#155 Ass Kicker

by Meg Czaszwicz Burke

I was sitting in the emergency room when the DOA rolled in. I asked the woman sitting next to me if she was ok. Most are not ok with sudden disembodiment, but she was within the realm of the normal reactions I see—shocked, but instinctively aware of what was happening. She looked at me.

“What now?”

This one was a real go-getter. So many ask about location, ‘is this heaven’, ‘is this hell’, ‘where am I’, or just clarification of what happened. But this one, she wants to get on with it. What now.

So I asked. I asked her the question usually reserved for later, when folks have had a chance to acclimate. “Any regrets?”

She quickly turned her face away from me with an upward sniff of her nose. My question seemed to sting at her a bit. “I thought I did what I was supposed to do.”

“According to whom?”

“To God.”

“What if there is no God?”

“Then I would have regrets.”

She was a go-getter, so I figured I’d get right to it.

I asked her the final question. “Are you ready to try again?”

She paused. “Is there a God?”

“Only if you need there to be.”

She looked down the hallway where her last body was called dead and covered with a sheet. She looked back at me determined, a little angry, and yeah, ready to kick some ass.

I smiled. “Labor and Delivery are on the fifth floor.”