Strawberries || short stories!

Afterlife

A/N: 

I used a prompt from the aforementioned tiktok account for this! :)

tw for talk of death

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She looked around her at the colored carpet and the windows with drapes on them, not remembering how she got into this...hotel lobby. She pushed a strand of red hair behind her face and took it all in. There was a distinct smell of mint about the room, and the only thing that hindered her thought of the room as a hotel lobby was the fact that there were no luggage carts, and there was a solitary woman sitting behind a desk, chewing gum and filing her nails. Panic started to sweep in, and the woman began to fear that she had amnesia and had forgotten where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. The outward manifestation of this panic was sweaty hands, which the woman then had to wipe on her white dress, which was adorned with blue flowers. She approached the desk at the end of the room unsteadily, trepidation filling her heart.

The woman at the desk looked up and smiled. "Well, hello, darling, and welcome to the underworld! My name's Doris-" The woman immediately cut her off:

"No, there must be some mistake, I'm not...I can't be..." she couldn't bring herself to say the simple word: dead. The lady behind the desk, Doris, looked the woman up and down.

"Well sweetheart, a panic attack isn't going to help anybody, now is it?" She had a slight southern drawl. The woman was taken aback, wondering how Doris could read her emotions so quickly - and so accurately. "You are dead, unfortunately. Well, fortunately for us," she laughed airly, as if death were nothing more than spilled lemonade at a garden party.

"How can that be? I don't remember dying!" Panic was making the woman's voice rise in pitch and volume. Doris frowned, seemingly wondering how she could be so stupid.

"Well, we do erase memories of the fifteen minutes up to your death." she explained, her calm tone contrasted by the woman's internal (and apparently external) panic. She had stopped chewing her gum, the woman noticed.

"How did I die, then?" the woman demanded, now more angry than anxious.

"You died in a car accident." Doris told her.

"No, that can't be..." her voice trailed off as she remembered the last thing she had done - made herself breakfast and planned to go to a job interview in the heart of the city by taxi. "True." she finished, the truth crashing down on her.

"Now that you've accepted it, we have things to do!" Doris chimed happily. She pointed to a door at the opposite end of the room that looked remarkably like a middle school gym door. She walked over to it, and opened it to reveal pits of fire, and a lake that looked like lava. "That's Hell." Doris said with a sense of superiority, and she walked over to the opposite side of the room, opening a much smaller - and much classier - door to reveal a nice looking elevator that literally had an angel's choir coming from it. "And this is Heaven."

At the mention of Hell, the woman began to get even more anxious, but at the mention of Heaven some of that anxiety was alleviated.

"Where am I going?" was the only thing the woman could manage to say. Doris turned to her with a smile on her face.

"Well, now, eager beaver, we have to examine your life first." Doris once again eyed her up and down. "Don't worry, you're probably one of His."

"One of whose?" she was more curious now than anxious or angry, what with so many unknown variables.

"His? God's? Y'know."

"Oh, so the Christians were right?" she asked.

"Actually, some of every religion was right. But I see here that you were a Christian, so."