The End Has Come and Gone

can astral project.” I stopped right there, looking at Gary for any indications that he was going to get me some heavy medication. When he sat back down, I took that as a sign that he wanted me to continue.

“Astral projection, that’s where you float out of your body, right?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. From what I’ve done and read there are two types of projections. The first is on the astral plane which has nothing to do with the world we live in, and the second is the ability to travel within our own world. I usually can’t control it, and the night I found out about Glenn was no different. I had gone to sleep relatively early because I was pulling a late night shift on the ladders.”

“The ladders?” Gary asked.

“Yeah, it was an early form of torture when I still lived at Little Turtle.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, my legs cramp up every time I think of them. They were just crude guard towers we used to watch the walls at Little Turtle.”

“Gotcha.”

“So I’m lying in bed and as soon as I fell asleep I found myself in our old home on Cefalo Road.”

“Really? Are you kidding me? What was it like?”

“To be honest, it was awesome,” I told him, and it was. I hadn’t been back to my childhood home, well, since my childhood.

“Was anyone there?” he asked.

“Not at first,” I told him. I have never encountered anyone on my path when I am on the earthly planes, it just doesn’t work that way for me. “The house was exactly as it had been when we were kids. I ‘appeared’ in Lyndsey’s room on her bed. The same white bed with flowers she had when we were growing up.” My sister’s room was at the top of the stairwell and my parents’ room was further to the left. To the immediate right was my brother Ron’s room, and then there was an ell and then mine, Gary, and Glenn’s room and then a bathroom.

“You’re freaking me out,” Gary said.

“Yeah, well, consider it payback for your stories.”

“Was it day or night?” Gary asked.

“It’s always a sort of twilight when I’m on these planes. Light enough to see but would probably be pretty difficult to read by. And that’s another thing I need to make clear, when I’m on these journeys the great abundance of what ‘leaves’ my body is saturated in ‘feeling’ and ‘instinct;’ higher reasoning does not tend to make the transfer. I went on a ‘trip’ once and could not figure out how to work a doorknob.”

“What did you do?” Gary asked fascinated.

“I went through it.”

“Oh,” Gary said cupping his chin with his hand. “That’s possible?”

“I’m basically a living ghost, so yeah.”

“That’s kind of scary when you describe it that way. Can you get trapped outside your body, like maybe not be able to find your way home?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve read some stuff that says it could be possible, but damn near almost everything else says it’s completely impossible.”

“Still, that would be pretty scary. It’d be like you were in a coma, only your spirit is wandering around the world aimlessly.”

“Great, one more thing to worry about. Can I go on?”

Now it was his turn to motion me on.

“So I’m in our house and I’m thrilled. I loved that place, I never really got over that we moved away. I got up off of Lyndsey’s bed and went downstairs, took a quick look in the kitchen and then went into the great room and from there into our playroom.”

“Remember how we used to put Pledge on our socks and play hockey there?” Gary asked fondly.

“I remember up until the point that you broke Mom’s lamp with your hockey stick and then threw me under the bus for it.”

“You were younger, she wouldn’t hit you as hard. I taught you a valuable lesson that day.”

“What, not to trust anyone?”

“No, how to take one for the team.”

“Great. So anyway, I’m down in the playroom and there was no broken lamp, at least that I could see, and I started to sense someone else was in the house.”

“You said you don’t encounter other people.”

“I don’t.”

“Who was it?”

“It was Mom.”

“Was she there about the lamp?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see her, I could only sense that she was there. I could ‘feel’ her presence in her bedroom.”

“Did she know you were there?”

I thought about that for a second, “No, I really get the impression that she had no idea whatsoever that I was there. So now I’m sitting on the floor in the playroom. I’ve got my back resting on the cellar door and I’m just looking around. I can tell that Mom is just sitting on her bed. She hadn’t moved, she’s just waiting.”

“Waiting for Glenn.”

I nodded. “After a few more minutes I began to sense his presence. He had not yet made it into the house. It was kind of like he got lost and Mom was there to lead him home.”

“Damn, Mike.”

“That’s what I thought. Mom was bringing him to a familiar place we all had loved when we were kids.”

“That’s not just some elaborate dream, Mike?” Gary asked, his eyes a little wetter than normal.

“I swear to you Gary, it was as real to me as this conversation we’re having now. I glimpsed something that I think very few on this side get to.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“It makes me thrilled, brother, to have proof that there is more to this life, especially now. To know that we have a soul and that when we are gone from here we go into the loving arms of those who have gone before.”

Good Luck!

'Gary, what are you doing?' I asked more peevishly than I should have.

'Reading the paper, did I really need to explain that?' he said as he turned the over-sized page.

Maybe it was the crinkling of the paper, the huge size of the medium or the fact that my friends were stranded on a roof top surrounded by zombies five miles away. But I was pacing around like I had smoked some crack and while I was waiting for it to kick in I had snorted a couple rails of coke.

'You know that paper is over four months old, right?' I stopped my pacing long enough to berate him with that fact.

My brother seemed to gain some sense of enjoyment from my discomfort. He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the small metal table.

'How the hell can you read that thing anyway? It's too damn big.”

'You know, little brother, not all of us had our noses shoved up the Internet's ass. The cultured prefer the news the old fashioned way.”

'Yeah, stale and irrelevant,” I replied

He smiled and kept on reading. “Wow, this guy took out a full page ad the night the zombies came.”

I finally sat down, I was beginning to wear a groove into the floorboards. “Now I'm not really curious, but since there's nothing else going on, what the hell was so special about this ad?'

'How much do you think it costs to run a full page ad?'

'Really? You're going to make me jump through hoops before you answer me?'

Gary had a look of bemusement on his face.

'Fine, I know a dinky little one inch ad runs about five hundred bucks, so a full page ad...” I stopped to think. “Has to be close to four thousand bucks.”