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You open your eyes to a stifling white. It passes through your eyes and spills out in every direction, an endless plain. Sea, sky, and land, all a perfect, featureless white. Two exceptions. Yourself, dressed proper in your denim pants, long sleeve, ascot, vest, and coat. You are seated on a white wooden chair. Across from you is the other exception, also seated in a white wooden chair and looking exactly the same as the day he died. Cornelius.
“Finally awake? Well…I suppose that’s unfair.” one hand wanders aimlessly over the text of his thick, open bible. He crosses his legs and takes off his hat, hanging it on his front foot. “Where exactly are you goin’ boy?” His voice always was a little high, nasally too. You’d heard it more than once soaring above gunfire and other, unmentionable sounds, remanding terror to its place beneath the world. “You’re dead.” Your statement sounds stupid even to yourself. Cornelius looks at you with very pale blue eyes. He looks at you for a long time, then without speaking he turns to look over his shoulder. Drawing your gaze to one black spot in the vast infinite of white. You are certain it hadn’t been there.
He turns back around to face you. “I always was fond o’ bluntness in a man. Find a problem, shoot it. I like you Campbell. You’re sincere. Whatever you do, you believe in it. Keep that one in ya son.” He blinks, his heavy, wrinkled lids make the motion seem laborious. You suddenly notice that the spot is no longer a spot. It’s an oil spill at the edges of the universe, slopping in uneven forays a hundred thousand miles away from the two of you. Covering the corners of the sky. Cornelius snaps his fingers. Your attention is back on him. “You been runnin’ boy, but as clever as you are, you can’t run from this ‘un.” Each of his words rings your head like a bell. Your eyes glaze over and memories from long ago fountain up unbidden.
A younger you, clean shaven. A ripped army uniform, ragged desert vegetation catching your boots. A shaking rifle in your hands and the other three in your scout troop even more raving and unmanned than you. Pitch black night, the Navajo tossed back from the dark into your tiny circle of light. He had ran first. Its chest filled with small, screaming faces of every animal imaginable. The Navajo’s now among them. One of your troop vanishes into the night.Tall. Too thin. Another is hauled up high, into the sky. Nails like knives, four feet long. The third makes a run for it, like the Navajo. He stops screaming very suddenly. All alone. You had given up your dignity, your pants soiled, your mouth working out gibberish, trying for a prayer. The thing…spoke.
