Is This Heaven?

Is This Heaven...?

A free short story by

M T McGuire

Published by M T McGuire

Wattpad Edition

© December 2009, M T McGuire

For more titles by M T McGuire visit my smashwords author page via this link http://bit.ly/SWfromBog or my author website and blog at www.MTMcGuire.co.uk

Thank you for downloading this free e-short.

Please feel free to share it with anyone you like. In fact, so long as you keep it in its original form, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it unless you're using/publishing excerpts (then you need to ask me) or making money out of it - in which case you need to give me a cut!

If you have any questions you can contact me by e-mailing mailto:freeybc@gmail.com or leave me a comment on my website at www.MTMcGuire.co.uk and I'll get back to you

Right, I think that's about it. Enjoy.

Is This Heaven?

One minute I was stepping off the kerb, the next...

Bang!

Ouch!

Oblivion.

Just like that. I guess I should have looked twice but I was late. I did feel a bit of an arse, though, if the truth were told... not that I realised I was dead then, of course. That took a day or two to sink in... or was it a couple of millennia? You know, I've no idea, time does weird stuff over here and once you've dumped the body people whizz around like insects over there. I sort of noticed that things were moving very quickly but even so... it didn't sink in until the light turned up.

Yeh, yeh. A little cheesy no? But it was exactly the way I'd heard it described. Brilliant, white, soothing. I followed it in a pleasant daze. I think part of me expected something to drag me back to earth like all those near death experience stories but there was no garden, no smiley bloke giving me a push. Instead, at the end of the tunnel, I stepped out into a plain white room, floor ceiling, walls, all white. No doors or windows nothing but an old guy sitting at a desk. He got up and came over. He was wearing a long robe and carrying a clip board.

"Hello." he said and stuck out a gnarled hand. "Peter. What can I do for you?"

"I'm not sure," I said - I was nervous and tried a joke to crack the ice. "This is the first time I've died."

"Ah, not an old soul then..."

Hmm... 'No sense of irony this Peter bloke.

"Um... not as far as I know..."

"Quite, quite... Well... if you have had any other lives they may come back. If you've only just snuffed it you may take a bit of time to remember of course......" 'snuffed it'? Cheeky old get! "Name?"

A long pause, my train of thought having been comprehensively derailed by this time. The idea that I might have had other lives which I was, shortly, going to remember was a bit of a bombshell! Blimey! Was he serious? He answered my thoughts.

"Absolutely, don't worry, once you're dead, it's quite normal. You'll get used to it right away."

I wished he wouldn't do that.

"What?" he asked me.

"Ok, look, don't answer anything unless the question actually comes out of my mouth as speech, ok?"

"How can it? You don't have a mouth. You're dead. You're essence... anything you feel is nothing more than a memory of what you were... speech and thoughts, here, are more of a convention than a reality. I must apologise, I don't mean to offend, but I've been here a couple of thousand years, now and do you know, I find it difficult, these days, to differentiate between the two?"