Memory of Flesh

“Ticket please,” said the goblin, but it may have been an imp.It had a long, bulbous nose typical of maleficus goblinae, but it also had the barbed tail found in diaboli militis.Its parentage, as well as its gender, was questionable. Its monochrome gray shift was the sameshade as its skin, which tinted towards a deep red or a dark green, depending on the viewer.Its chubby palm, with long fingernails cracked with aeons of not being trimmed, accepted a small ticket from a skeletal hand. The goblin-slash-imp tore the ticket in two along a perforated line and returned the stub to the skeleton.The remainder of the ticket, which read in a runic script “River Lethe Riverboat,” dropped into a slot in the turnstile.The turnstile cranked and acounter clicked from a number large enough not to have a name to the same plus one.

“Ticket please,”the ticket-taker repeated to the near loss of all other vocabulary. Another ticket, another stub, another crank, another click.If time had any meaning in such a place it would have passed unheeded by change. The parade of skeletal shades cranked through the turnstile and into the stygian shadows of the boat ramp below, already forgotten by the ticket-taker and soon to be forgotten by themselves.

“Ticket please.”

“There’s been a mistake,” said the next skeleton, “this can’t be right.I’m a good person. I don’t belong here.”

The goblin guessed that the counter had progressed exactly five-thousand seven-hundred and twenty-two since the last troublemaker. It was right.The ticket-taker took a step back to look into the empty eye sockets of the skeleton.The memory of flesh wrapped around his bones, barely visible to any but the ticket-taker and the skeleton himself.

“Can’t complain to me.I’m not in charge here, I just take the tickets.”

“Surely someone around here knows what’s going on. I demand to speak to your supervisor. I’ve been standing in this line forever.”

Uh-oh, thought the ticket-taker. Passengers were supposed to have lost their sense of time before they arrived at the turnstile.This one must have been a forceful personality before he started to stand in line.

“Nothing I can do about it.My job is to just stand here and make sure no one comes through without a ticket.”

“I don’t know what the line is for,” said the skeleton.

“That’s all right mister, I don’t know either. Not my job to know.” The ticket-taker was trying to remember anything it could about recalcitrant souls. It hadn’t needed to do anything fancy since the last problematic passenger.

“I said my prayers every night. I helped old ladies across the street. I didn’t think an evil thought about anyone.Now I’m here in something more boring that reading Dante.”

The ticket-taker remembered Dante, about a billion souls back, and he was another trouble maker. When he had arrived, he looked at the ticket-taker, hung his bony head and said “Damn. Got it wrong,” then trudged through the turnstile. The ticket-taker hadn’t given it much thought since.

“Where’s heaven?” asked the skeleton, “Maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere.”

“Well, that maybe,” said the ticket-taker.“You may have made a series of choices in life, but you weren’t aware of all of the choices you faced.It’s not the intentional choices you make or a fragment of the fabric of your soul that determines if you should be here or somewhere else.Maybe you scratched a cat behind the ears instead of under her chin, or didn’t smile at someone who could have used it.Infinite choices that are too small to see determine the fate of the individual soul.The balance sheet of good and evil istoo large to quantify.”

“I see,” said the shade. The ticket-taker suspected that it was a lie, but that wasn’t important.It had to keep the line moving.A little Quantum Theology was usually enough to introduce doubt in the passenger, and push them through the turnstile, after which it would be too late to turn back. The memory of flesh faded from the skeleton.He handed over his ticket, took the stub, and walked through.

The ticket-taker grunted with the satisfaction of a job well done and resumed the regular rhythm of shuffling shades through the turnstile.It pondered the pattern of the troublemakers and wondered if there was any significance to the number five-thousand seven-hundred and twenty-two, but it couldn’t think of any. It wasn’t even a proper prime. It was just another mystery of the universe that was beyond his understanding.

“Ticket please,” it intoned with the relaxed attitude that nothing would happen for while, and for a while nothing did. Skeletons shuffled, the turnstile cranked, the counter clicked, and stubs were fed into the slot. Eventually it forgot all about the trouble of the past and let its mind wander into the oblivion that only tedium can create.

“Ticket please.” No ticket came forth.The ticket-taker hadn’t been paying any attention to the parade before it and looked up in surprise.The next passenger wasn’t a skeleton.It was a goblin, but it may have been an imp.It had a long bulbous nose and a barbed tail and wore a monochrome gray shift that was less threadbare than the ticket-taker’s. Its fingernails had barely begun to grow past the pudgy pads of its fingers.

“Time to clock out,” said the new goblin-slash-imp. The ticket-taker reached into its pocket and pulled out a small card and half a pencil. The card had aseries of numbers on it.The ticket-taker recorded the number on the counter and handed the card and the pencil to its replacement.The two goblins exchanged places. The ticket-taker fished its ticket out of its pocket.

“Ticket please,” said the goblin. The ticket-taker handed over its ticket, took the stub, and walked through the turnstile, its memory of flesh fading as it walked down the ramp.

END