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Description
There are too many people who die in the hopes that whatever pain they feel, it will end once they are dead. But it doesn't end, much to their sadness and surprise. People still feel pain in the Afterlife. We all feel it, perhaps more than we did in life. And here, there is no death to save us from this pain. Some poor souls will go through great lengths to avoid it, but the best anyone can do is put it off for a while. That’s the reason we end up here—to finally deal with the pain once and for all. Easier said than done, I know, but it happens. And if we can do that? Well, then we get to move on. Usually.

The Prison never used to be here. I'd heard a story by an old rabbi once. He said that after Cain invented murder and founded a city, Abel found himself in the Afterlife, crying out through blood and earth for justice. After he’d calmed down a bit and realized there was little point in fussing, he would make the Afterlife different from Cain’s city. Rural. Wild. No governments. No prisons. Free. But with the memory of the pain until there was no longer a need to cry out. But then one day, the Prison was built by people wanted to clean up the Afterlife. Get things moving along. Reform the errant and arrest the unremorseful. Oh, they intended to do it in the name of justice, but the funny thing about that is that the justice of city-builders is different from those of us who are friends with the wind and rain, and see flocks of birds and beasts more like partners.

It used to be really simple. People come here. They go West. A lot of people who come here are surprised and maybe even a little confused to see the Afterlife look so familiar. I don’t blame them. I was one of those people once. West is west, where the sun sets, easy as that. Coyote once told me that there’s more difference between men and women than there is between the living and the dead. That was his way of saying that there really wasn’t much difference at all.

But since the Prison came, things have just seemed more complicated—if time means anything here. Come to think of it, a lot of the Afterlife has gotten more complicated with things like cell phones and halos, prisons and politicians, anarchists and automobiles. People bring with them a lot of complicated things to the Afterlife. You don’t find many crossbows or codpieces anymore, but even those personal attachments never complicated things. Much. I think there was in Inquisition once. But the Church, like today’s Marines, stayed on their side of the Veil to do the butchering and letting the Afterlife do the sorting. Maybe someone realized there wasn’t any sorting going on and took matters into their own hands.

After a rather intimate frisking, Elk, Coyote, and I are let into the Prison. Afterlife pain can be felt physically as much as emotionally, but around here they’re probably looking more for file-laden cakes than a crude shiv. Murder becomes anachronistic. We snake around single-file through a tight labyrinth of chain-link topped with razor-wire until we enter the main administration building. The room we walk into isn’t much larger, it seems.

“Hold up,” says a bearded man in a stained blue uniform with some shiny symbol pinned to it. His voice comes not from him but from a speaker installed on the other side of the bullet-proof glass he hides behind. He saunters over to a door with a clipboard in one hand and an itch in the other. He comes out and stands like a wall before Elk. “Bringing someone in?”

“We’re here to see the Tribunal,” Elk replies with equal coolness.

The eyebrows of the uniformed man crease. His eyes flit over Coyote and me before boring back into Elk. “Not a drop-off, then? You sure?”

Elk nods once. “We need to talk about someone you are holding.”

While the man wordlessly regards Elk’s answer, I take a closer look at his uniform. It’s as neat and clean as can be except for the stains. I puzzle at the contrast for a moment faster than his attempt to find the slightest hint of condemning falsehood in Elk. Neither gravy nor old sweat, I quickly understand that he’s not a visitor like me. I avert my eyes. I find it rude to gawk at the details of a person’s actual death, especially when I’m the tourist.

The clipboard drops to the guard’s side. His frown stays right where it is. “Hmmm. Wait here.” He turns and waddles off back through the door, through the bullet-proof room, and through a door that buzzes electric hornet warnings.

I frown and look at the surroundings. Glass. Concrete. Steel. Asphalt. Even the air seems artificial. Sound timidly sneaks back to its source. After a while I glance over to Coyote. He’s got his arm halfway under the semicircular window opening, reaching for a pen. I slap his shoulder.

“You don’t steal a pen in a prison, moron,” I grumble.

Coyote retracts his arm and pouts. “You’re no fun.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Coyote’s eyebrow arches. “Let’s not go there, or I’ll have to start commenting on the color of pots and kettles.”

Elk finds a seat in the small room. I trudge over and plop down next to him. I look at the table. A single book stands upright in the center. I reach for it and open up the hardcover. Sure enough. I smirk and put the book back. “Even in the Afterlife, the Gideon’s have a corner on the market. Why not a Koran? Or the Book of Mormon? Or the Bhagavad-Gita? Or Walt Whitman?”

Coyote shrugs, goes over, picks the Bible up, and slips it into his shirt.

I rub my face. “You’re stealing a Gideon Bible now? That’s low.”

“You wouldn’t let me take the pen.”

“You’re not even a Christian. What do you want with that?”

“You want it?”

I frown and bite my lip. My eyes turn towards my shoes. The dust from the restaurant, now less moist, still cover them. “No.”

The hornet buzz makes us look up to see the door yield. Maybe jumping out of the way based on her precision stride and perfectly spaced clack-clack of sensible shoes on hard prison floor. A bullet-proof room and the second door later and I find myself wondering at what point I stood up. Her hair is as dark and tight as her face, punctuated by lips that could stop traffic. Her eyes are at my level, and I glance downward, past the crisp pantsuit to the tiles. Somehow the tiles seem the softer of the two.

“Ms. Rankin.” Elk extends his hand. “I appreciate you coming to speak to us. My colleagues and I—“

“No.”

The three of us blink. I glance a question at Coyote. He pulls at the collar of his shirt, even though it’s not buttoned up. The tiny room feels like a sauna. I look to make sure the three of us aren’t suddenly wearing nothing but towels.

Elk retracts the unshaken hand. “’No,’ we can’t see you? Or ‘no’ you won’t let Hawk—“

“On all accounts, Mr. Elk. No to speaking, even. I know you. And you can just stop right there. Whatever sins we imprison, will be imprisoned,” she says. “And whatever sins we loose, shall be let go.”

I frown. “Hawk isn’t a sin. Hawk is…well… Hawk.”

The woman’s eyes flare and she looks me up and down. I feel like my existence, now noticed, is being squeezed back into whatever black box from which it wiggled free. I wonder again at what point I took a step backwards as I feel my back touch the three-foot-thick concrete wall.

“You.” She stabs her finger into my chest. So much for my shiv-free prison theory. “You have a lot of nerve coming here. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Lightning strikes somewhere in her eyes.

My back becomes really intimate with the wall, and there’s no time for a proper candlelight dinner.

“I should arrest you right now, Mr. White. When I gave you permission to be here, that didn’t mean you had the right to speak the first time. So now, you get no right at all.”

“Now, now, Ms. Rankin.” Elk takes a step like a wedge between two car bumpers welded in post-collision coitus. “He’s not done anything. Not since Hawk was taken away. As per the agreement. ‘What sins are loosed is loosed…’ Remember?”

Lightning flashes at Elk, and the room goes from sauna to ice-box, but I feel the sliver’s breath pass between myself and the Prosecutor.

“And I remind you, Mr. Elk, that that arrangement was made between Mr. White and Mr. Dean as a gesture of trust and goodwill. Your coming here to bargain is knocking on a door you don’t want to open.”

“I understand, Ms. Rankin. I was under the impression that it wouldn’t hurt to at least ask.”

I file into memory Elk’s reasoning as another proverb to mistrust. Sometimes, it does hurt to ask.

“You have me in a good mood today, Mr. Elk—“

Coyote opens his mouth but my eyes plea with him to remain silent. Mercifully, he only puts a finger to his lips.

“—and the Tribunal are rather busy securing our next item on the agenda to bring order and accountability to the Afterlife. I would highly advise you to keep out of our way, or you’ll all find yourselves reunited with Mr. Hawk in a manner you may not intend.” The Prosecutor turns to stare at Coyote.

He averts his eyes and finds his own wall to make into a friend with benefits.

Satisfied, she flashes a brief warning my way before dismissing my existence back from whence it came. She continues her turn like an iron ballerina and somehow manages to give a polite nod to Elk. “Good day.”

The pirouette concludes when her back faces towards us and her precision punctuations on the floor move her back through the glass cage of a room and through the hornet buzz door.

Elk barely manages a “But—“ before the final door slams and the bearded man in a stained blue uniform with some shiny symbol pinned to it stands alone with his clipboard in the waiting room.

“Time to go, gentlemen.” I can’t tell if his voice is less imposing in comparison to the Prosecutor’s, or due to the recent presence of her.

We understand why there’s silence surrounding the Prison by the time we make it back to Elk’s hybrid. Most theft is anachronistic in the Afterlife as murder is, but I feel like checking my pockets again to see where my voice must’ve gone. Thankfully, it takes a thief to steal back what was taken.

“I hope you had another list of things to do in that book of yours.” Coyote gestures at the notebook Elk gave me.

Elk shakes his head. “If we want to help Wasi’chu, we need to get Hawk out.”

“Well, unless you got a way to turn Miss Rosy Cheeks around, there, that ain’t gonna happen. Ever. And when I say ‘Ever’ in a land without a really good sense of time, that’s saying something.” Coyote snarls and fishes the book from his shirt. He opens it to a random page and blinks. He starts to flip through the pages.”

“Then there’s one thing we have to do,” Elk nods and folds his arms. “We need Grizzly. If there’s anyone who has the power to stand up to the Tribunal, it’s Grizzly.”

Coyote hands me the open book.

I roll my eyes and don’t take it. “I’m not in the mood for platitudes and proverbs right now.”

Coyote persists, jabbing the book at me.

I take it and look. Nothing. The page is blank. I flip more pages. Blanks. All of them. “What the…?”

Elk cranes his neck curiously. A smile forms on his lips. “Oh, yes. Grizzly will love to see this. Boys, we’re going back to the Land of the Sheepeaters.”

Description
There are too many people who die in the hopes that whatever pain they feel, it will end once they are dead. But it doesn't end, much to their sadness and surprise. People still feel pain in the Afterlife. We all feel it, perhaps more than we did in life. And here, there is no death to save us from this pain. Some poor souls will go through great lengths to avoid it, but the best anyone can do is put it off for a while. That’s the reason we end up here—to finally deal with the pain once and for all. Easier said than done, I know, but it happens. And if we can do that? Well, then we get to move on. Usually.

The Prison never used to be here. I'd heard a story by an old rabbi once. He said that after Cain invented murder and founded a city, Abel found himself in the Afterlife, crying out through blood and earth for justice. After he’d calmed down a bit and realized there was little point in fussing, he would make the Afterlife different from Cain’s city. Rural. Wild. No governments. No prisons. Free. But with the memory of the pain until there was no longer a need to cry out. But then one day, the Prison was built by people wanted to clean up the Afterlife. Get things moving along. Reform the errant and arrest the unremorseful. Oh, they intended to do it in the name of justice, but the funny thing about that is that the justice of city-builders is different from those of us who are friends with the wind and rain, and see flocks of birds and beasts more like partners.

It used to be really simple. People come here. They go West. A lot of people who come here are surprised and maybe even a little confused to see the Afterlife look so familiar. I don’t blame them. I was one of those people once. West is west, where the sun sets, easy as that. Coyote once told me that there’s more difference between men and women than there is between the living and the dead. That was his way of saying that there really wasn’t much difference at all.

But since the Prison came, things have just seemed more complicated—if time means anything here. Come to think of it, a lot of the Afterlife has gotten more complicated with things like cell phones and halos, prisons and politicians, anarchists and automobiles. People bring with them a lot of complicated things to the Afterlife. You don’t find many crossbows or codpieces anymore, but even those personal attachments never complicated things. Much. I think there was in Inquisition once. But the Church, like today’s Marines, stayed on their side of the Veil to do the butchering and letting the Afterlife do the sorting. Maybe someone realized there wasn’t any sorting going on and took matters into their own hands.

After a rather intimate frisking, Elk, Coyote, and I are let into the Prison. Afterlife pain can be felt physically as much as emotionally, but around here they’re probably looking more for file-laden cakes than a crude shiv. Murder becomes anachronistic. We snake around single-file through a tight labyrinth of chain-link topped with razor-wire until we enter the main administration building. The room we walk into isn’t much larger, it seems.

“Hold up,” says a bearded man in a stained blue uniform with some shiny symbol pinned to it. His voice comes not from him but from a speaker installed on the other side of the bullet-proof glass he hides behind. He saunters over to a door with a clipboard in one hand and an itch in the other. He comes out and stands like a wall before Elk. “Bringing someone in?”

“We’re here to see the Tribunal,” Elk replies with equal coolness.

The eyebrows of the uniformed man crease. His eyes flit over Coyote and me before boring back into Elk. “Not a drop-off, then? You sure?”

Elk nods once. “We need to talk about someone you are holding.”

While the man wordlessly regards Elk’s answer, I take a closer look at his uniform. It’s as neat and clean as can be except for the stains. I puzzle at the contrast for a moment faster than his attempt to find the slightest hint of condemning falsehood in Elk. Neither gravy nor old sweat, I quickly understand that he’s not a visitor like me. I avert my eyes. I find it rude to gawk at the details of a person’s actual death, especially when I’m the tourist.

The clipboard drops to the guard’s side. His frown stays right where it is. “Hmmm. Wait here.” He turns and waddles off back through the door, through the bullet-proof room, and through a door that buzzes electric hornet warnings.

I frown and look at the surroundings. Glass. Concrete. Steel. Asphalt. Even the air seems artificial. Sound timidly sneaks back to its source. After a while I glance over to Coyote. He’s got his arm halfway under the semicircular window opening, reaching for a pen. I slap his shoulder.

“You don’t steal a pen in a prison, moron,” I grumble.

Coyote retracts his arm and pouts. “You’re no fun.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Coyote’s eyebrow arches. “Let’s not go there, or I’ll have to start commenting on the color of pots and kettles.”

Elk finds a seat in the small room. I trudge over and plop down next to him. I look at the table. A single book stands upright in the center. I reach for it and open up the hardcover. Sure enough. I smirk and put the book back. “Even in the Afterlife, the Gideon’s have a corner on the market. Why not a Koran? Or the Book of Mormon? Or the Bhagavad-Gita? Or Walt Whitman?”

Coyote shrugs, goes over, picks the Bible up, and slips it into his shirt.

I rub my face. “You’re stealing a Gideon Bible now? That’s low.”

“You wouldn’t let me take the pen.”

“You’re not even a Christian. What do you want with that?”

“You want it?”

I frown and bite my lip. My eyes turn towards my shoes. The dust from the restaurant, now less moist, still cover them. “No.”

The hornet buzz makes us look up to see the door yield. Maybe jumping out of the way based on her precision stride and perfectly spaced clack-clack of sensible shoes on hard prison floor. A bullet-proof room and the second door later and I find myself wondering at what point I stood up. Her hair is as dark and tight as her face, punctuated by lips that could stop traffic. Her eyes are at my level, and I glance downward, past the crisp pantsuit to the tiles. Somehow the tiles seem the softer of the two.

“Ms. Rankin.” Elk extends his hand. “I appreciate you coming to speak to us. My colleagues and I—“

“No.”

The three of us blink. I glance a question at Coyote. He pulls at the collar of his shirt, even though it’s not buttoned up. The tiny room feels like a sauna. I look to make sure the three of us aren’t suddenly wearing nothing but towels.

Elk retracts the unshaken hand. “’No,’ we can’t see you? Or ‘no’ you won’t let Hawk—“

“On all accounts, Mr. Elk. No to speaking, even. I know you. And you can just stop right there. Whatever sins we imprison, will be imprisoned,” she says. “And whatever sins we loose, shall be let go.”

I frown. “Hawk isn’t a sin. Hawk is…well… Hawk.”

The woman’s eyes flare and she looks me up and down. I feel like my existence, now noticed, is being squeezed back into whatever black box from which it wiggled free. I wonder again at what point I took a step backwards as I feel my back touch the three-foot-thick concrete wall.

“You.” She stabs her finger into my chest. So much for my shiv-free prison theory. “You have a lot of nerve coming here. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Lightning strikes somewhere in her eyes.

My back becomes really intimate with the wall, and there’s no time for a proper candlelight dinner.

“I should arrest you right now, Mr. White. When I gave you permission to be here, that didn’t mean you had the right to speak the first time. So now, you get no right at all.”

“Now, now, Ms. Rankin.” Elk takes a step like a wedge between two car bumpers welded in post-collision coitus. “He’s not done anything. Not since Hawk was taken away. As per the agreement. ‘What sins are loosed is loosed…’ Remember?”

Lightning flashes at Elk, and the room goes from sauna to ice-box, but I feel the sliver’s breath pass between myself and the Prosecutor.

“And I remind you, Mr. Elk, that that arrangement was made between Mr. White and Mr. Dean as a gesture of trust and goodwill. Your coming here to bargain is knocking on a door you don’t want to open.”

“I understand, Ms. Rankin. I was under the impression that it wouldn’t hurt to at least ask.”

I file into memory Elk’s reasoning as another proverb to mistrust. Sometimes, it does hurt to ask.

“You have me in a good mood today, Mr. Elk—“

Coyote opens his mouth but my eyes plea with him to remain silent. Mercifully, he only puts a finger to his lips.

“—and the Tribunal are rather busy securing our next item on the agenda to bring order and accountability to the Afterlife. I would highly advise you to keep out of our way, or you’ll all find yourselves reunited with Mr. Hawk in a manner you may not intend.” The Prosecutor turns to stare at Coyote.

He averts his eyes and finds his own wall to make into a friend with benefits.

Satisfied, she flashes a brief warning my way before dismissing my existence back from whence it came. She continues her turn like an iron ballerina and somehow manages to give a polite nod to Elk. “Good day.”

The pirouette concludes when her back faces towards us and her precision punctuations on the floor move her back through the glass cage of a room and through the hornet buzz door.

Elk barely manages a “But—“ before the final door slams and the bearded man in a stained blue uniform with some shiny symbol pinned to it stands alone with his clipboard in the waiting room.

“Time to go, gentlemen.” I can’t tell if his voice is less imposing in comparison to the Prosecutor’s, or due to the recent presence of her.

We understand why there’s silence surrounding the Prison by the time we make it back to Elk’s hybrid. Most theft is anachronistic in the Afterlife as murder is, but I feel like checking my pockets again to see where my voice must’ve gone. Thankfully, it takes a thief to steal back what was taken.

“I hope you had another list of things to do in that book of yours.” Coyote gestures at the notebook Elk gave me.

Elk shakes his head. “If we want to help Wasi’chu, we need to get Hawk out.”

“Well, unless you got a way to turn Miss Rosy Cheeks around, there, that ain’t gonna happen. Ever. And when I say ‘Ever’ in a land without a really good sense of time, that’s saying something.” Coyote snarls and fishes the book from his shirt. He opens it to a random page and blinks. He starts to flip through the pages.”

“Then there’s one thing we have to do,” Elk nods and folds his arms. “We need Grizzly. If there’s anyone who has the power to stand up to the Tribunal, it’s Grizzly.”

Coyote hands me the open book.

I roll my eyes and don’t take it. “I’m not in the mood for platitudes and proverbs right now.”

Coyote persists, jabbing the book at me.

I take it and look. Nothing. The page is blank. I flip more pages. Blanks. All of them. “What the…?”

Elk cranes his neck curiously. A smile forms on his lips. “Oh, yes. Grizzly will love to see this. Boys, we’re going back to the Land of the Sheepeaters.”