Strange Mammals by Jason Erik Lundberg

again, or little men in red pajamas poke you with pitchforks. But then I think, what if I get to Heaven and my really annoying relatives are there, and they won’t leave me alone, and I can’t go anywhere else because, well, it’s Heaven. I’d almost prefer pitchforks to that.
    “There could be Buddhist reincarnation, which I like a lot. They don’t see people as having souls, but more of a collection of sensory inputs, and that you never truly die, but change from one form to another, just like you’re not the same person as you are when you’re six years old as you are when you’re sixty, it’s the same with becoming a new person. We are reborn every day, if you think like this, with your cells constantly dying and being replaced, every seven years you’re a whole new person, and so it’s not much of a leap. Your karma determines your new body. With my luck I’d probably become a snail.
    “Or there could be nothingness, annihilation. All your experiences, all your memories, gone, poof, just like that, the void of emptiness. Your body returned to the earth to feed the worms and enrich the soil, but your soul, your identity, is just gone, lost forever.”
    Wade started to cry, unable to hold it in, the exhaustion and the sadness of this place and the discussion of the afterlife just too much. He covered his face with his hands. He thought of the helpless ignorance of what lay beyond, that undiscovered country, that awfully big adventure. He rested his head on the bed, and his father patted his head.
    “Shush now, don’t be sad. If I come back as a snail, I’ll visit you every day.”
    “I’m sorry I called you a bad father.”
    “Oh don’t worry about that. I wasn’t the best father, though I tried.”
    “I know you did.”
    “Besides, I’ve seen you, with your family, years from now. You speak Cantonese and your son grows up into a handsome man, a book publisher, and he visits every other weekend with his girlfriend, who becomes his wife, a beautiful woman, who looks like she should model lingerie but she’s a physicist. You and your wife grow happy and content, running the animal hospital even into your old age, revered by your community as the vets who are truly there for their patients. Your grandson, the piano prodigy, he has his father’s eyes, your eyes, my eyes, the eyes of every male in our family line. It’s the eyes, Wade, the eyes, the eyes . . .”
    His father’s words drifted away as if caught on a breeze, and his chest raised and lowered several more times and then went still. Wade’s cheeks and ears burned, hot enough to steam the air. The room, the ward, became instantly quiet. No squeak of shoes, no hiss from ventilators, no hum of life-monitoring electronics. No inhale of breath. The clock on the wall, analogue, ancient, spaded hands wrought of centuries-old iron, still, unmoving, halted. To tick no more.
    Time stopped.

King of Hearts
    I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d be far happier without you than with you.
    Moss paused in front of the flat’s bistre-hued front door, hand extended toward the stainless steel handle, frozen there as surely as though time had stopped. Where had he heard that sentence? The voice prickled the tendrils of his memory and teased him with its elusiveness even as he closed his eyes and scanned the labyrinthine passages of his inner mindscape in order chase it down, pounce panther-like, ingest it back into his recall centers, and therefore bring back not only who had uttered such a tremendously awful declaration to him, but why, and in what context. However, no matter how long he stood there, arm outstretched, looking for all the world like humanity’s most poorly-dressed mime, the memory would not come to him, evaporating into engrammatic mist, leaving him frustrated, impotent.
    Moss snapped open his eyes, glanced furtively around the exterior corridor of the housing block, then completed the gesture, reaching forward to grip the door’s