Falling

She awakens with a crick in her neck, opens her eyes and discovers she is in an airplane. Maybe it’s an airplane. The light is dim, and it’s difficult to make out details. No emergency light strips on the floor, just a soft glow that permeates everything, barely enough to see a few feet. There is no airline logo anywhere, no windows, only featureless walls. She has no recollection of how she got here.

Leaning over and looking down the aisle, she can only see a half dozen seats in front of her, configured like airplane seats, two on each side. Beyond that is nothing.

An old man shuffles out of the darkness and pauses beside her seat.

“Get up.” His voice is soft as a whisper. His colorless eyes are unreadable. “You don’t want to miss out.” He ambles on.

Curious, she rises and follows him and finds a line of people at the open door of the aircraft. She wonders why there is no wind tugging at her, threatening to drag her out into the abyss. White mist streams past the door.

She is sixth in line behind the elderly man. In front of him, a young woman flips long white hair back from her neck. In front of the hair flipper, a middle-aged Black woman in a business suit stands tapping her foot on featureless carpet. The woman turns and her eyes shine in the uncertain light. Two other people, a nondescript man dressed in jeans and a sweater and holding a clipboard, and a young woman, stand side by side at the open door. The woman wears a skimpy dress that hugs every curve and shows an embarrassing amount of cleavage. Her hair is piled on her head in the haphazard way a skilled hairstylist might do it. Her lipstick looks black in the soft light, but it might be bright red.

The tentative light mutes colors, reducing everything to black and varying shades of gray. The hair flipper turns slightly. She is young, perhaps early twenties. Her hair is not white. It’s blond, the color faded by the absence of light. The Black woman smiles at her and nods.

She senses movement behind her, and a glance reveals a line of people of all ages in the aisle—men, women, children. The seats and the line of people vanish into darkness a dozen rows away from her, but she has the impression the line is long.

She stands in a small open space, perhaps in the center of the airplane, if that is where she is. A steady drone fills her senses, like the hum of jet engines. There is a mild sensation of motion, enough she adjusts her weight from foot to foot.

Clipboard Man turns. “It’s time.” He points to the woman in the revealing dress who is now first in line. “Now.”

The woman does not hesitate and vanishes out the door.

She gasps and reaches out, but the woman is gone beyond saving. Why would someone do that? The man with the clipboard makes a notation and points to the Black woman. She raises her arms. “Hallelujah,” she says and steps into the void.

Another mark on the board.

She is closer to the door now and can see outside. Clouds obscure the land below. People lie on the clouds, waving as they slide by. Clipboard Man gives a quick wave back, then nods to the hair flipper. She spreads her arms and jumps.

The elderly man moves forward, his gait unsteady.

She puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t do this.”

He turns, tears in his rheumy eyes and a wide grin on his face. “We must.” He turns back. Clipboard Man beckons, and the old man jumps.

She leans out and sees him land on the clouds, if that is what they are. He waves and then he is gone. People on the clouds must be alive because they are all moving. Some make swimming motions, some lie on their backs waving as they pass out of sight.

Clipboard Man grasps her arm and pulls her away from the door.

“Wait.”

“Why?”

“For your space.” He leans toward the doorway. Wind whips his hair. “Everybody has a space.”

Fear knots her stomach. “I don’t want to fall. I just want to go home.”

Clipboard Man turns back to her and shrugs. “Either you will fall, or you won’t. If you fall, you’re the lucky one.”

The only explanation she can think of is that she is dead, and people are being sorted. This might be some version of limbo. Or purgatory. Or hell. She is not religious, so she has nothing to guide her through this ordeal.

Clipboard Man glances at the open door. Only a few scattered people float on the clouds.

“Now,” he says. “Go.”

“I don’t want to—”

“You must go.” He gives her arm a gentle nudge.

Against her will, she finds herself at the edge of the doorway. If she is indeed in an airplane, it’s a long way down. She will have time to think of the terror as she faces her death.

She looks into Clipboard Man’s eyes. Dark eyes, almost all pupil, devoid of emotion. “What if—”

“There is no time for what ifs.” He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Go.”

She is uncertain whether she steps willingly, or he pushes her, but suddenly she is falling. She gasps in a deep breath and hits the cloud layer as if it were moist, soft cotton. She floats face down and breathes a sigh of relief. She won’t fall.

“Welcome.”

She raises her head.

A few yards away, a woman beckons her. “Come and chat.”

She is not a good swimmer, but the other woman is close. She reaches out —

And drops, whooshing through the clouds, faster and faster, past shadowy shapes of people, her stomach threatening to rebel. Suddenly the clouds thin. She sees the earth laid out below her from an impossibly high altitude. She sees its curvature, the blackness beyond. How can that be? If she were above the atmosphere, she could not breathe.

She drags in panicky gulps of air because there is no escape. She is going to die. She wants it to be quick, not this prolonged journey to anticipated pain. She doesn’t want to think about what she has lost.

Her life. Memories cascade through her mind in flashes so quick she barely has time to register them. Childhood. College. Love and marriage to a good man. The birth of a daughter. Happy times. Grief over the death of a loved one, a parent, a cousin, a friend. Growing older. The overwhelming pain of losing her husband and her child to the senseless violence of a shooter. The images fade and still, she falls.

The earth grows larger, landmarks define themselves in daylight. Gross features: Oceans. North America. The Great Lakes. Mountains. Rivers. Cities. Roads. Farmland.

Desperation fuels panic. She does not want to witness her death. It would be better to die of an illness, steeped in drugs, and unknowing, drop off to sleep, never to awaken. Her heart pounds. She wonders if it will explode when she hits.

She flails her arms, hoping to slow her descent, but it doesn't work. She doesn’t feel her clothing flapping because she is naked. Air rushes over her bare skin. She draws her hands closer to her face. She will cover her eyes the last few seconds of her plunge. Her hands are translucent. She can see through them, feel the wind on her skin and going through it, suffusing her entire body with a curious lightness.

The ground is closer. She closes her eyes. But she still sees the inevitable looming closer. Hills, streams, forest, bushes.

Closer until she sees a clearing below. Grass waving in a breeze. This is how she will die. A deep breath before she hits. It will be over in an instant. A flash of pain and then nothing.

But there is no pain, no oblivion.

Grass swishes against her skin, tickles her nostrils. She falls through dirt, sinking through layers of earth, at first luminescent, then blackness so deep she sees nothing. Heat floods through her and grows more intense until her skin prickles like a sunburn. Faster and faster. Flames burst around her. She braces herself for death, welcomes an absence of awareness. And yet awareness remains, and she falls into the furnace of the earth’s core until suddenly she is falling up. The heat fades and she is once more in the darkness of rock and more rock, then layers of earth and dirt and roots and mountains.

Then sunlight. Above her, the wide blue sky punctuated by a thunderhead to her left. And still she falls upward. She does not look back. Doesn’t want to see what she leaves behind.

She soars up past the thunderhead, past the blueness, into blackness. Past the moon in its stark monochrome detail toward countless stars that beckon with their brilliance. Faster and faster. Only then does she glance back. The sun diminishes to the size of a marble as she passes Mars and its red sand and white polar caps. Moments later, she catches a fleeting glimpse of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot swirling, and Saturn’s rings sparkling with bands of light and shadow.

Faster. The sun is a speck lost in a vast field of stars. She whizzes past galaxies and clouds of matter to the edge of creation and then beyond into the abyss where the universe shrinks to a pinpoint behind her, and then there is nothing but darkness. There is no sense of falling because there is no air or reference point in the void.

There is no sense of time, no up or down. Only being. She has no substance, but she feels every part of herself, stretched thin to encompass the emptiness. If this is death, it is not what she expected. She thought dying would be the nothingness of sleep. But she remembers how she arrived here and every intimate detail of her life before she jumped… or was pushed.

A little light might allow her to see something. A spark glimmers before her. Then another and another until myriad tiny glowing embers float in the vacuum.

Stardust. If she gathers the specks, she will have light. Thinking makes it happen. The sparks congregate into a miniscule glowing dot and explode. A universe is born. It swirls and expands, coalescing into nebulae and stars that whirl into galaxies. The stars spawn an uncountable number of planets and moons. Between the light and the dark, infinite variations of colors flare and grow dim so fast her senses barely register the cycles.

But all this grandeur is meaningless. She is trapped in space devoid of life, of connections. A devastating sense of loneliness makes her cry. Her tears sprinkle a galaxy and settle on a rock orbiting a small sun. A haze of blue forms around the rock.

Swooping closer, she discovers a planet, fully formed, with land masses and oceans. Days and nights pass in a second. An eon. Hellish storms blanket the planet. Eons. The earth buckles and forms mountains. Volcanoes spew molten rock that creates and obliterates landforms. She loses count of the passing eons. Continents split. Glaciers form and reshape the land. Torrential rain obscures the surface. Oceans rise and recede.

Time slows. She floats down through the layers of atmosphere and clouds and hovers above a beach where waves wash gently up on the sand. Movement on the sand draws her attention.

A small fishlike creature wriggles from the water onto the sand and gazes up at the sun. There is innate but unknowable intelligence in the eyes. Time speeds up once more and then pauses. A legion of similar creatures appears on the beach. As one, they look upward. In an instant, the creatures shed fins and grow legs and scuttle into the lush forest that springs up where a moment before there was only rock.

It is good. This planet sustains life. Life that will evolve into more complex life. If she has patience, she will someday have company to ease her loneliness. Now she understands. She is stardust and one with the universe.

“I'm free.” Her voice is soundless because she is insubstantial. She has left behind all the grief and the pain.

She is home.