air or liquid. Not the pull of her muscles as she reached out. She couldn't even tell if she had arms.

That was a terrifying discovery. She couldn't feel her arms, or her legs, or her head. She wanted to flail around in panic, to prove her body was still there, but . . . nothing. She couldn't even feel the race of adrenaline or the drag of air as she hyperventilated.

'Am I paralyzed?' she wondered. That would explain why she couldn't feel her own body. Maybe. But why would she be paralyzed?

Abruptly, the memory she was trying not to recall became unavoidable. She shied away from it, mentally scrambling for some other explanation. But every attempt to ignore it brought her back to the same place.

An ugly red stain on Andi's brilliant white carpet, the struggle to breath, the ringing in her ears and narrowing of her vision as she . . .

As she . . . .

As she . . . .

As she died. The truth settled into place, unwelcome but undeniable. She fell into the nothingness a bit, taking comfort in it.

'This is death?' she eventually asked herself. It wasn't what she'd expected. Truth be told, she'd hadn't expected anything. She didn't believe in life after death. Not the Christian heaven and hell or the eastern concept of reincarnation. If asked, she would have said she wasn't even sure she believed in the soul. Until now, anyhow. Clearly, she'd been wrong about souls, and they did exist.

But not, apparently, heaven and hell.

In college, she and a bunch of her girlfriends had once drunk too much wine and gotten into a debate about what heaven was like. The traditional idea of an eternity gazing in adoration at a deity hadn't seen all that appealing to any of of them. One of the girls had suggested heaven would be just like the real world, only you would only have to be around the people you wanted to and do the things you wanted to do, and you wouldn't have to worry about hunger or pain or whether you were going to fail your next exam. Everyone had agreed that sounded more like a reward for a life well lived than singing hymns incessantly.

"Not that any of us are going to get there, not the way we behave," Cadence had cackled, as she took a swig from the bottle she'd appropriated, and the rest of them had all laughed and agreed.

'Well, at least I escaped the pitchforks,' she mused, and just drifted again, thinking about nothing in particular. But eventually she was stuck with another unavoidable truth.

'Death is really boring.'

All those people spouting trite mottos like "You can't take it with you" and "You only have one life to live" and "No one's tombstone ever said they wished they'd spent more time at work" were almost right. But what they should have been saying is, "Death is boring. Make sure your life is worth remembering."

She spent a bit longer thinking about her life. Mostly about college, when the whole world had been laid out at her feet waiting for her to explore. She'd meant to travel and see the wonders of the world and meet interesting people. She was going to find her true love and raise half a dozen children in a big old house on the beach, and when she was old her children and grandchildren would come home for the holidays and every summer, and she'd bore them all with stories about her youthful adventures.

But instead she'd married Rick, and instead of youthful adventures they'd bought a condo and invested in a stock plan. Somehow twenty years went by, and then Rick left her for a pretty blond who was twenty years younger and who'd already popped out three bastards for him before he got around for filing for a divorce and marrying her instead.

Rick was was where she'd gone wrong, she concluded. She'd settled for him and instead forty-five years of adventures to remember, she had a life of regret and abandoned dreams to dwell on.

'Not only is death boring, it's depressing,' she thought, and went back to trying to think about nothing. But that didn't work. Instead she found herself thinking about Bespoke Suit Man. 'I should have introduced myself. Next time I will.'

Except there wasn't going to be a next time, because she was dead, and stuck in real hell, which wasn't fire and torment, but endless nothingness.

'How long does it take to go mad?' she wondered. 'I think I'd prefer brimstone and devils with pitchforks to this.'

Almost as if in answer to this thought, there was a flicker. Her focus shifted to the flicker. Was it really there, or had she imagined it? Eagerly, she waited to see if it would happen again.

There it was! She wanted to call it a light, though it was barely more than the gleam of of a candle far away. But to see a light, she had to have eyes, and she was pretty certain she didn't have a body any more, much less eyes.

Still, there was nothing else to focus on.

'I wish it was closer.'

The flicker drifted closer. Or perhaps she drifted closer to the flicker. She concentrated again, trying to will herself towards it. And it worked. She shot towards the flicker, or perhaps yanked it in close, there was really no way to tell. Nor did it matter.

The flicker grew in size and intensity until she felt as though she was inside a ball of bright white light.

'Well, it's different than the darkness,' she thought. 'Not better. But different.'

There was another difference, she discovered.

There were voices. Sort of. More the impression of voices. She couldn't actually hear. It was more like an impression of feelings. Specifically the impression of annoyance and boredom, which reminded her of a call-center rep on the twelfth our of a ten hour shift who just didn't give a damn any more, just wanted to get this call over with so they could go on break.

There was a second non-voice as well, giving the impression of impatience, and the sense that a question had been asked.

'What?' she thought in confusion, once again trying to focus. The impatience and feel of interrogation felt like a cop who'd pulled someone over and was asking for license and registration for the third or fourth time. So she guessed, 'Who am I?'

The affirmative came back so sharp and clear it was almost like someone had barked, 'Yes.'

'Umm, Seraphina? Ana Seraphina Conroy? You can call me Sera?'

'Well, You-Can-Call-Me-Sera, where is your--' and the rest of it wasn't clear, but her mind once again supplied the sense of a cop asking for identification.

'I . . . don't have it?' Sera thought back.

Irritated Cop snorted. Yes, that was definitely a snort, even if it was only in her head. Her metaphorical head. Sera had the distinct impression he just called her a fucking stupid novice.

'Hey!' she thought with indignation. 'I've never been dead before!'

'No excuse for losing your ID,' Irritated Cop grumbled. She got the impression that Irritated Cop and Bored Call-Center-Rep were debating what to do with her.

She waited curiously, until Bored Call-Center-Rep instructed a little vindictively, 'Hold please.'

She was tempted to wander off, but not entirely sure she could. Also, where was she going to go? It wasn't like she was busy. So Sera waited, observing that death was turning out to have a lot of odd similarities to life.

Maybe it was just her consciousness trying to frame the intangible in a way she could comprehend, she told herself. Maybe a thousand years from now this conversation--if that's what it was--would be entirely different.

'Oh, God, don't make this be my eternity,' she pleaded, even though it had been decades since she'd really believed. How the world she'd known possibly be the result of a divine being with a plan, after all? But if this was what God dealt with, creating the reality Sera knew made a lot more sense. People did stupid things when they had nothing better to do.

Bored Call-Center rep was back, and gleeful. 'Right, here you go. Try not to die again.'

'Try not to what?!'

But she was shoved sharply out of the light. She flew through the nothingness, the light flickering faster and faster as it got farther and farther away, until it winked out entirely.

Frustrated, she drew in a deep breath to scream, but the sting of a slap surprised the breath right out of her.