The Next World

My eyes blinked open and I looked around to see a beautiful grassy green plain. I shook my head, I must be dreaming. The last memory that floated around my brain was me in that hospital and my daughter sitting next to me telling me not to die. Then I remember feeling very sleepy and closing my eyes. Then my daughter screamed. So was a dead then, impossible! I must be dreaming, that was it, I was dreaming and I was perfectly alive. But this didn’t seem like any dream I had ever had before. Besides, I could smell the flowers. Who could smell stuff in dreams? I smiled, a logical expiation. My daughter had put flowers beside my bed, easy. But then why was my forehead getting hot and my legs getting sticky from the grass? And I could feel the long grass, blowing in the wind and tickling my legs. I pinched my arm, hurt like hell. So, I wasn’t dreaming then, so what had happened? For the first time I looked down from my surroundings and to my hands. They were young, unwrinkled, and… green? My hands were green…? I stared down at them in amazement and for minutes I did not stir. Then I felt a light tap on my shoulder, I spun around. There was a figure, a girl. I think. She was tall and pretty and… green also?1

“Am I dreaming?” Were the first words that came out of my mouth. But immediately I felt foolish. If I were dreaming she would be part of the dream, so of course she would say no.2

“No, not dreaming.” She said smiling like a grownup does at a small child.3

“Am I dead?” I gasped forgetting all about my resent spout of logic.4

“We don’t call it ‘dead’ here, we call it truly alive.”5

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” As I talked I realized how childish my words sounded. I sounded like a moody pre-teen, not a seventy-year-old woman.6

The girl smiled bigger. “There are many worlds that you go through. Passing through each one as you die. This is the second world or the faery realm. We have a fine connection with the human realm. The human realm is the lowest realm, reserved for new souls that haven’t earned there way up. If you are good in your human life you become a faery.”7

“And if you’re bad...?”8

“You go back to the human world as a lesser animal.”9

“Okay, so now what?” I almost gasped at my childish voice.10

The girl shrugged. “You forget.”11

“Forget what?”12

She sat next to me on the grass. “The human world, and everything I told you. Soon in your mind humans will be myths, no more than fantasy. The thoughts of other words will be unbelievable. And a world without magic will seem unheard of.”13

“But why?”14

“You need to make choices in this world without knowing about consequences on your soul when you do evil.”15

“So I’ll never remember my daughter again?” I asked on the verge of tears.16

“In your next life you will. Now fall back into the grass and close your eyes. Soon you will be a baby faery with no memory of this. Be calm. Welcome to Summerland little one and enjoy your stay.”17