Indie & Hale

"I know what it means to be dead."

I looked at my companion with not a little skepticism and she clarified. "Well, I've never been dead before, obviously, but I completely understand the implications and personally I don't see a problem."

"I know," I replied simply.
"But when I told him that, he shot me anyway. What do you think it means?"
"That depends on where you went when you died."

Hale Larck had just finished telling me about her dream during the night before. In it, she had been debating religion with Jesus Christ over coffee. Apparently, in spite of his presence, she had nobly stuck with her conviction/belief that his existence was unlikely. Raising his hand she had seen that Christ was toting a .356 Magnum. When she called his bluff and told him that her intended afterlife was made up of absolute oblivion, and that she gazed upon the prospect with wistfulness rather than dread, he shot her very dead.

"Of course it does, if I knew that I wouldn't need you to figure it out for me," she scoffed.
"In that case its pretty clear. Your subconscious says its me."
"Who's you?"
"Jesus Christ."
"I don't think it's saying that."
"Now that's what the experts would call denial."

She heaved an unnecessary sigh and indulged me, "Fine Indie, why do think you're Jesus?"

"It's you who--" she stopped me with a withering 'hurry-before-I-get-really-bored' look and I got on with my makeshift interpretation. "Okay, so you're having coffee with "Jesus". We'll, that's all we ever do. We're doing it right now, even! (I hope it's not too hard for you.) And your talking theology: one of our favorite subjects. Plus, he shoots you!"

She cocked an eyebrow at me, "And you do that all the time, huh?"

I pretended to look exasperated. "It's a metaphor, dear girl. I'm constantly putting a hole in the fabric of your reality, know what I mean? The similarities are too many to be denied."

We paused for a moment. Then, "You're not trying very hard," she says to me. And I thought my problem had been trying too hard. I shrugged. "If you want to doubt your one true savior, that's your problem. Besides, I don't buy into dreams as prophetic. You won't go down like that, I bet."

"That's not what I'm worried about..." Hale said with characteristic random mystery. Of course she didn't elaborate.

Shortly thereafter we decided it was time to go. We parted ways until that night when we'd both return to the house we shared rent on, along with three of our other friends.

It was four in the afternoon smack dab in the middle of a misty New York summer. While Hale went to start her bartending shift at a place called 'January's End', I left to return from my intentionally late lunch (consisting of coffee and still more coffee) to my own place of employment.

I used to wear the title of Librarian's Assistant, which basically meant I was a librarian without the proper, if ridiculously excessive, credentials. That was where I'd grown up in an itsy-bitsy town in Louisiana so that it felt less like a dirty government job and more like a community one. When I moved to this silly city though, I found out that government jobs are taken far too seriously. Still possessing an obsession with the scent of old books, I moved to the profit version of the same trade and now work in an independently owned used bookstore by the name of 'Tattered Remnants'. Sometimes we get customers in there just for the meaning behind the title. When we tell them they usually linger awhile, all charmed-like.

I, by the by, am Melinda Parks. My first name reminds me of the color gray for some reason so I try to go by 'Indie instead. I'm drawn to its possibilities: independent; indistinct; indifferent; indelible; in...decisive. My favorite is ????, yet in this I am deceived, for the instant devastation of change is...?!

[I wish for once "I owe my life to you" wouldn't sound so much like a reprimand.]