Fiction: The threshold

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The threshold

As if attracted by a magnet, he moved towards the light in front of him. He did not know if he was walking or flying, but what was clear to him was that his body weighed absolutely nothing. When he was in front of the threshold, he crossed it decisively.
He immediately felt the difference. The atmosphere was icy, dark, with a strange smell, full of spectral cacti and arid soil. Suddenly he was surrounded by a circle of shadows that simply wandered without raising their heads. He felt like asking where he was, in fact he approached one of them, but when the man raised his face, he saw that where his eyes should have been, two huge holes appeared.

He felt afraid and cold, and without knowing why, he wanted to return to his mother's womb. So he lay down in fetal form among the rubble and began to hear opaque voices speaking inside his head:

"You are one of us, welcome"

"Try to let go so that everything will be quicker and shorter".

He didn't know what they were talking about, but he got up and resumed his journey. He saw that another group of shadows was ahead of him, so he decided to catch up, but as he ran to reach them, he fell into a deep and endless hole. As he descended, the cold ended and warmth came to him: at the end there were burning coals and clouds of smoke waiting for him.

When he hit bottom, he discovered that he was now at the center of something and that thousands of eyes and hands were pointing at him. Black birds were flying above him and although he was out in the open, what he had over his head was not the sky, but a ceiling made of orange and black fire. At that instant he felt asphyxiated by the strong smell of sulfur and when he wanted to put his hands to his face, he realized that he was chained. On the other side of his hand, a fountain full of things was overflowing as if it were a rushing river. Among the things that were stuck were visions of the past.
He watched himself as a child run and go to school. The family home filled with busy, dirty rooms. He watched himself cry in a corner, while his siblings played with each other. He also saw his mother stirring the stews and seasoning the meats with the accumulated tears. Then he looked at himself as an adult, tired, bitter, working day and night. His children crying and his wife in front of the stove. It was as if his life was in front of thousands of mirrors that multiplied his days a million times.

The memories were reconstructing everything: the time he stole money from the company, the time he hid food so as not to share it with anyone, the times he was the cause of his mother's tears, his wife's tears, his children's tears. A black and white movie projected just for him, who was in the front row, with his eyes closed but listening to the whisper of the constellations.

After that, he began to sob and ran away. He went into the void feeling that behind him were great inquisitive eyes, blind eyes, eyes that hovered with the howl of guilt. It was then that he realized that he was no longer chained to anything and that he was at the bottom of the beyond, in the very darkness of the universe. The shadows, which previously circled around him, now took him by the hand and walked beside him. He was certain, at that instant, that he was dead and that this was not heaven.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Until a next story, friends