When his parents had still been alive, they’d been Christian. Julian had lost that faith somewhere along the way. One too many losses, one too many punches in the gut from the universe. If there was a God, as far as Julian could tell, he was an asshole. He hadn’t prayed in years, and had barely thought about a higher power.
So he didn’t pray. He didn’t believe that it would do anything. Instead, he just entertained a momentary fantasy of what he’d do if he could find a genie. What he’d wish for. Not for Maggie back - that felt like it would subvert her free will, and that grossed him out. He wouldn’t even wish for a do-over. Even knowing what mistakes he’d make, there didn’t seem to be a point.
“No,” he said aloud. “I’d wish for a new life. Start over somewhere fresh.”
Julian didn’t believe in the supernatural. But if he did, he’d have appreciated the irony of what happened next.
He stepped into his bedroom, deciding to grab a shirt. It was pitch black in there, which surprised him. It had still been light out just a moment ago, hadn’t it? It was also colder than it had been in his bedroom. Colder and the air had a ...stale quality to it. As if it hadn’t been disturbed in ages. He couldn’t smell the pizza and beer and bad air freshener, either.
Also, the floor beneath his feet wasn’t carpeted. It was hard and cool. And...it was stone. He was standing on stone.
Hand shaking, Julian bent down to feel the stone, hoping his fingers would return a different sensory input than his feet. They didn’t. There was, in fact, stone beneath his fingers. In his bedroom.
In the distance, he could hear the gentle drip of water into a pool, and air rushing past something.
“Oh,” Julian said. “I get it. I’m having a nervous breakdown.” The words were supposed to be calm and reassuring, saying something patently absurd to mitigate the absolute insanity of his surroundings. Unfortunately, they came out as a kind of panicked squeak. They also didn’t do anything to alleviate the hallucination.
“Okay. I’m in my bedroom, right? So that means that I need to take three steps and I’ll be at my bed. Then I’ll bang my shins on it.” Julian nodded in the darkness and took a step. Then another. Then a third. Sweat beaded his brow as he took a fourth. Then a fifth. Still no bed. Still nothing barring his movement.
Julian’s hands were shaking now, and his heart was beating like a machine gun. Was he in his bedroom? For all he knew he’d snapped so badly he’d ran from his apartment and was now in the street.
For all he knew, he was blind now.
Barely able to keep his hands steady, Julian reached into his pocket for his phone. He tapped the screen. The sudden flash of light was blinding, and the shock merged with his trembling hands to cause his phone to tumble from his grip.
It landed at an angle, half resting on something on the floor. Julian had to blink a few times to clear his vision.
The phone was bright enough to illuminate his surroundings, which wasn’t hard given how minimal they were. He was in a cave that had been partially worked by human hands, given a smooth and level floor. If he’d taken another step, he would have banged into something - a stone slab about the height of his waist and nearly three times that long. More of a table, really. The phone’s light threw shadows from the carvings in the side of the slab, and while none of them were recognizable as anything Julian had seen before, they had a repetitive quality that tugged at his memory.
It looked like an altar.
“I’m...dead?” Julian asked nothing.
It was no surprise when the only response was the distant drip of water.
It made a kind of sense to him. He’d been so tense he’d had a stroke or heart attack. Died instantly. Ended up...here. Heaven or hell’s waiting room. It was hard to not regret a life of atheism now that he was faced with the final destination and the inarguable fact that it was not, in fact, oblivion. That after death, there was still a him to think.
And...carry a cell phone.
How’d the old saying go? “You can’t take it with you.” Julian wasn’t sure of much, but if there was an afterlife, he doubted they had changed that particular policy to make exceptions for cell phones. Or pants, for that matter, yet he was still wearing his jeans. He patted his pockets. Car keys were in there as well, and his wallet. The very definition of worldly goods. The AREVE system was in the other pocket, although Julian didn’t think that was definitive proof of being alive. Any version of heaven he could imagine featured his baby, and any version of hell would involve using it to torment him somehow. But the rest...that was easier to believe wasn’t something you could take to the afterlife.
“Okay, so not dead. I guess we’re back to - shit!”
The last swear came from the light of his cellphone dimming as it started to go into sleep mode. Julian half lunged for it, a terrified vision of being unable to find it in the inky darkness gripping his imagination. He tapped the screen before it could go dark, and the light returned to its normal levels.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he picked it up, and the stone that it had landed on came with the phone.
He turned the phone over. The stone wasn’t some ordinary rock. It looked like an uncut golden gemstone. What was the term for it again? A citrine, that was it. It was a citrine
