burning bright

“Cold.”

I open my eyes.

“Dark.”

I blink a few times. The darkness swimming before me doesn’t fade — it only lessens as seconds drip by, grows less overwhelming until I can see rock above me. My fingers twitch, numb and tingling as if I’ve fallen asleep on my arm.

I reach out around me.

“Soft, cool, damp.”

The ground beneath me feels unsteady — it shifts when I sit up, sticks to my hair until I reach up to brush it off of my skin.

“Sand,” I think. Suddenly I can smell brine. Suddenly I can see a prick of light off in the distance, minuscule and insignificant in all of this darkness.

But I don’t feel afraid.

I stand up and look down. It’s too dark to see but I can feel sand beneath my feet, can feel a breeze whisper over my skin.

There are no thoughts in my head besides ones about where I am. Nothing else matters but reaching that light. Not my name — which I don’t remember. Not how I got here — which is dark and foggy. Not even where here actually is.

So I walk.

I walk and I walk and I walk.

The light grows larger and larger and larger — until I can see that it’s the entrance to this tunnel I’m in. It yawns wide and free in front of me, the light bleeding in from outside to turn the sand bone-white, to pierce my fragile eyes.

I stop, blink a few times until my vision clears. A stronger breeze blows here. It tangles through my hair, runs gentle fingers over my bare skin. I look down at my hands first — they’re young hands, soft and unblemished. Then I look up.

A shore stretches out before me — white sand, silver waves, a full moon in a sky as dark as the tunnel I woke up in. The sea glows as if it has swallowed all of the stars in the sky — an image turned upside down if only the moon weren’t still there, hanging large and luminescent.

All at once I remember one thing.

I am dead.

The memory washes over my skin, prickles and bites. I feel nothing but a cold, distant sense of logic.

I am dead and this is what comes after death.

My feet move of their own accord. They take me down the shore, slipping through sand as fine as silk, until I’m standing at the edge of the sea.

The waves are still. The ocean rests motionless, as if caught in time — a black and white photograph.

But between the space of one slow breath and another, a flicker of light colors the air in front of me. It’s colorless — nothing more than a spark of flame until it grows and grows and grows, hovering there above the water that glows like starlight.

“A human? No… something more than that,” my brain whispers, gossamer-light.

A being stands before me — faceless, shifting, as bright as the moon. They are silent until a voice not my own reaches my thoughts.

“Do you know why you are here, William?”

William. My name bubbles up from the depths of my memories, one more piece to the puzzle.

“I’ve left the living,” I answer simply, honestly.

“And do you remember how?”

I hesitate. The memory is there, I can feel it. I reach for it carefully.

“I passed in my sleep,” I answer slowly. “I was 95.”

The being shivers and shifts before me, throwing sparks into the water below them.

“Do you know where you are now?”

I look around at the surroundings that are just now beginning to feel strange as more time trickles by — the luminescent water, the crags of dark, black rock that rise up behind me, the bloated moon and the infinite sky.

“No,” I respond.

The divine being shudders once more. More sparks fall to the sea.

“This is a world between worlds,” they murmur. “A place of judgement.”

Judgement. Something in my memories twitches at the word, something sharp cuts at my heart.

But I don’t have time to dwell on it.

“Do you remember your sister?”

A laugh reverberates from the air at the being’s words — the sound wraps around me, dances away across the waves like a ghost.

I look down the beach — and I see her.

“Elise.” The name leaves my mouth in a whisper, is carried away by the sea-salt breeze — but the girl down the beach doesn’t look up. She continues to stare out at the water, her long, white-blonde hair blowing out behind her. The strands catch the light of the stars in the ocean and burn.

Suddenly, I remember this beach. I remember running down it as kids with my sister, remember my parents watching from farther up the shore. I remember her laugh — it had been one of the last things I had heard before falling asleep. Before dying.

“Do you remember what that man did to her?”

My eyes snap away from the illusion. Something cold and dark is seeping into my lungs — another memory.

“No,” I choke out. Not because I don’t remember — because I don’t want to remember.

But the images come unbidden, intrusive. Elise — her dress torn down the front, limping through the door. Her face bloodied and bruised — crying at first and then going silent for days until one name had slipped from between her lips at my insistence, at my rage.

“Do you remember what you did to him?”

I gasp on my own breath, choke on it. I look down and my hands are covered in crimson. Blood drips from my fingertips to the white sand below.

I see a man with a knife in his chest. I see a fire. I feel the rage in my stomach and taste the ash on my tongue.

“Stop,” I try to say. Suddenly the waves of the strange ocean are moving — crashing, thundering, swelling up to the shore and then stopping as if hitting a glass wall.

“Was it worth it?”

The memories disappear. I am left with the voice in my head and the roar of the furious sea. Something wet drips down my face, my chest heaves with unsteady breaths. I am afraid once more — afraid like I had been in the land of the living, resting there on my death bed, watching time slip by with the slow scud of the clouds across the sky, waiting for the cold to spread from my fingertips to my heart.

But my answer is clear.

“Yes,” I whisper from between trembling lips. “Yes.”

The ocean’s growl grows louder, the waves begin to crest higher.

Elise is gone when my eyes slide back down the shore. I am alone.

“And how do you think you should be judged?”

My eyes raise to rest on the being before me. They’re still, steady, no longer flickering or wavering — a beacon of light in a dark, dark sky.

The sea rises like a wall of fire behind them, countless stars held within its depths — burning silver and ragged gold and incomprehensible black.

And suddenly — standing there, facing judgement — the fury and the pain and the fear fade from my bones. I don’t think about mercy or punishment. I don’t wonder about damnation or sanctuary.

All I see is the color of Elise’s hair — glowing silver all around me.

I straighten my shoulders, my answer resting on the tip of my tongue — and I speak.