text: I woke up screaming, underwater, borne along at high speeds by a current of tightly-packed, bloody, smelly bodies just like mine. We filled the red river we were in from top to bottom like a massive migration of sardines. Stale, sweat-filled water rushed into my mouth, but I didn’t care. I was gonna scream for a while. Once I was done screaming I listened, and heard several other people in the current of bodies screaming too. For a little while I started up again and joined them, harmonizing on some wails and moans with the strangers next to me, packed together like the pipes of a wind chime. We sounded pretty nice. It hit me that I hadn’t breathed in a while, and that all the underwater screaming hadn’t forced me to surface for air, which I found strange--I had by *far* the smallest lungs of all my brothers and sisters. I rolled this around in my brain for a minute, and realized that I didn’t know why I was in a roiling torrent of 10% bloody water, 90% live human bodies, either. I didn’t know much of *anything,* come to think of it. I decided to surface and see what was what. I kicked off the guy below me and paddled upwards through the stacked, floating bodies, most of them wounded and bleeding in one way or another, turning the river a deep crimson. The amount of light around me made me think that I was close to the surface--but as I swam upwards, pushing arms and legs aside, my fingers occasionally brushing faces, noses, mouths--I realized this river was *deep.* The light level stayed consistent as I ascended through the floating, bleeding crowds of thousands of people, as if light itself was flowing through the river too, illuminating the faces and bodies of every shape and size of person. The light was an orange-red. I had the thought that this must be what it’s like to be inside a vein. Finally, after something like twenty minutes of ascending, I pushed aside a big, sticky man, kicked off a smaller woman below me with both feet, and felt my fingertips enter something that was unmistakably not liquid, although it was still heavy and thick with fumes. One more push, my head broke the surface, and I grabbed on to the guy I had pushed aside like a piece of driftwood, throwing my elbows up onto his belly and dragging myself aboard. He didn’t seem to notice. I took some deep breaths of the foul air although by this point I knew I didn’t need to breathe, and had a look at the landscape surrounding the fast-moving river of bodies. The first thing I noticed was that wherever I was seemed to be completely flat, free of the limiting curvature of the earth. As such, I could see for countless miles in every direction, the only obscurant the hazy stink and fumes emitting from the people around me. The sky was deep blood red, hanging with heavy black clouds. They seemed to routinely fall onto the steel-grey plains all in one piece like anvils and explode on the ground below, blossoming out into flowers of jet-black liquid that flowed into the tributaries and lakes linked to the massive river I was in. I wondered if every single waterway in my view was filled with bodies too. The river we all flowed through seemed to stretch on forever, every inch coursing with human bodies. I wondered just how deep it was--and more importantly, how I got here. After a few more seconds of unproductive musing, I decided to ask the man whose belly I clung to like a life raft. “Hey!” Nothing. “Hey--big man!! Big fella! Wake up!” He slowly lifted his head out of the water and looked at me. He was not a pretty sight, eyes sunken deep into his head, deep cuts slashing the sallow skin that clung to his cheeks, jowls that hung low and rested against his neck--but his voice was warm and kind. “Yeah?” “I was wondering if you knew where we are.” The big fella looked around as if he were just sort of taking things in for the first time, and he looked back at me with horror in his eyes. He spoke in a low whisper. “I don’t know.” “Any guesses?” I watched a little tear form in his eye as he realized his answer. “I think we’re dead, kid. I think I think this is hell.” I looked around and thought about this. Where we were did *certainly* correlate with depictions of hell that I’d seen. I did have no memory of how I got here, and the screams that surrounded us and bubbled out of the depths of the river sounded a lot like the screams of the damned. The red sky, the gunmetal plains, the river of living corpses--all of it had a distinctly hell-esque flavor that I couldn’t deny. One of the damned below grabbed my leg. I jumped like a spooked cat and pulled myself fully onto the big fella, legs and all, and sort of balanced on him on all fours like he was a surfboard. The water and his mass were buoyant enough to keep us afloat, and he seemed so disturbed by his own revelation that he didn’t mind me riding on his stomach. I’m a pretty small guy, anyway. While he processed his emotions, I tried to see where the river was flowing towards. It meandered and coiled like a snake towards the faraway horizon, cutting the empty grey plains in twain-- but I could see no end. I turned back to Big Fella, who had started to cry and quake with sobs, threatening to send me back into the drink. “Hey now--cut that out! We’re gonna be okay, man! We’re in a dream--we can’t be dead! I don’t remember dying!” He sniffled and wiped his tears away. “I do.” I looked at him and knew he was telling the truth. My heart sank. “Are you sure?” “Yeah. Dead sure.” I sighed deeply and prayed that this was a nightmare. “How’d it happen, man?” “Some guy broke into my house late at night--my wife heard, and she woke me up. I grabbed the gun that I kept under the bed--” “Holy shit. That’s nuts. I’ve always wanted a gun under my bed.” “Yeah--so--so I went down the stairs, only I’m so *big*, you know--I can’t stop the stairs from creaking, and he heard me, the burglar, and he--he was faster than me, and dressed in all black, and he shot at me--” “He had a gun too?” “Yeah. He had some pistol.” “Did he hit you?” “No--that time he missed. I dodged him.” “You *dodged a bullet?”* “You tell me. I ducked and it didn’t hit me.” “Damn. Then what?” “I raised the gun to try to shoot, but he was so quick--and he shot me for real that time, in the chest, and I went head over heels down the stairs--and, and--we always had this big fucking picture window at the bottom of the stairs and I always told my wife, honey, we shouldn’t have a window there, someone’s gonna trip down these slippery old wooden stairs and go right out the window--” “So you fell through the window.” “Yeah. Landed right on my head and I woke up here.” “Geez.” I sat with that for a little bit. The current of bodies behind us raised up in a giant wave and crashed on us, and I held tight to Big Fella as we were buffeted by limbs and bloody water. Slowly we evened back out and continued moving with the current at the clip we were before. “You think he got your wife too? The burglar?” “I hope not. I don’t wanna see her--it’d be too embarrassing. I hope she knows I was trying to protect her before I tumbled out of the window like one of the three stooges, though.” I laughed a little bit and thought. Big Fella seemed to be warming up to me, his little passenger. I looked around at all the people around us. They all bore the wounds of their deaths, but no one was dead--most of them were just sleeping, breathing quietly, undisturbed by the screams from below. Some were clothed in soaking garments, some nude--me and Big Fella were thankfully both clothed. He interrupted my thoughts. “How did you kick the bucket?” “I don’t remember.” “Think about it. It’ll come back to you. It did for me.” I thought as hard as I possibly could and saw a few images--an axe, one of my brothers, a can of green paint. The images seemed--severed. Disconnected. Suddenly, some skinny guy with a bullet hole in his forehead poked his head out from the mass of bodies right next to us. He didn’t look like anyone else in the river--he looked strong, healthy--fully awake. His eyes were shining a little bit. I called out to him. “Hey! Do you know where we are?” The guy treaded blood and looked over to us. His face lit up. “You guys are awake?” “Isn’t everyone else?” He glanced out at the endless deluge of bodies. “Not really. Most people wake up and freak out for a while, and then go back to sleep. It’s rare you get people who are really moving around.” Big Fella piped up. “Are we in hell?” “I don’t think so. I think everybody comes here after they pass on--I think this river’s all there is.” “How do you know that?” “I swim around a lot. If you get strong enough you can move around as you like and see a lot of people. I’ve met a lot of great people, world leaders, pastors, missionaries, all that. Everyone who would be supposed to go to heaven is here, I think.” I jumped in, even though I knew I was gonna derail the conversation. “My brother cut my head off.” Big Fella and the swimmer stared at me. “What the hell did he do that for?” “I don’t remember. I just remember him cutting my head off. That’s how I died.” “I guess that makes sense. I was gonna ask you about the big cut on your neck.” “...I think it was something about paint.” The two of them were silent for a while after I said that. I didn’t blame them--I didn’t really know what to say either. Finally I broke the silence. “Is there an end to the river?” The swimmer looked at me with sort of a sheepish smile on his face. “I’ve been here a couple hundred years--I swam once for a few decades, straight forward. Swam through the 80’s, the 70’s, through the 1500s, the Roman Empire, all the way back to cavemen-- every single person’s arranged in time order of when they died unless people break rank and swim around--and ahead of the cavemen was just empty, dark red water, going on for as far as I could see. Same thing if you go backwards far enough. Sometimes it’s fun to hang out in the back and watch all the new people pop in and start freaking out. But not that fun.” “You ever try to get out of the river and walk across the plains?” “It’s boiling hot. I tried for a little and it was just too much--jumped right back in.” I came down from all fours and laid on top of Big Fella like a lizard sunning itself on a boulder. He didn’t mind. “So it’s just the river, forever.” “I think so, yeah.” “You ever look for your family or anything like that?” “Too many people. The river’s a couple miles deep, at least, and there’s people occupying every single inch for miles. Couldn’t find ‘em. Billions of people here.” We all thought about that for a while. “Why’s everyone sleeping?” The swimmer smiled the same sort of sorry-to-deliver-the-news type smile. “It’s just how it goes. People wake up, they figure out where they are, someone lets them know the river goes on forever, they thrash around for a while, then they go to sleep as often as they can. Some people prefer up top, some like it way down below. There’s a couple swimmers like me who go around meeting people. It all gets old after a while. It’s mostly just boring once you get past the initial horror of it.” Me and Big Fella stared at him, and he tried to not look too sad. Big fella spoke, quietly. “Is God anywhere?” The swimmer looked even sadder, and gave a tiny shake of his head. “Well--I should go. Maybe I’ll see you guys around, huh?” “Yeah.” “Yeah. See ya around.” With that, the swimmer ducked his head back under the waves of people and was gone. Me and Big Fella were all alone, surrounded by every single person who had ever died, screaming or sleeping or letting themselves be carried by the current. “You gonna go look for your wife?” “Maybe later. I don’t know if she’s dead, anyway. I’ll wait a few years--maybe she’ll forget how stupidly I went out. You gonna go find your brother and get revenge?” “He *definitely* won’t be dead for a few more years.” We looked at each other, me and Big Fella, and we sort of had a moment together, and both of our eyes filled with tears as we thought about where we were. I don’t know why, but I put my head down on his chest and hugged him tight, and he hugged me back. His chest was warm and when he spoke I could feel his diaphragm rumble. “What’s your name?” “Tommy.” “That was my son’s name.” “What’s yours?” “Jim.” “D’you mind if I call you big fella?” “That’s alright with me.” “Cool.” Jim yawned real big, and I did too. I took a look around at the fast-flowing current, at the people’s wounds, at the stench and fumes rising from their bodies. I imagined all the people, slumbering miles below, filling the river with their never-ending blood, wrapped up in a blanket of silence and dark. I thought of my brothers and sisters and tried to think of why they would decapitate me over paint, and then decided I’d rather not remember. I hugged Big Fella tighter, and he did the same to me. Before we knew it we were both asleep in each others’ arms, borne along by the endless, boring river of blood to a destination we would never reach.