Short Stories

The Elevator Pitch

Joseph Cameron died with the inexplicable feeling that he wasn't truly going anywhere.

It was a routine kind of death - a 5-year battle with an aggressive cancer whittling down to its inevitable end. He was 78. A respectable age, he thought, for this type of thing to happen. He lay in a plush bed of modest cream white, beside a window looking out over the suburbs, all neat-trimmed bushes and freshly-mown grass. The sun was high in the sky. He was surrounded by his wife, Winnie, and two beautiful daughters, Bella and Abigail. They were not at his bedside, but instead mulling about the room with a nervous anticipation. It was all inevitable, they knew as well as he. Joseph had been in Hospice care for months.

It felt silly, even, to keep him going so artificially. Many times he had wondered if he was best... let go, so to speak - poisoned or stabbed or anything, just to cut to the chase. He wasn't a man who was very used to free time, and in the midst of it he squirmed, flopped about like a fish out of water.

He didn't feel much fear as his grip on the world faded away. Even given his impatience for Death, this surprised him. It must have been due to the calm of the room - a gentle summer wind breezing through the window... his Bella's long, chestnut-brown hair cascading down over a book which she studied with an absent sort of intensity... the familiar smell of pine from his wife's favorite cleaner. Everything was as it should be, and he supposed he felt so calm because he knew it would all still be there when he left. Bella would always be reading. The house would always be clean. The world, in short, would keep on turning, whether he was there to see it do so or not.

"Winnie?" he croaked out.

Her tired eyes pulled away from the TV she was watching in the upper corner of the room. He noticed the gentle curl of her silver hair, which bobbed a bit as she rose from a small couch and hobbled over to his side. Abigail, who had been sitting beside her, cocked her head as though annoyed at the interruption, but curious as to its cause.

It was all going just as Joseph had been told. His vision was starting to fade. He could feel his very existence, his soul ebbing away.

Still, he felt at peace.

"Winnie," he breathed, contented. He reached for her face, and the hard lines on her brow turned soft as she realized....

"B-Bella... Abbie..." she gasped quietly. Her eyes flickered all about Joseph's face, then to his trembling hands, and back again. It was clear she didn't know what to say.

"Mom?" someone answered. Someone.... Joesph already couldn't tell who. The room was going dark. Was it dusk already?

"Joseph..." Winnie sighed. He smiled back at her- or at least tried to. No one else called him that. To the rest of the world he was 'Joe' or 'Dad,' but with her... his name was something special, he thought. Something important.

He opened his mouth. It was time for his last words.

But all of a sudden, he realized he had nothing to say. His mouth stumbled shut. That unnerved him, for reasons he couldn't understand....

Ah! There it was. The light at the end of the tunnel that he had always heard about. He focused on it, ignoring his last thoughts, feeling his body go slack just before all sensation disappeared, dissolving into the rest of existence. And still, though the light was growing closer and closer by the second - or hour, perhaps, it was hard to tell - he felt as though it might not be a tunnel at all. He wasn't moving, after all, he wasn't going anywhere....

So what was happening to him?

The light soon enveloped everything. It dazzled him, blinded him. With a jolt he realized he could feel his eyes again. The sensation grew; soon the rest of his face felt hot, like a floodlight was centered on it. Then his neck was restored, and his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, his arms, his fingers, his legs, his toes. He found that he could swallow, though there was little but dried spit in his mouth.