“Shit.” I said. I rubbed my head before I realized it didn’t actually hurt, which I might have expected it to do after that fall. I looked down to check my legs and it didn’t take me very long to realize that I was NOT on a ski slope in Aspen, not by a long shot. I still wore my bright red ski pants, though there didn’t seem to be much need for them. Not that it was hot, really, but it wasn’t cold either. It was…I wracked my brain but the best I could come up with was that it was the absence of temperature. Not in the zero Kelvin sense where molecular movement stopped, but more like temperature had ceased to matter.

“Am I dead?” I asked nobody in particular, patting myself down as if I might find the presence or absence of corporeality. Could ghosts, or spirits, touch themselves, I wondered? I looked around for the first time and all I saw was gray. Not a fog, the entire landscape was just a monotone gray, nondescript surface. The ground was an undefinable substance and stretched endlessly unto the horizon, where it merged with something just barely lighter, more insubstantial, that might be sky. Stacked in neat rows were box-like structures, like a square forest. It too stretched eternally into the distance, the boxes getting smaller and smaller until they were indistinguishable from the ground.

I don’t know what I expected from the afterlife but it was undeniably not this. I would have accepted fire and brimstone or multi-eyed, multi-winged angels, or even the sensation of floating timelessly in a golden cloud, but this…the overwhelming dreariness of it…Malvina Reynolds must have had a near death experience one time.

<i>Little boxes on the hillside…little boxes made of ticky-tacky…little boxes on the hillside…little boxes just the same</i>

I started walking, the sensation of time and distance dulled either by some fundamental quality of eternity or by the overwhelming sameness of the landscape. It was quiet, the other occupants perhaps in their homes—mausoleums? Nothing moved or changed. I walked for a moment or a millennium before I sighted another human—ghost? Soul? Spirit? Who knew, really. He was a gray man in a gray work suit, skin that might once have been peach, hair that might once have been salt-and-pepper, a long, philisophical beard. He could’ve died yesterday or during the Roman Empire, there was no way of knowing.

“Am I…?” I asked him, hesitant to finish the sentence.

“Almost certainly.” He said. I narrowed my eyes, looking around. “You looking for the big guy?”

“God?” I asked. “Sure…or anything…I dunno…familiar.”

“He quit.” The man said.

“I’m sorry, he what?”

“Quit. Buggered off. Gave it up for a bad job.”

“Can he do that?” I asked. The man shrugged.

“He’s God.” He said, as if that answered anything.

“So now what?” I looked at the row after row of ticky-tacky boxes in front of me.

“He took all the magic with him, but you’ll know which one is yours.”

“Oh good.” I sighed. I didn’t even say goodbye, just put one foot in front of the other, through the rows of gray.

It was going to be a long eternity.