Thoughts
Acrylic on canvas 10" x 11.5"
Aditi Sawant attended Jasper High School in Plano, Texas, and this piece of theirs first appeared inVoicesin 2023.
My End of the Bargain
Niles Reddick
I’ve been thinking a lot about what comes after life, if it’s really a choice between heaven and hell based on decisions we’ve made. I’d like to be in heaven, but I think most of my friends and relatives went to hell. Sometimes, I dream about them, and they are hot, red, and sweaty and reaching out through space and time for ice water that I can’t give them. I recall my granddaddy who was honest, humble, and good, but he didn’t go to church. At night he sipped Jack on the porch and smoked cigars and played Carter family songs on his Jew’s Harp, and in the morning, he sat on the porch and drank chicory coffee and smoked Marlboros. The church where he’d been baptized as a child was just down the road, and he watched people come and go on Sundays for sixty years. It was all a blur when he learned he had liver cancer, and I asked him if I’d see him again in heaven one day. “Boy,” he paused. (He called all six of his grandsons “boy” and his four granddaughters “girl” because we don’t think he knew our names.) “I don’t think I kept up my end of the bargain.” I knew what he meant, but he didn’t try to change it then either when he had time. He just curled up on the day bed in the den by the tv blanketed by an old quilt and took morphine until he was gone and we had a graveside service for him in that church cemetery. I reckon I’ll try to get to heaven. I don’t like sweating and enjoy ice water. Maybe some of my friends and relatives will be there, and we can remember the good things about the ones who aren’t.
