It didn’t suit him well to grieve, and he knew that much. Anger fit better, like a well tailored suit, opposed to the ill fitting, rented black blazer he now wore. As he stood there watching the casket lower into the ground, he was unable to feel any grief for his deceased lover. The people around him kept using words like, “stolen,” but the ones that drifted across John’s mind were all synonyms for “fled.”

Seriously, he couldn’t help but think, a little bit of cancer? Was it so easy to leave me behind? A few colonizing cells drifting around in your spine? The disease seems to be the

only evidence you had one at all.

As he got home, and opened the door to what was their apartment, it wasn’t despair he felt in response to the loneliness that emanated from the empty space, but rage. John wished he had a gun, he wished he had someone to fire it at. But the subject of his wrath had already escaped his grasp. A final cowardly act. Not only did he deny John the ability to continue loving him, he denied John the ability to enact revenge upon

him for running outside the bounds of his love.

As he paced around the rooms, his mind played back all the memories formed in their corners. Dinner at that table, laughing on that couch, loving on that bed. It was as he paced that he began to formulate an idea. John did not have a gun, but he did have someone to fire at. He walked to their balcony, and stepped out. He put his hands on the railing, and gazed down at the street below. He watched the ant sized people walking along it, and was suddenly thankful that Jacob had convinced him that the twenty-fourth floor, “wasn’t tooooo high up.” He clambered over the railing, and without taking a moment to think, flung himself towards the pavement.

First: darkness.

Then: light.

Finally: some third thing.

“Hello,” Jacob called out.

“Hello,” he heard his own voice call back to him.

“Echo,” he called out again, but there was no immediate reply. John tried to look around him, simultaneously understanding his surroundings entirely, and seeing nothing at all.

Eventually a response arose from the strange place, if it could be described as such, “that is not my name.” It was John’s voice still.

“What is?”

“I am called by many names. You would know me as God.”

“I see. Why do you speak with my voice?”

“You hearing your own voice when I speak says everything about you, and nothing about me,” it replied.

“Where is Jacob?”

“Heaven.”

“Bring me to him.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?”

“You killed yourself. Your parents brought you to church as a child. You know as well as I do as that is a prohibited action.”

“That shit is actually true?”

“For you it is. Because you believed it to be true when you did it, and you did it anyway.”

“So what?”

“So you are to be sent to the underworld: eternal suffering, torture, etcetera.”

“But Jacob got to go to heaven?”

“Yes.”

An idea began to rise up through the chaos in John’s head. His concerned expression transformed into a satisfied grin, “were you watching what he did in the tenth grade?”

“Enlighten me.”

John spent the next few hours (not that either of them could identify the passage of time) explaining everything that Jacob had done wrong in his life, from cheating on his seventh grade girlfriend with a boy, to stealing from a liquor store in college. It impressed the god precisely how much John remembered of Jacob’s life.

“Very well,” the deity spoke, “I will bring him down to join you.”

With this, John’s smirk transformed into a wide grin. He had done it. He had enacted his revenge. Now Jacob will suffer for what he has done.

There was a flash, or perhaps the lights vanished, or some concurrent mixture of the two. Suddenly, the only thing that stood out as concrete among this place of incongruence was the face of Jacob. It smiled gently as he walked towards his love.

Somewhere and nowhere, the god smiled too, for nothing had changed. Of course, none of the “sins” described actually applied to Jacob, as he lived his life an atheist. You must know this is how such things work. Rules only apply when you allow them. In the end John had still been sent to hell where he belonged, and Jacob remained in paradise. As you can see, death is full of these contradictions.

As their hands intertwined.

As they walked through the fiery gates of eternity.