I gaze out over an open field of blood, smoke burning my eyes. The infantry banner lies trampled in the mud. Bodies of dead and dying litter the hillside—the village is on fire. Screams of women and children reach my ear with the sound of a church bell.
“You have a choice,” I remember her saying.
I kick the flanks of my horse and gallop up the hill into the village. Fire erupts out of thatched roofs. Whoever did this is gone. The church is on fire. I race to the chained entrance, my horse rears up and crashes through. Women and children escape.
The church bell rings.
A lady in white comes down the tower steps. “John!” she cries out.
I take my horse into the chapel and grab her outstretched hand, pulling her up onto my horse. Leaping over a fallen beam we gallop out the main entrance.
“You came back,” she whispers, gripping me tighter.
“Too late.” I spin the horse around and watch as the roof falls into the flames.
My vision changes and I am soaring over a forest of pine, bracing against the wind and gripping the leather on the back of an immense dragon.
We fly through a portal to a desolate area—lava and ash explode out of a volcano. I shield my eyes with my gloved hand as we fly through the ash. In the field below is an army dressed in animal hide clashing against armor clad knights.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I say to myself. “This isn’t my battle.”
“It’s your choice…” the dragon’s words echo in my mind.
* * *
The clock reads 2:00 AM as I roll out of bed, clinging to the fading remnants of a dream. Something about flying and having a choice. The dream evaporates like smoke before I touch the floor.
My brain rarely wakes before my morning coffee, and today is no exception, though it’s Sunday morning. I am not a night person and usually go to bed after watching the evening news. This morning is Easter, and I don’t even have the desire to see the sunrise. My father raised me to be a good Catholic, but I stopped practicing a long time ago, ever since he pulled me out of the communion line the day after my marriage. That was forty years ago, and I still remember it like yesterday.
I dip my brush in slate blue and fill in number ten on the painting, forming the edges of the lake. Painting helps when I get stuck writing. Several paintings hang on the walls. My wife thinks it’s too much, but I don’t want to throw them away.
She’s in the other room, cycling on her elliptical from the comfort of the living room sofa. Ariel, our long-haired dachshund, keeps her company while she watches the morning news. I am doing this because of her—since I told her I was retiring.
“What will you do with yourself?” I remember her asking. My mind drawing a complete blank. I didn’t realize I needed a plan. Fulfillment doesn’t come from building ship models and painting, but I tried them both. Finding a new purpose is harder than I realize.
I thought I had found my passion in work, but there’s only so much fun someone can have sitting behind a desk and playing with formulas and numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my work, but I knew it wasn’t my lifelong passion. Too many of my friends passed before retirement, and I can’t see myself working until I die. I have always known there was something more out there.
A few months ago the answer came in a dream. I rarely remember my dreams, but I remember the dragon telling me to write a novel and was still thinking of it when I got in my car that morning to go to work. I turned on the radio and listened to an author talking about writing a fantasy novel. If the universe was sending me a message, I got it. I just knew this was the answer, my new purpose in life. But being a physicist, I had to prove it to myself.
That day I conceived a brief idea for a book, and when I returned home that evening, I began writing. I wrote late into the night, woke up early before work, and continued writing. Four hours of sleep was all I needed. My passion and coffee kept me going. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote every day next to a painting I was still working on. In less than two months, I had drafted three novels of a series. I finally answered Rose’s question and still had three months to go before retirement.
But this morning I am still staring at my brush, trying to move it to the next number. It’s stuck to the canvas, then with more focus, it skips across the painting through the other numbers. I hurriedly grab the brush with my other hand before ruining the painting and drop it in a mason jar of water.
I pick up my right hand, which is still laying there on the canvas, and bring it to my chest with my left, trying to revive it. My right arm has gone limp, as if asleep, but no tingling. This doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been up for hours.
I open my mouth to call my wife but only make garbled sounds. Not even close to what I am trying to say, and she is still watching the news.
Weird! —like I am having one of those dreams of wading through mud.
I have never experienced anything like this.
“Am I having a heart attack?” I think to myself, but there’s no pain and my chest feels fine.
I stand to get my wife’s attention only to fall into another chair. Shit! My leg is asleep. I may be dying, and my wife will never know. I have to try again.
Standing up on my left leg, I grab the kitchen counter and make it ten feet to the living room, letting go and mumbling something like, “Help,” before falling.
Ariel is licking my face when I open my eyes. I pick myself up off the floor. I don’t understand how she is dressed. A second ago she was in her pajamas.
“Should I call for an ambulance?” Rose asks, looking at me with concern.
I feel better like nothing happened, but I am confused about whether it was a heart attack or something else.
“No, but we should go to the hospital just in case,” I say.
I change into jeans and a shirt, comb my hair, and grab my wallet, phone, and keys. “You probably should drive.” The hospital is only five minutes away, but I don’t want to take any chances.
Rose drives us to the hospital and pulls into the parking lot. “I am going to drop you off at the front entrance and park. Is that alright?”
“Yes,” I say, but only garbled sounds come out of my mouth. I pick up my right arm with my left and watch it fall back onto my lap, like a marionette ragdoll with no one pulling the strings.
It’s happening all over again.
Tears stream down my face, as I try to respond to communicate to say something. I grab a tissue with my one working hand, knowing this is the end, and if I’m lucky I’ll end up in a wheelchair unable to speak ever again.
Rose drives to the hospital entrance and races around the car, opening the passenger door. I try to step out, but I can’t move my right leg. She runs into the hospital and grabs a wheelchair from the several waiting at the entrance. No one is around to help this Easter morning.
She rolls the wheelchair to the passenger side and helps me as I pick up my right leg with my left hand to step out. Not as easy as it sounds. It takes a few minutes to move from the car seat to the wheelchair. Rose arranges the footrest so my feet aren’t dragging on the asphalt, then she wheels me through the automatic entry doors to the front desk.
The receptionist asks me what I needed. I can’t respond. Isn’t it obvious?
She just stares at me slumped over in the wheelchair. Rose says something is wrong, that I am having a stroke or heart attack. She calls for help over the phone. It’s only a few seconds before several nurses rush to the front and wheel me back into the emergency room.
I must be their only customer. There are at least seven nurses and a doctor waiting on me. Within a few minutes, the male nurse removes my clothes and puts me in a hospital gown and I wonder why I got dressed.
They take me into the next room to have a CT scan of my head and say something about bleeding in the brain and a blocked artery. The last thing I remember is the doctor ordering an MRI before darkness falls over me.
* * *
Far away a distant light calls to me. I float through a sea of colors. Harmonic sounds wash over me bringing the peace of an ocean breeze. The hospital is a distant memory. Chimes sound then images drift in front of me that I recognize as memories—happy times, regrets, past loves, and family. My heart aches seeing images of my dog dying on my lap when I try without success to revive him. It’s so real.
Family and friends who have departed come into view, followed by people I hurt and wish I treated differently. It feels like an eternity and soon I am filled with an immense sense of love penetrating my whole being.
A woman materializes out of the ether before me with long flowing blond hair floating in a breeze that doesn’t exist, wearing a long blue gown matching the color of her piercing eyes. The perfect image of an angel without holding the fiery sword.
“It is not yet your time,” she says in a commanding voice.
My time—What does she mean?
Before I respond she dissolves in a cloud of mist and I am swallowed up by a vortex, a centrifugal force that spins me faster and faster with nothing to hold onto. My mind clears of all pictures, images, and emotions—propelling me into total darkness.
I float there as images of stars come before me. I turn and see Earth and its moon. “How can this be?” I think to myself. Then I see Mars in the distance and before I realize it I am sailing by its red canyons and barren mountains and my curiosity grows. “Can this be real?”
Jupiter and its moons go by quickly as I fly towards the rings of Saturn, and soon I am traveling to distant star systems—Arcturus, Pleiades, Orion come into view at the speed of thought.
How am I traveling faster than the speed of light? My understanding of physics is blown away in mere seconds and I am filled with wonder like a child seeing stars for the first time.
I pass by other star systems with planets and their moons and for some unknown reason, maybe my curiosity or some hidden force, but I am being pulled to the center of the galaxy where the stars are brightest. It is my destiny, some unexplainable desire to see the truth of our existence. I feel so expansive and completely forget about my predicament in the hospital, like I am seeing all things for the first time.
There it is. A swirling mist of orange light and in its center is nothingness but pure attraction. I try to get away, but I have no control. My speed goes faster and faster and I am pulled into a whirlpool of light and energy going deeper into the void. I am blasted by energy so great that it penetrates every cell of my being.
So this is where we go when we die.
But before I finish my thought I am on the other side of nothingness, thrown into another galaxy, not sure if it’s where I came. Then something catches hold of me. The forces grab hold, and then, suddenly, I am thrust to the outer edges of the galaxy. Faster than thought. Faster than light. And before I count to three, I see Earth.
At least it looks like Earth with its clear blue water and land masses. I slow down and enter the atmosphere, flying over an expansive ocean, and up ahead is land. I travel far above the green forests and meadows and begin falling as the planet’s gravity grabs hold.