“Another Kind of Heaven” by Sean Mclain Brown
It doesn’t happen the way you think it does, where you float out of your body and look down at everyone crying as they stand around your body and mourn, and then a brilliant light shines a tunnel and you go through it, enveloped in an egg of soft white light on a golden chariot with wheels of fire, and the sounds of legions of Cherubim and Seraphim blowing trumpets and all their Hallelujahs. It doesn’t happen that way at all. You blink and suddenly—you’re someplace else.
For me, it’s summer, a pick-up game with Ronnie, Daryl, and the rest of the boys from town, and me, out in right field, my favorite position, snapping my fist into my father’s worn glove. Sky, like the ocean I never saw, and earth, dew-soaked and fresh shorn green against the pale yellow dirt of our baseball diamond, so green and perfect like a watercolor paint-by-number, everything in its own space, and I begin to think that my being sick must have been a dream, and just when I manage to believe, I hear God’s own choir—the chants from the boys ringing out clear across the field.
Copyright © Sean Mclain Brown, 2010