You’re in a bed that smells of bleach and urine, in a room so white, you have to shut your eyes, but the white is lightning piercing your brain. The beep-beep-beep of the monitors is a swarm of mosquitoes dive-bombing your ears.
The beeps turn to a long whine. The pain that clamped you to the bed is gone.
You feel yourself float off the bed, free of wires and tubes. The brilliant white softens. You open one eye to find yourself floating out of the room, as the doctors and nurses rush in to pull you back into the black pit they call life.
You float down an endless corridor with no doors or windows. You are chilled, even though there is nothing to shiver. You think you are supposed to walk into a white light, but this corridor is dark. And you’re not walking.
The corridor dissolves into a building of steel and glass. You are surrounded by multi-colored orbs, bobbing up and down toward a large door. Through the door, you see a chaos of glowing vehicles. Some are carriages. Some are limousines. Some are train cars. Some are single-engine planes. All are boarded by orbs, all are pointed in different directions.
You are suddenly heavy. You bump against a traffic cop with no face. Before you can ask, he pushes you back behind a gold line, a border you didn’t see before.
You pick up speed. All is dark around you. The orbs are gone.
Are you going back to living, or are you going to Hell?
Notes:
Spectral, dank, ghosts, nobody lives there, mist, chilled, graves, cold steel/glass, drizzle, overcast, traffic lights always red, trains filled with the dead going to their final destinations, the sound of a heart monitor in the air (just before and after death), marshland, a border town (life/death, good/evil),
When we walk into the light, what happens afterward? When we are dying, why do doctors try to keep us alive?
Nolcha Fox’s poems have been curated in print and online journals. Her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net, 2024 Best of the Net Anthology. Nominee for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Editor for Garden of Neuro.
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