Excerpt: The Amber Cloud aka Back Home

Do you believe in life after death?

It's a ridiculous question, but the upside of marriage is that you always have someone to answer them. This was one of the ones he asked me. I stuck with science. I believed that when people died they just did, their body becomes vacant and if they were lucky someone was born to take their place. It was one of a million truths I believed in before it happened. Death is one of the few things with the ability to completely change a person. He left and so did I. The difference was that sometimes death is just a detour. Apparently you can go there and come back, die and than reverse it. I was fundamentally wrong.

It happened like an epidemic, first to one then to another seemingly unconnected. They never found a port of similarity between any of them. A random anomaly. It posed so many questions that it scared the world. What if dying was inherently reversible? What if the ones you lost were merely misplaced? We still don't know exactly how it works, just that some of us are chosen and some aren't. Death works much the same as life. There are no favorites, no promises made or kept. The facts aren't a guarantee. Sometimes you lose something that can’t be replaced. And sometimes it finds its way again, picks itself up and faces the odds to fight its way right back to you.

I took my time saying good-bye to him. I savored the idea that nothing in my life would be harder than that. If I could claw my way back into the sunlight outside of it I could be guarded, protected, safe. He'd follow me to make sure of that just like he did when he was breathing next to me. I couldn't deny it to myself because I wasn't about denial anymore. Denial had been stage one. I was through that; I had to be. I was too busy working on acceptance to fall all the way back.

The world twisted itself around me. I tried to keep up. When people told me he was in a better place, I nodded calmly and agreed while a part of me was screaming, trying to get out. It wondered if he was there with the bullet still lodged in his chest. I should have seen it then. He'd died and drifted somewhere I couldn't follow, but the difference was he fought for that out. And when he was left between searching for a safe place he fell back on the only thing he knew. We were both searching for heaven and his and mine were the same.

Early in the morning I go outside. The air weighs on me with an easy chill. The sun is rising with a haze and when I look up it's been enveloped by a cloud. It's invisible behind it but when I look I can still see. The rays try their best to fight, to win, breathing through wispy strands, bathing the sky in light. It only appears for a second as the cloud floats to the side before another pushes in front it. And for a split second, as the next cloud becomes strong enough, the entire world is lit in sunlight. The air is calm as I hear him step onto the porch behind me. He still gives me a chill.

“Good morning,” he says, his accent pushing streaks of cloud across the sky. It doesn't take much now to make me remember what I was and even pine for it. There's serenity, though, in knowing I don't have to go very far. We're all just a sum of who we used to be and what's happened to us since. You can see that on our faces worn with change. And if I were to search, I could probably find everything I ever was right behind that amber cloud.

I don't answer him in the end. I hand him the paper, a distance between us, and move my way back inside.