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November 18, 2024
"Mes de los Muertos"

Limbo Can Wait

By Ethan Goffman

I had been rejected from heaven and was knock, knock, knocking on Limbo’s door. Finally, it cracked open and a gnome popped out. “Hold on,” she said, “I’m checking the list.” Eyes darting violently, she scanned an interminable series of parchments, flipping through them as disheveled sheets flopped onto the wispy clouds that held up limbo. I wondered that the guardians of the afterlife were so disorganized—at heaven’s gate it had been just the same. “Nope,” she said finally. “You’re not authorized to enter Limbo.”

My heart palpitated, my pulse boomed like a snare drum, my lungs seized up, and my innards shriveled with dread. “I can’t see what I’ve possibly done to deserve Hell,” I heard my voice squeaking. True, I had left my wife when she got cancer, but she’d cheated on me years earlier. This seemed a feeble excuse and, consumed by guilt, I’d spent my latter years striving to repent, helping neighbors and friends, donating to food kitchens.

“Oh, you’re not going to Hell, no worries about that,” the gnome said. “If that was your destination, you’d have been instantly sucked into the flames, no bureaucracy, no fuss.” It was a relief, I thought, that at least one part of the afterlife was run so efficiently.

“So where am I supposed to go?” Perhaps wandering endlessly between heaven and limbo was itself a kind of limbo.

“I don’t know,” she said. “In all eternity, a soul has never before been assigned to no-place whatsoever.”

“Maybe you made a mistake.”

“Impossible—we don’t make mistakes.” Given the haphazard system of checking lists, it was hard to believe that errors didn’t proliferate like acne on a teenager’s face.

“Just tell me, then,” I said. “What’s the next step?”

“Wait here.” And she was gone, the door gently shut in my face.

So here I stand, at the gates of eternity, frozen.








Article © Ethan Goffman. All rights reserved.
Published on 2024-11-04
Image(s) are public domain.
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