Daydreams of Angels by Heather O'Neill

Author:Heather O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711221
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

HEAVEN

Grandfather claimed to have been dead a few seconds once, when he was nine. The story went that he’d been so cold in his house that he froze to death in the middle of the night. Lucky for him, his mother had been boiling water for tea and porridge early in the morning and had come in to wake him when she did. Seeing that he was blue, and that his hair was frozen and sticking straight up, she put him in the bathtub and covered him with tea and hot water and she yelled for all his brothers and sisters to come and rub his fingers and his toes. And finally, he came back to life.

“Impossible!” my brother would scream when my grandfather told his tale.

“It’s not impossible at all,” Grandfather would counter. “You get perfectly preserved when you’re frozen. They defrost cavemen all the time. Even after five thousand years. The scientists buy them a fashionable suit, take them out for a steak dinner, and they’re as good as new.”

My brother and I believed that my grandfather, as he often did, had mistaken something he’d seen in a Hollywood comedy for real life.

Just the same, the time he had died was far and away one of Grandfather’s best stories.

* * *

Grandfather had no idea what actual heaven was like because he had never gotten that far. He just knew about the train ride there. You see, according to him, when you died, you ended up on the platform of a huge railway station. There were thousands of cars, such an impossibly long line of them that you couldn’t even see the last one. He said you don’t realize how many people die in a single morning until you’re dead and standing in a crowd among them. He said the crush of people was worse than Coney Island on the Fourth of July. The conductor had to make many stops at many platforms so there wouldn’t be a stampede.

He said the year was 1942, so a lot of the adults showed up in terrible shape. Especially the soldiers, who were missing limbs and drinking from metal flasks. A soldier in a wheelchair was softly asking an angel if there was any way he could get his legs back, and the angel told him it wouldn’t be a problem once he got to heaven. Then he safety-pinned a little blue card to the soldier’s jacket that read “URGENT.” Quite a few people had these cards pinned to them, and despite all their infirmities, Grandfather said, they were the happiest-looking people he had ever seen.

* * *

The angels sorted through everyone, rushing about and chain-smoking cigarettes—for as it turned out, in heaven, smoking was good for you. They gave all the children first-class tickets that allowed them to ride in the cars at the front of the train. There were hordes of children too, Grandfather said, as children died all the time back then. They were all dressed in the tuxedos

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