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I’M TRYIN TO GIVE YOU A VIIIIIBE.
Two men were sitting in the waiting room. Limbo. Not heaven. Not hell. The waiting room.
“After we broke up, I moved Barstow, TX. It just seemed.approprate. I’d just spent the previous eight years in a band in Cornwall, ON with the ‘popular’ Canadian alt-rock band Barstool Prophets. We did our drinking at The Mark. A friend of mine from high school is even if the music video for the title track of their final, 1997 album, The Last of the Big Game Hunters. He’s the guy in the gas mask giving the thumbs up. I made it my mission to memorize each member by name, even near the end when they were hiring a new bassist every fortnight.”[1]
“I don’t care. Stop talking to me.”
“Our touring schedule kinda killed us and we called it quits by 1999 after a disastrous tour with Sonic Unyon post-rock legends (they were called legends because Daniel Lanois liked them and had a twenty-minute coffee shop meeting in which they discussed the possibility of him producing their record. Listen to a song like ‘Eight Hundred Mixer,’ off 1998’s There’s Always Someplace You’d Rather Be, and you can see why Lanois wanted to produce one of their records. The last six-minutes of the song are like a haunted Hawaiian BBQ where everyone has left and the sun is glinting off bottles of Corona and the waves keep sloshing and lapping slowly…take my hand…take my sand is about the only comprehensible lyric during this outro. The song swerves gently into Slumberland for the remaining five minutes and twenty seconds of the song. It’s perfect for where we are. It’s music for surfers in limbo. In God’s waiting room.”
“They gotta let me in dude, there was this one time where I…”
A polite voice said over the P.A. “Number #177, Saint Peter will see you now.”
“Sorry man, that’s me.”
“B-But I’ve been here for years. C’mon dude, the story’s almost over.”
“Hey no offence but I’m not leaving God waiting to hear your stupid story.”
“How do you know it’s God?”
That gave him pause.
”She said Saint Peter. Not God. What if it’s a test? And God wants you to hear me out?”
“I don’t think so.” And with that, the second man left the room, leaving Richard alone in God’s waiting room again.
After pacing for forty-five minutes (or was it forty-five million years?) he went up to the sliding window and knocked on it.
Pounded on it. Punched it.
A ghostly sprite arrived, squinting. “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“What is this place?”
She rolled her eyes. “Why do you…people have to give everything a name? If it’s not yours, then it’s not yours to name. Does it comfort you to name your hurricanes? Do they slam into the coasts any gentler just because you named them?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Will you sit back down please?”
“I wrote a trio of badly received novels (by which I mean book critics hated them but which sold well) and allowed me to purchase a house hour near an ocean. Can’t tell you which one. Sorry. Too many death threats. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Sir, you clearly don’t know where you are.”
He sat back dow and waited in an infinite field of white. Except the sliding window, floating about forty feet away from his bench.
He waited until he saw the spite again, moving papers, faxing things. Phones ringing on dead planets. He cupped his hands: “Is this hell?!”
The sprite looked almost shocked for a moment but quickly recovered.
‘“Sir, you clearly don’t know where you are.”
fin
The Complete Novels of Richard Christmas
Ghosts of the Great Highway
I Killed A Man Who Looks Like You
Prairie My Heart