Ugly Heaven

by Carlton Mellick III

  Salmon halts at a large pink worm-infested moat. The liquid boils with them. More worms than water. Tree stumbles into Salmon, glances into the moat, then whips around to see the shades closing in.

  "Cross," the olive-tinted man yells.

  Salmon gawks at Olive, dog-panting. Then turns to the festering water, and back to Olive again. "You're joking." Cross.

  Tree touches his toe to the water. It thuds against the surface.

  "Glass?" Tree asks.

  Both men cautious-step onto the transparent bridge and hurry across. Many shadows follow, but explode upon touching the crude liquid. As the men arrive on the other side, they drop to their knees. Tree rolls onto his back, gasping for breath. Olive appears above them, chewing a bite of apple.

  "They fall through glass," says the old man, rolling the apple across the moat. "They aren't made of matter."

  Salmon pulls himself to a stump, dropping his head, exhausted.

  "What are they?" Tree asks.

  "What do you think they are?" responds the olive-tinted man with a wide cartoon smile.

  Tree turns to the shadows who rustle about the terrain like cockroaches.

  "They are like shadows," Tree says.

  Olive nods. He strolls along the waterside, chin to the sky, and speaks as if reading a passage from the Bible: "And God said, let Man possess a dark side so that he may be tested by it. And let man's darkness follow him for every step of his way."

  Olive beams on Salmon, who picks purple thorns from a foot. Rubbing his feet-wrinkles, Salmon gawks up at the jitter-fleshed man.

  "What are you talking about?" Salmon sneers.

  Olive raises an eyebrow.

  "What do you think I'm talking about?"

  Salmon grumbles and waves the olive man away.

  "What is this place?" Tree asks.

  "Yeah, where are we?" Salmon asks.

  "Where do you think we are?" responds the old man.

  "Hey, Tree," Salmon turns away from the olive-tinted man. "Remember when I said you were a horrible conversationalist?"

  "No," Tree says.

  "Well, this guy is worse," Salmon says.

  "I don't remember anything," Tree tells the old man.

  "What if you never remember anything?" the man says. "You'll never fully know who you used to be."

  "Who I used to be?" Tree asks.

  "You were once somebody else," Olive says. "But that person is dead. You have evolved out of him and into somebody new."

  Salmon is rolling his whip-like ears around his fingers.

  "By the way, have you come up with names for yourselves yet?" the olive man asks.

  "Tree," Tree says, pointing to himself.

  Then he points to Salmon, "Salmon."

  "Good," he says, spitting brown juice at a brick wall. "That makes my job easier. My name is Rowak. My job is to name people. I'm not very good at naming, though. It makes me very happy when people name themselves before they come to me.”

  The olive-tinted man rubs suction cups along his armpits.

  "As I was saying, your memory will be fuzzy for a very long time. Years, perhaps. Eventually, you'll dream of the people you were close to. Then important events. You'll know many aspects of the life you once lived, but most likely you'll never know the person you used to be."

  "So we're dead?" Tree asks.

  "Obviously," Rowak says.

  Tree calms his breath. "Are we in hell?"

  Rowak shakes his head.

  "Heaven," he says.

  Tree blinks his metallic eyelids.

  "Welcome to paradise.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The insides of the fortress are mostly stuffed with hay. There are only a couple small rooms in the back. One where Rowak sleeps. One where Rowak eats.

  Both rooms are filled with two things: dolls and furniture. The dolls are in piles on the floor. They are made of plants, paint, hay, and rusty spikes for eyes that follow Tree around the room.

  The furniture fills most of the space. It is enormous in size, reaching all the way to the ceiling as if made for giants or extremely obese people. It's made of wood but painted to look like stone.

  "Why is the furniture so big?" Salmon asks.

  "Much of the furniture in Heaven is this big," Rowak says.

  "Why?" Salmon asks.

  Rowak smiles at him.

  They climb into the bulky chairs and rest their chins on the table, like children at a restaurant.

  "So now what?" Tree asks, kicking his dangling feet that cannot reach the floor.

  "Now what?" Rowak asks.

  "Where do we go from here?"

  "Where do you want to go?" Rowak asks.

  "I've got so many questions," Tree says. C^uestionsr

  "We still don't understand this place," Tree says.

  "I told you. You died and are now in Heaven. Now you will start your new life."

  "I don't think I believe this is Heaven," Tree says.

  "Why not?" Rowak asks.

  "Heaven isn't supposed to be this way," Tree says.

  "Then which way is Heaven supposed to be?"

  Tree digs through his memory. He's sure that he once knew exactly what Heaven was like, in perfect detail. But now all of the information in his head is a messy soup. The only word he can find in relation to Heaven is the word paradise.

  "A paradise," Tree says. "I don't remember exactly what it's supposed to be like, but it should be a paradise. Not like this."

  "What if it was a paradise a long time ago but isn't anymore?" Rowak asks.

  "Heaven is supposed to be eternal bliss," Tree says.

  "What if this is God's interpretation of eternal bliss?" Rowak says.

  "Show me God and I'll believe we're in Heaven."

  "What if God doesn't want to see you?" Rowak says.

  "Then I won't believe you," Tree says.

  He jumps down from his chair and cringes at the salty textures on his feet.

  "That's okay," Rowak says. "I don't expect you to believe me. Not many people listen to me at all."

  Tree leaves the room. He climbs a ladder to the roof.

  "Where are the other people?" Salmon asks Rowak.

  "In the cities."

  "I want to go to a city," Salmon says.

  "I will take you in the morning," Rowak says. "There is a small village not very far."

  Tree is out on the rooftop throughout the blackish-blue night and into the green-sky morning. There isn't a rising or setting sun, just a change of sky color.

  Staring at his prickly yellow knees, he tries to remember how he died or if he really died at all. He tries to remember things, but nothing of his past can come out of the fuzzy blots that fill his mind. He tries to sleep, to leave the unpleasant consciousness, but it is cold and hairy-ant feelings are crawling inside of him.

  He watches the shadows stalking the landscape, attaching themselves to trees and rocks and small bubble-backed mammals.

  In the distance, there is an enormous creature stagger-stomping across the landscape. It is like an elephant's skeleton, but made of purple meat and long television antennas. Clawing through the black-slime hills.

  "You've been up here all night?" Salmon asks. "Look at you." He pats his forehead. "Like a ghost."

  Tree loses the elephant creature on the horizon.

  "They are the dark side of men's souls," Salmon says, motioning to the shadows. "Rowak says that all of the evil in humans exists in our shadows. It hides there, from the sunlight. After death, they used to cut the shadows off of people and lock them away deep underground. They nicknamed the underground Hell. So that the good side of every human being would go to Heaven and every bad side would go to Hell."

  "What are they doing outside of Hell?" Tree asks.

  "They've broken out," Salmon says. "The Utopian Heaven written about in the Bible died ages ago. It's no longer a paradise. It's in ruins."


  The shadows drift across the phantom landscape. Tree rubs his seashell skin patterns.

  "I have a strange feeling that I'm being lied to," Tree says.

  "Rowak says that the feeling is natural," Salmon says. "It took me all night getting answers out of him. He says we're like infants right now. We won't understand very much. But we'll grow."

  "Did he talk about God?" Tree asks.

  "He won't tell me anything about God," Salmon says. "We're probably not good enough to see Him."

  Salmon rolls his finger against a seashell pattern on Tree's thigh. "He's taking us to a city after breakfast. We'll find more answers there."

  Tree brushes his salmony finger away. "So how are we getting out of here?"

  Salmon shrugs. The shadows fester the landscape for miles in every direction.

  A large metal plate with fried chunks of lard and thick snotty sauce is smacked on the table in front of Tree. He cringes at it and pushes it away. Sitting in the enormous chair, he feels like a picky child refusing to eat his lima beans. Without any pantry in sight, Tree assumes the food has to be the pink worms from the moat.

  "You'll be surprised," Salmon says, eating the slimy meat with a large fork that only half-fits into his mouth and licking the snotty sauce from his fingers.

  Tree still refuses to eat.

  "You could have slept in the bed with us," Rowak says. "There's room enough for five up there."

  "The ladder gave me splinters," Salmon says with a full mouth.

  Tree frowns at his food and takes a tiny bite of the smallest piece of meat. His face lights up, like things are popping and moving inside. The taste is overwhelming. Not necessarily good or bad, but complex and intense. Like dozens of opposing tastes are colliding at the same time. He doesn't remember there being dozens of tastes. He remembers sweet, spicy, salty, sour, bitter, what else was there? The taste of the blubbery meat is none of these yet very strong in many other ways.

  "By the look on your face I can tell you've noticed the change," Rowak says.

  Tree looks at him with a sagged jaw.

  "Sensations are different in Heaven," Rowak says. "On Earth, they were simple and easy. Here, they are infinite. There are not only five senses anymore. There are hundreds. And each sense has billions of varieties."

  "I don't notice any new senses," Tree says.

  "Not yet," Rowak says. "But the five senses you had in your previous life are beginning to expand, aren't they? You are beginning to experience new flavors. You're probably seeing colors you've never seen before."

  "I don't know," Tree says. "I'm not sure what is new and what I've forgotten.”

  "Things will be confusing for a long time," Rowak says. "You have a lot to learn."

  Salmon is licking the snotty soup from his plate, his facial expression like he's licking a battery and enjoying every second of it.

  Before they leave for the city, Tree has to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, he can't find a bathroom in the fortress. Nor can he find any holes on his body to release the body waste.

  "What am I supposed to do?" he asks Rowak.

  Rowak goes to his bedroom and pulls a wooden bucket from the monstrous bed. The bucket has an enormous spike pointing out of it.

  "Here," Rowak says. "I'll show you."

  Rowak steps behind Tree and places the bucket between them. Salmon watches with giggles from the giant's chair, swinging his legs to a musical rhythm.

  "What are you going to—"

  Before Tree can finish, Rowak pulls him back and impales him on the wooden spike. Tree shrieks like a bat. It is not painful; it creates a sensation like sitting on a raw egg. Rowak pushes Tree upright and a syrup of white, red, and black swirls oozes out of the new hole and fills the bucket. Tree's mouth widens with shock. He feels the insides of him are different than they were before death. He is mostly goop inside. Like an insect. He is positive he was thick with internal organs during his past life.

  After the syrup stops running, Rowak sews up the new hole with black thread and wipes the fluid off of his legs and crotch with an old rag. A smell like peaches mixed with dead earwigs clogs the room until Rowak dumps the bucket's contents out of the window and stows it under his bed.

  "You have to do that every time," Rowak tells Tree, sitting him down on a pile of hay in the corner. "The hole will heal itself in an hour, so it must be pierced open again. Make sure to sew it every time or else it won't heal properly and you'll have waste leaking down your legs."

  Tree's horrified face glares at Salmon, who doesn't seem at all bothered by watching his bathroom performance.

  "You'll get used to it," Rowak says, patting Tree's shoulder.

  The path is underground. Rowak opens a hatch under the giant's table and leads the two newcomers into a tiny crawl space in the earth. One by one, they trudge through muddy darkness on all fours. They aren't speaking, just heavy breaths fill the tunnel. Tree can hear the textures and shapes in his breath. He can taste the flavor of the sound it makes.

  Tree searches his mind for some kind of memories. In the darkness, his thoughts are a bit more clear. He is not being swarmed with alien visions and new colors. He tries to catch things floating in his mind and hold them tight. The things he can catch are trivial, but he concentrates on them as if they're the most important of memories.

  He remembers a woman laughing deeply, almost like a man, and drinking scotch. She's smoking too. He doesn't think it was anyone important in his life. Definitely not a mom or lover. Maybe a distant aunt or a neighbor. Perhaps she was just a character from a television show. He remembers television shows, but can't think of what any were called. Just faceless sitcoms with laugh tracks and kooky characters. The people talking to the woman in this memory are fuzzy and even less familiar. The memory doesn't really go any further than that. When the scotch woman speaks, her language is under water. Her cigarette smoke, spider webbed in the air, is the only smell in the room.

  Tree locks onto a different memory. A memory of driving down a street in the dead of morning. The houses are all identical and comfortingly familiar. He's not sure if he is driving the car or just a passenger, but he knows he is on his way to somewhere he doesn't want to go. Kittens are crawling in and out of the windows and cuddling in his lap.

  He goes to another memory. He is cutting off his fingers with a switchblade. Instead of blood, red worms are crawling out of him and squirming against the tabletop. This must be from a dream or a movie. It couldn't have really happened to him. In fact, all of these memories seem more like dreams he once had. Or perhaps they are just things his subconscious has made up for him on the spot.

  It hurts him to think about the past.

  The tunnel opens up into a small brick-walled room, caked with mud and ancient footprints. Piles of old clothes lie in the corners. A smell like burnt paper and chewing gum lingers in the air.

  There is a lit stove cooking a pot of coffee to the left. But there isn't anybody in sight. In fact, it seems as if nobody has been here for months or years.

  "Go up," Rowak tells Tree, pointing to a rusty ladder that leads to a hatch in the ceiling.

  Tree stares up the rusted ladder. "What about those things?"

  Rowak pushes at him. "It is safe up there. A river keeps the shadows back."

  Tree climbs a few rungs and then pauses.

  Salmon is pouring the pot of coffee into metal cups. He finds some grayish sugar in an old boot under the stove.

  "Move it," Rowak says, and Tree continues up the ladder.

  They emerge into a field of white turtle-shaped flowers growing in zigzagged patterns. A wide but shallow river is behind them, pink-colored due to worm content.

  "You still have your shadow," Tree tells Rowak. "It wasn't cut off?”

  "It's been a long time since a shadow has been removed," Rowak says. "The technology has long been forgotten."

  "Tell him about the multiple shadows," Salmon says.

&nbs
p; Rowak nods at Salmon with steel teeth and tells Tree, "It is important to never let one of the stray shadows latch onto you. They will attach themselves to your soul and become a part of you. Then you will have two dark sides. Yours and somebody else's."

  "And there's no limit to how many shadows can attach themselves to you," Salmon interjects.

  "There are some locked deep underground who are connected to twenties of shadows. Their souls pumped with the evils of so many men that they have become mad with hate and despair. None of the new ones know how to remove shadows, so we must lock away these lost souls and forget them."

  "Is anyone without a shadow?" Tree asks.

  "Not any of the new ones," Rowak says. "The old ones had the technology to remove shadows. There aren't any old ones left."

  "Old ones?" Tree asks.

  "The old ones are those who lived before the fall of Heaven. We call ourselves the new ones."

  "There has to be somebody who knows about the old ones," Tree says.

  "The old ones disappeared long before the new ones came," Rowak says.

  "What about God?" Tree says. "Did He disappear as well?"

  "Of course God did not disappear," Rowak says. "He is God."

  "Then why don't you ask Him to teach you the ways of the old ones?" Tree asks.

  Rowak just laughs and wobbles an elbow. "Children...”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The city is like a pile of dirty old boots in the distance. It looks old and dead, as quiet and motionless as a painting. Even the small strings of smoke from crooked chimneys appear to be at a standstill.

  In another direction, there are golden crab-like creatures as tall as houses creeping through the trees. To get a better view Salmon climbs a hill of wagon wheels that have become part of the soil, spilling drops of hot coffee on his thighs. The sight of the creatures gives Tree sour beeskin sensations down his back.

  "What are they?" Salmon asks.

  Rowak pokes at the ground with a curly stick.

  "What do you think they are?"

  "Crab dinosaurs," Salmon says, rubbing a thigh.

  "There are three of them," Rowak says. "There have always been three of them."