Just Seems to Be Residing in an Upstairs Room
An example of a "flash fiction" form of short story. I expanded upon a passage suppled me by the funeral home and produced what could be the prologue to a longer short story.
The passage below in italics is something I recently ran across that puts this first anniversary of Pam's death, Saturday, into an interesting perspective. It almost makes her passing a bit more tolerable and easier to accept. The section that follows below it is something I thought of that maybe could only happen in my mind. Admittedly, that's the way I think sometimes. Either way, life has many surprises. So, too, it may seem does death.
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well.
Excuse me a moment. Believe someone’s at the door.
(Hears knocking.) Hmmm, sounds like from upstairs but I don’t have an upstairs.
(Door sounds, squeakily opens.)
Pam? I ask. No response.
Pam? I ask again.
I can’t come out but you can come in, she intones.
I hear your voice but can’t see you. If this is what I think it is, I can’t come up there now. It’s not yet my time.
Then slowly I hear a squeaky door closing.
Pam, I ask. No response. Then again; nothing.
Then, faintly, as if In the distance, I hear a door close.
I stand there, frozen and jarred by the experience.
News Bulletin from the Interdimensional News Agency:
Did this really happen? Does life exist that close to another dimension? Does just a door we cannot see separate us from the hereafter? Who knows!
Perhaps in the Twilight Zone it does, but this is not the TZ. Or is it?
Perhaps it’s simply a page-turn at the chapter’s end in the multidimensional book of life and death.
“Pam? . . . Pam?”. . . Fade to black . . .
