Do I Have To?

It is what it is. There seems to be no rhyme or reason with it. I can see it with people I love and with people I hate. I wish I could control it but I can’t. 

“A dream is just a dream” pastor told me. Mama, papa and everybody else nodded in agreement. Two days later, pastor was dead after a massive cerebral hemorrhage, just like in my dream. Well, “massive cerebral hemorrhage” wasn’t in my dream. I just saw him grab his head and drop down to ground in pain. I sat straight up in a panic. It was too real. It took me a minute to realize that I’d even been asleep. I told pastor to go the hospital to get checked out. Now. I begged him. “No.” Pastor was firm. “I feel fine. I just had a physical a few weeks ago. I’ve got too much to do here. Besides, I trust the Lord to take care of me.” “God speaks through His prophets in the Bible through dreams, pastor. Think about Zacharias, Solomon…” Everybody’s laughter cut me off. “I’m not saying I’m a prophet, but…” More laughter. I left it alone.

We’re all sitting around the living the living room. Nobody’s bothered to turn the TV on. Nobody’s looking at their phone. We are still all dressed in our somber funeral black. The late summer sun is beginning to set but is still somehow unrelenting, blazing. I turned the AC off before we left, so I manage to go turn it back on.  I’m tired and ready to get out of my hated but worn-all-too-often standard summer funeral dress but not right now. All I can do is kick off my heels.

I dreamed that I saw my brother walking on the side of the road one rainy day last spring. I told him. I let him know that he should maybe look at getting another car. Nonsense, he told me. He’d only had that car for six months – why would he get another one? Well, that car died on him in the middle of the highway and was rear-ended by an 18-wheeler. It had been raining, so the 18-wheeler didn’t have time to slow down or swerve. Somehow, miraculously, nobody got hurt, but my brother did end up walking on the side of the highway on a rainy day last April.

Coincidence, my family told me.

I haven’t always been like this. It just started happening as I got older. I wish I knew why.

I dreamed that my favorite teacher from elementary school had a terrible fall. I couldn’t see the outcome, but I prayed fervently that she’d be okay. A month or so later, I saw on social media where she’d been on an out-of-state vacation and suffered a terrible fall during a hike. She posted pictures where her face was all purple and banged up, but she was smiling. “Thanks to everyone for the prayers and good vibes,” she wrote within a tie-dye filter. I swear that woman is a pothead but I love her to death. I wonder if she really felt our prayers.

I dream about the mundane, like people getting a new red outfit and they’ll show up in it a few days later.

I dream about the happy events, like a baby being born, especially when baby isn’t planned. I have to convince people that this is a happy time, though.

I dream about other things, too.

I’m so sleepy.

Come with me.” The voice speaks to me in a commanding yet soothing manner. I don’t fear following whoever this is. I squinted. This being has no face that I can discern, and it is neither male not female. It’s wearing a dark hooded robe. I follow it. I’m stunned because my body has no mass whatsoever. The being seemingly has no mass either. It leaves the faintest trail of sweet incense it its trail as I follow.

“I have something to show you,” it tells me. “Who are you?” I askit. 

“That’s not for you to know at this moment. Just have faith that I mean you no harm.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“You will see in due time.”

We move through oceans of time but time somehow stands still. Winds whirl around us and harmonic hymns hum from unseen heavens. I can barely make out countless serene figures all around me and I long to ask them so many questions, but I can’t communicate with them, can’t break the invisible yet impenetrable wall that somehow surround me but not my guide. 

My guide stops. “Look up.” I look up and see three massive Doric stone pillars. Above the pillars is the word PERDITION. My guide, though having no body, intertwines their arm in mine to support me. I feel safer than I’ve ever felt in my life. “Look down for an instant.”

This instant seems to last an eternity. Words are inadequate to express what I see. Human senses cannot express what I feel for these few seconds. Ungodly creatures, heavier, serpentine and more fearsome than anything on Earth, slither about tearing and devouring the flesh and the very sinew of live humans. Pieces of the damned that had not yet been eaten scream out of whatever orifice remained, though they had no mouth. I see a quarter of a man, ripped jaggedly in half by the fearsome creature, screaming out of his bloody entrails. Horrid grey creatures with no skin stuff money into the mouths of what I understood now are the greedy as their guts explode. And the fire. Oh the fire. The fire burns the damned non-stop yet they are never consumed. None of this is the worst part.

Looking down at all of this, I can feel the absence of God. It’s funny. God is all around us all the time on Earth but we’re oblivious to us.

My guide gently pulls my face up so I could no longer see Perdition. We are now far away. In fact, I don’t know where we are. Wherever it is, it’s peaceful. 

“Do you wish to keep a soul from this fate?”

“Yes.” I can barely speak.

“Good. You must tell Lilith not to get into her car on Thursday afternoon.” 

“Lilith? You can’t be serious.” Lilith was my supervisor,  the woman who’d fired me six months earlier so her niece could have my job. She had been a micromanaging bitch and had generally made my life hell for the past two years.

“I am serious.”

“How is telling her not to get into a car on Thursday afternoon keeping her out of hell?” I ask.

“Well, if she gets into the car on Thursday afternoon, she’s going to get into a horrible accident, die at the scene of the accident because she’ll get pretty much get decapitated…. stop snickering, this is not funny, what’s wrong with you?…and end up damned. If she doesn’t get into the accident, she’ll live.”

“Okay, the former sounds pretty damn good to me. I just made a funny, did you get it? Lilith will be dammed and I said it sounds ‘pretty damn good?’”

“You’re exasperating. You could have so much more spiritual depth if your heart weren’t so hard and if you would just obey. Will you tell Lilith not to get into that car on Thursday?”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t see how keeping that evil wench from getting her head lopped off is going to save her from hell.”

“You said it, you don’t see…you are to walk by faith, not by sight. You know that. Are you going to do it?”

“Look, whether she dies on Thursday afternoon in a car accident or in 30 years because of disease, her wicked heart is gonna be the same.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.  Two years from now, she’ll be fired from her job. Three years from now, her husband will leave her. The same year, she will be diagnosed with a degenerative, fatal illness. It will waste her body away. However, it will trigger something in her “spirit.”

“I doubt it.”

“No, it will be sincere. She will repent of her wickedness and avoid the fires of hell. Do you, seeing what you’ve seen, really want anyone to spend an eternity there?”

I don’t answer.

“Lilith will have to spend a good amount of time in Purgatory, but she will eventually see Heaven.”

“I don’t believe in Purgatory.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Humanity has no knowledge of most things that exist in the Universe. Gosh, you are yappy.  Will you tell Lilith not to get into that car on Thursday night? Is this an assignment with which you can be entrusted?”

“Do I have to?”

“No, not if you don’t want to. Not if it’s not in your heart.”

Mama hits me in the head with a pillow. Wake up. Dinner is ready.

I get a phone call from the HR department of my old job on Thursday morning asking if I have a flash drive containing some client information. I didn’t realize I still had it. The HR department manager asks to speak me. He’s so happy that I’m doing well but says he misses me, that it’s not the same since I’ve been gone. 

I skip my lunch hour at work on Thursday so I can make over to my old drive to drop off the flash drive. I chat with my former co-workers. They’re tense. They have their feelings about Lilith but can’t express them. I felt awful about being fired but now I realize I’m the lucky one.

On the parking deck, on the way out. I see Lilith. She sees me. She throws her snooty head back and offers me a curt “hello.” I offer her one back.

I look at her about get into her car and examine my conscience.

“Lilith,” I call to her.

“Look,” Lilith says to me. “You were a substandard employee. Don’t come crawling back to me for your job. I should have fired you long ago. Don’t even broach the topic. You must be finding that things are much harder in places where your incompetence is not tolerated. Now, what do you want?”