The Afterlife Is Closed for Renovation

How it begins

The afterlife closed at noon on a Tuesday.

Vela had chosen Tuesday because arrivals were usually quiet.

By twelve fifteen, six souls stood beside the fountain and a dead butcher was complaining that the notice should have been larger.

The gate leaned three degrees toward the town.

A crack ran from the upper arch to the carved hand above the threshold. Rain had entered the joint for a century. Somebody had filled it with prayer wax, which was not an approved structural material.

Vela erected a barrier.

The butcher stepped through it.

"That," she said, "is exactly the sort of thing we need to stop."

He looked at the crack.

"How long?"

"Three days."

"What are we meant to do?"

She had not considered providing an activity schedule.

An old porter approached with a folded letter.

"Could I deliver this?"

Vela checked the temporary guidance.

One unfinished kindness permitted during closure.

"Who is it for?"

"My brother."

"Is he expecting you?"

"I hope not. He never liked surprises."

By evening, the town had begun making requests.

A dead grandmother was asked to explain a cake recipe. A former clerk was sent to find a missing deed. The butcher's widow asked him to move the freezer, forgetting for a moment that he could walk through it.

Nobody wanted the gate repaired by Friday.

Vela found the porter sitting outside a narrow house with a blue door.

"Have you delivered it?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

He held the letter against his knees.

"I've spent forty years deciding what to say. It occurred to me he might have something to say back."

Above the town, the damaged gate gave a low, tired groan.

Vela looked toward it.

Three degrees had become four.

The porter stood.

"Will it hold?"

"Only," she said, "if people stop asking it to do the work of living."

He knocked on the blue door.

Vela returned to her scaffolding.