This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

They say tragedies like this bring people together. They’re right. And it’s suffocating. I kindly swatted away the invitations. More human interaction was the last thing I wanted. And I preferred the emptiness of our condo to seeing anyone else. Plus, we both know I wasn’t alone there.

The details bloomed all at once, not the way a story usually unfolded, but beginning, middle, and end all at the same time, the way stories happened to God.

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.

“When the world ends,” you said, the both of us sitting on a blanket, watching the clouds glide over the expanse, “this would be a pretty cool place to hole up.”

The way a tree that grew around power lines would produce seeds that would sprout other trees with mangled shapes, the way pain and tragedy flowed through the branches of my father’s family tree, the cook was trying to insinuate himself into life, braid himself into a person, so when that person died the cook would continue in the seed, in the thing that passed on to the next place after a person died, because the cook was tired, so tired of being caught in the flux between worlds.