Take a Number

The afterlife, it turns out, has a ticketing system. I died on a Tuesday and was issued ticket 4400912 and a laminated card that said PLEASE DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE, OR REINCARNATE WHILE WAITING. The waiting room was beige in a way that felt deliberate, almost editorial, as if someone had auditioned several beiges and chosen the most disappointing. There were chairs. The chairs were the chairs of all waiting rooms everywhere, the platonic chair, slightly too low, slightly too hard, designed by someone who hated both sitting and standing equally. A woman next to me had been waiting, she said, since the Bronze Age. She had a thermos. I asked her what the complaint was, what we were all queuing to complain about, and she looked at me with the patience of four thousand years and said, dear, you'll know it when the form asks. The form, she said, has a way of finding it. Then a number was called and it was not mine and the room sighed as one organism and resettled.