I don’t know how I ended up there. I know now, obviously, but at the time I thought I was asleep. Maybe I was drugged. I was standing somewhere but I didn’t know where because everything was black. The only light came from my memories. Greens from elementary school. White sunshine. Red… in my heart and on my lips. When my hand touched the light, I heard microscopic burning. Little flames dancing in the wrinkles of my thumb.

God breathed before he spoke. I felt His warm, wet exhale behind my ears. I might have stood in his lungs. Each inhale wrung the air out of me. Have you ever stood near a fire in the rain? Imagine letting your eyes touch the smoke, but it doesn’t sting.

I thought he was me when he first spoke. Then I realized he was using my voice. “Do you fear for your immortal soul?”

I said I didn’t have a soul. I believed it. My heart leaked blood down my chest and through my toes. Nothing inside me understood endurance— I did not have the strength for His redemption.

“I offer no such thing,” God said gently. “Saving a man’s soul interests me no more than saving a termite’s.”

Forever. I’m awake now, I know that’s true. But if my soul continues after death, but if I can’t change… Maybe time doesn’t stop, and my body grows and regrows, but He takes my soul and puts it in a merciless, identical circle. ◆

R.E. Duenas is an author from San Francisco, California.

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