Closer To Heaven by Patrick Sean Lee (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

            “Do not leave the road, Amelia,” she said, and then her face and arms and hands and legs went away. She’d turned back into the cloud that was spinning and very, very tall. But even though she didn’t have a face, I knew she was looking at me and she was smiling.

            I looked up the road. It was a long way to the top. I started to walk, and then I looked to my right, and then my left. Standing almost behind one of the spinning clouds I saw Munster! I saw the man who was with him yesterday, too. Munster didn’t speak, and he didn’t run to me. He waved at me to come over. The man who hadn’t murdered him after all was beside him. I wanted to run to him and ask Munster what had happened that day at the mini mart, and I wanted to help him, too, if I could. But the cloud lady had warned me not to go off the road, and so I shook my head no. My foot was so close to the edge of the road.

            Munster gritted his teeth and kept waving for me to come, but I wouldn’t. After a minute, he looked sad and hurt, and then he turned and disappeared into the cloud. The man followed him. Why wasn’t he dead when he touched the cloud? I began to think that maybe he was this time. That yesterday the cloud hadn’t gotten him and the man he was with. Maybe today he was so sad because I wouldn’t step off the road and go to him.           

I didn’t know, and I couldn’t help him anyway because he was inside the cloud, and I couldn’t leave the road because of what the lady said to me. The lady who was a cloud, too, and who spoke softly to me, and held my hand and didn’t want to hurt me. A good cloud. Still, I wanted to go to Munster. I thought he needed me, and that’s why he kept waving before he went into the cloud. I wouldn’t go help him, and so he committed suicide. My mind said “Go!” and then it said, “Don’t!” Over and over and over, and I almost went, but the words of the lady kept coming back. “Do not leave the road, Amelia.”

            I walked up the hill, feeling very sad about my friend Munster all the way, but I went along, and finally I reached the top and stopped to see where the stream with all my friends beside it was. Below me there were lots and lots of trees. Big ones with hundreds and thousands of leaves, and very thick trunks and branches that reached up to heaven almost. I was above them all, and the sun was bright, shining far off in the distance, so I thought I was almost as high as the sun, standing there at the top of the hill on that road. The stream was down there. It looked like a long blue ribbon and reminded me of one my momma wore sometimes in her hair. It sparkled when the sun touched it as it went along, winding and winding, and then going into a sea so far away.

            Along its edge sat many tiny houses, so small that I could barely tell they were houses at all. But they were. They all had roofs, and one or two had chimneys. And in and out of them went little people that looked like ants, except ants have more legs, and feelers on their heads. I ran down the road on the hill. It took a long time for me to go down, but at last I arrived at the trees, and then followed the road into them. I walked for a long time, and once I stopped to make my backpack go straighter on my back because it was crooked and digging into my side. I saw Lashawna in my head, lying with her eyes closed and starving, and I turned around. Instead of the road, though, there was a cliff, and that confused me very much. So I turned again and kept going down the road under the tall trees. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. I prayed that Lashawna could just hang on for a little while longer. That I’d find a way out of that place and back to Saint Andrews with her bags and tubes and needles, and my hair would be clean.

            I had no watch. I didn’t know how much time passed, but I walked on the road and heard birds in the tall trees all around me. I liked that because at my old house and at Saint Andrew’s Church the birds were all gone. Maybe they’d flown away to escape the clouds. I didn’t know. I liked birds because they sang and flew (which I couldn’t), and crows ate junk in the streets and didn’t sing like other birds, and that was okay. If they liked old pieces of hamburger and trash, that was fine. And the noise they made was funny and always made me smile.

            And I walked and walked, and finally I heard the stream off the road to my left. I heard it because I knew that when water in a stream goes over big rocks or even little rocks it makes a noise that it doesn’t make when there are no rocks in it. I also saw a house way ahead to my right, and so I was getting close to people, and that’s what I wanted. The lady cloud had told me I would see my friends—I think she said that—and that I could wash in the stream. Which meant that when I came to the stream I could leave the road.

            I saw a lion when I finally saw the stream. It was drinking the water. I saw a horse and a bear, and the bear was sitting down eating berries from a bush near the stream, and the horse was just standing there looking at the bear. I didn’t want to go over there to wash, so I kept walking. Before I knew it, I had come to a turn in the road, and what I saw made me leave the road quickly and run toward the stream. My momma was sitting on the bank with her feet in the water. I was so, so happy, and I didn’t care about washing because all I wanted at that moment was to run to her and throw my arms around her!

            I ran to her, and when I got there I threw my arms around her and told her I had missed her, and that I loved her. But she didn’t move or say anything back to me. I didn’t think she even felt my arms. She just sat there and looked out into the stream.

And then I woke up.

My legs were cramped. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t smiling. It was just the sun. I rubbed my eyes because there was sleep still in them, and then I stood up and pushed the trashcan lid open all the way. There were no clouds that I could see, but even if I’d seen one, or two, or a hundred, I didn’t care. And even if I’d seen Munster or the man who had captured him, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to die, but I had to run home to Saint Andrew’s, and the only way to do that was to leave and not be afraid anymore.

I had to wee, though. Very badly. I climbed out of the big trashcan and ran across the alley to a door, and it was unlocked, so I went inside. It was dark, so I went back and used my black backpack to hold it open so that I could see where I was going inside the building. I found another door with a blue drawing of a lady pasted on it, and that was the ladies room. I went in. There was a small trashcan just inside the ladies room, and I shoved it by the door so that it wouldn’t close, and I could see where the toilets were.

I went wee. I had to hurry, though, because Lashawna was starving. If I hadn’t hidden in the big trashcan and been afraid, I would have been home last night, and she could have eaten. I thought about this, and I also thought about the dream with the good cloud lady and the road and the stream and Munster, and my momma who didn’t know I was in the dream. When I asked Daddy once about why we dream and if they meant anything, he told me they were just jumbled up things in our heads that come together somehow and really don’t mean anything because they make no sense.

In my dream there was a lion and a bear and a horse down by the stream, and that didn’t make sense. A lion would have jumped on the horse and eaten him, and then he would have found the bear eating berries and eaten the bear. But he just drank the water instead and didn’t kill the horse or the bear. That is not real, I knew.

My momma didn’t see me or feel my arms around her, and that made no sense either because Momma always saw me and knew me and loved me. And Daddy wasn’t in the dream. If Momma was really sitting by a stream, then Daddy would have been close by because there was no garage in the house on the other side of the road. And I missed them, but they were gone, and I didn’t miss them as much as I had the day before, or the day before that, because hoping they would come back really made no sense. It was kind of like missing Grandpa who’d died when I was a little girl. I missed him very much at first, and I cried and wished he hadn’t died, or that he could come back, but he didn’t, and as I got older and smarter I didn’t miss him like I used to. And someday I wouldn’t miss Momma and Daddy so much because Father Kenney and even Momma and Daddy said many times that dead people are alive in Heaven, and they are always watching us, and they live with their friends and their own mommas and daddies, and they aren’t unhappy at all. And they live with Jesus and God his father and the Holy Ghost, and they love them and ask them to help us. I could never understand who the Holy Ghost was, though. He was God, but he was also a bird, and he never said anything to anyone.

I didn’t understand being dead, or Heaven, or especially God who was three gods, but only one god, and that made no sense because I had never met three people who were one person, and so I couldn’t understand it, but I believed it.

I left the ladies room and ran down the hall to the back door. I picked up my black backpack and ran down the alley because I needed to get the bags and tubes and needles back to Jerrick so that we could feed and get water into Lashawna. That is all that really mattered. If I saw Munster or the man or a cloud or a hundred clouds, I didn’t care. I needed to get back to Saint Andrew’s Church.

I forgot about the dream and ran.