Hell is nothing like I expected. Although it should be obvious, once you think about it, that without a body there’s not going to be any burning or torturing or pushing boulders uphill for all eternity.

It took me a few days (or maybe it was months, or years, there’s no way to tell), but I figured out I’m some kind of energy blob—sightless, weightless, drifting. I know I exist because I’m thinking (was that Plato or Socrates?), and somehow I know I’m not in a coma or an isolation tank or a virtual reality experience. It’s the afterlife, and it’s forever.

There are others around me. Their presence is a ripple, like a magnet that’s attracting and repelling at the same time. Some of them are in clumps and clusters, some single or in pairs. They all seem to be avoiding me. People weren’t drawn to me when I was alive, so I guess there’s no reason they should seek me out now I’m dead. But still, nobody wants to sit alone in the cafeteria.

Hannah won’t be here, I know that. Her life lasted four innocent years. It’s Emmett I need to find. It’s as though the last 50 years of my life have been ripped away and I’m back in the days after the accident, desperate to confess to Emmett, but robbed of the opportunity to bathe myself in his anger, to endure his contempt, his hatred, his anything.

A cold core of dread fills me. What if he’s not here either? Some say what he did was a mortal sin, but it’s got to be borderline at worst compared to all the other sins. Compared to what I did.

I try to focus on my surroundings. If I concentrate, I can hear something from the other presences. Not words, but a pulse of emotion or a spark of memory. I visualize these interactions as little dialogues, although I know it’s just me projecting my own interpretation. Statistically speaking, most of them won’t even know English.

—Uh oh, a newbie, says one, and scurries away.

Another one draws closer and I feel a tug, a gentle tapping at my memories as though they’re a clump of partially-melted ice cubes and someone needs to free one for their evening whiskey. My most recent memory pops forward, the memory of my death, with my favorite niece and her husband by my bedside, reassuring me I was going to a better place. Believing I’d led a life deserving of everlasting glory.

The memory glows and expands and the tugging grows stronger. They’re trying to steal it. I resist, feeling panicked even without a heart to pound or a throat to constrict. The pulling changes to a push and I see another death scene, one with sirens, crumpled metal, the smell of gasoline and blood, and a searing rip that extinguishes all light.

—I’m sorry, I tell them.

But there’s no sadness as the memory settles in alongside my own; the emotion is calm acceptance. Other memories drift in to join it: some mundane—the smell of morning coffee, the warmth of an outdoor shower—others more wrenching. One feels ancient, its edges crumbling from millennia of retelling, and I realize not all the memories originated in this being.

I lessen my hold on the memory of my niece and it spreads into the other presence. Together we savor the scene, and I feel gratitude flow back to me along the connection.

—You’re welcome, I say.

We separate and I’m drifting again, sifting through my old memories and my new ones.

*     *     *
I remember now, it was Descartes. I think, therefore I am, and apparently always will be.

*     *     *
I’m not sure if it’s sleep exactly, but I zoned out for a while. My first friend is nowhere to be found. I’m starting to recognize a couple of the presences nearby who haven’t moved much. It’s like I have a celestial radar, and each presence has a unique signature that reflects back a sense of who they are. Or were.

Let’s call these presences souls. Because, why not?

My plan is to find somebody in charge. I’ll ask around, see if any of these others know how everything is organized and where I should be looking for Emmett. Are our souls cataloged by time of death, place of birth, depth of sin? And I have to know if there is a way I can visit Hannah—some sort of day pass, perhaps. Or a way to watch her from afar, even for a nanosecond.

I wonder if I’ll recognize Emmett, if I find him. My sense of him is so bound up in how he looked—Sunday morning stubble, lopsided smile, the scar on the curve of his shoulder—and how he looked at me. Adoringly. Trustingly. Will I recognize his soul? The essence of Emmett?

I sense a vast presence approaching, or rather a vast swarm of microscopic presences. One soul, or many? Each presence is unique, but there’s a single-mindedness that vibrates in unity. I try to move away, but the swarm surrounds me and I feel flickers of probing like a million tiny pin pricks. I take a mental breath and relax into the white noise. Cold water rushes over me, and the color green, and I’m floating in the open ocean, absorbing the nourishment of the sun’s rays. It triggers a memory of a beach trip: me dangling chubby Hannah legs in the shallows, while Emmett goofs on a wakeboard and splashes my bare stomach. Unbidden, another memory surfaces. Hannah calling from her playroom, Mama, I can’t reach it.

I try to shut it away, clamp it down, but it’s too late. The tiny fragment of memory flows out of me in a thousand directions at once, yet it’s still with me.

All around me the swarm shares visions of blue skies and storms and silver flashes of sea creatures, and the creep of the ever-present cold. Gradually the sensations fade, and I am alone.

For a long while I float in numbness.

I’m trying to make sense of the experience. Plankton or algae would be my guess. Which means to find Emmett, I not only have to hunt through the 100 billion human souls who have ever lived, but also trillions of other animals and plants. And what if there’s life elsewhere in the universe? Do they all end up here?

I also need to reconsider where here is. What on earth could a bunch of plankton do that would lead to eternal damnation?

Maybe this isn’t hell after all.

But there’s no way I can be in the other place.

*     *     *
When someone dies, the living murmur reassurances to each other. He’d want you to go on living your life, they say. She loved you so much, she’d want you to let go.

I never believed that. I thought if I died, I wouldn’t want my loved ones to enjoy life without me. I’d want them to hurt, to burn with grief, to rage at their God about the injustice. I’d want strangers to know my name, and be sad.

I was wrong. It’s the remembering that matters. You who are left can be happy, love whoever you want, and spread joy everywhere if that’s your thing. Just don’t forget us. Talk to us, write to us; reminisce about the good bits, forgive us the bad bits.

Perhaps my niece is speaking to me now. Remember that time you took us apple picking, and we ate cider donuts and your shoe got stuck in horse manure?

I did good things too.

*     *     *
I’m getting the hang of the other souls. I can mostly tell which ones are people, and which ones are mammals or birds or insects. If you want to avoid them, like the swarms of plankton and viruses, you can focus elsewhere and you drift away from them. Otherwise, you can connect for a while. Some share a lot of memories, some trickle only a few back and forth, and some just seem to enjoy the companionship. Whenever I connect, I share a memory of Emmett, putting him out there like a Wanted poster and watching for a glimmer of recognition.

A lot of them still avoid me, particularly the plants and trees. At first, I thought it was personal. Could they tell? Not exactly what I did, but that I’m a bad person?

Then I thought there might be some kind of clock speed for different species. Just like it was overwhelming for me to be among the plankton, perhaps the plants have a hard time with beings that run around all over the place. It would be like us trying to meld with a mosquito.

But now I realize it’s because of our deep-seated conviction that humans are superior to other species, particularly plant life. I think they sense that.

I know now that this isn’t hell. Not with oak trees and spider ferns and ants and sheep and humans from up and down the scale of virtue. And nobody’s in charge. Once again I’ve been cheated of my punishment. How can I atone when nobody acknowledges my sins?

But if this isn’t hell, then Hannah might be here. I imagine her soul—pure and curious and joyful—and try to silence the rustle of hope. I haven’t earned it.

I find myself linking with a bear. I sink deeply into the memory it’s sharing and we’re there together, at the side of a river, ripping the head off a wriggling salmon and feeling the sweet flesh slide down our gullet. Another bear approaches, cuffs the fish from our claws, and runs off with it. We dwell a moment in the defeat.

I let the memory of Hannah flow toward my companion.

She’s in the tiny bedroom we’ve converted into her playroom. I’m next door and I hear her clearly.

—Mama, I can’t reach it.

—I’ll be there in a minute, angel.

—It’s too high.

—I said I’ll be there. Just wait.

—I want to play with it.

—Stop it! Play with something else for a minute.

I pull away, cutting off the memory. I sense the bear’s momentary confusion, which changes to indifference as it floats away.

For a while, a long while, I don’t mix much, and when I do I share only the safe and the mundane. It’s two doves that finally release the memory. They’re irresistible as they pass—their love radiates like a beacon. They must have been traveling together for a long time, as I can’t tell whose memories are whose. I bask in their mutual devotion as we float together, and eventually I lower my guard and feel the memory ease out.

—Mama, I can’t reach it.

Annoyed at the interruption but realizing she's not going to stop, I end my delaying tactics and go to the playroom. I open the door just in time to see the huge bookcase—the one we’d proudly installed a few days earlier, after painting it yellow and eggshell blue to match the room, the one we hadn’t yet secured to the wall despite our best intentions—toppling forward with Hannah clinging to a shelf.

It was a fluke, it caught her wrong, it was nobody’s fault—people tried to be helpful. But Emmett thought it was his fault, and I knew it was mine.

I stay awhile with the doves. I know they have no understanding of playrooms and bookcases, but every soul knows the pain of loss.

*     *     *
There aren’t many animals that judge others like humans do. You’re worthy; you’re not worthy. The other primates, dogs, and chickens with their pecking order. And cats, definitely cats.

*     *     *
How can this go on forever? I was tortured with a long, undeserved lifetime after Hannah’s and Emmett’s were cut short. Gray, numb years of pointless distraction, trying to erase the technicolor memories of line dancing with Emmett, both of us ending up in a hopeless heap of laughter. Trying to forget the pure timbre of Hannah’s squeal as my lips blew a raspberry against her bare stomach.

Forever has no closure.

I’m spending time with a woman who jumped from a bridge after her second husband left her. I find her presence reassuring, as it eliminates any last doubt that Emmett can be here too. She seems to find relief in Emmett’s story, so we share my memory of him often. I’m hoping repetition will make it easier to face.

Over and over, I watch him blame himself for not fixing the bookcase to the wall. I see the tears on his cheeks and hear the refrain.

—It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.

I don’t correct him.

Hell is what I’m carrying around until I let Emmett know the truth.

*     *     *
Sometimes I’ll help a newly arrived soul, even though it’s demanding work. They’re disoriented and defensive, like I was, and I try to share happy, everyday memories of Hannah to put them at ease.

It’s hard to keep track of time. One day my niece and her family will be here too.

Not too soon, I hope.

*     *     *
It happened.

I’d been traveling with four other souls. Others had joined and left, but we were a core and we knew most of each other's lives. One soul was sharing a memory of a languid afternoon love affair when mine just popped out.

We’re in the spare room, as it doesn’t feel right to use the bed where I sleep with my husband. Hannah’s in her playroom next door and believes this man who visits her house when Daddy’s away is an electrician. We have to be quiet. I'm stroking his stomach, which is tan and hairless and nothing like Emmett’s patches of dark curls, when I hear her call.

—Mama, I can’t reach it.

—I’ll be there in a minute, angel.

We smile and his lips brush my cheek before finding their way to my mouth.

—It’s too high.

I pull back from the kiss.

—I said I’ll be there. Just wait.

—I want to play with it.

—Stop it! Play with something else for a minute.

But the mood has broken, and with a grunt of frustration I unlock the door and go to the playroom.

I stay with her while he calls 911, though we both know it won’t help. I make him leave before the ambulance arrives.

What I did was a sin in just about every religion there is. Maybe I can persuade myself that it didn’t lead to Hannah’s death—that if I’d gone to her when she first called, I would still have been too late. Or if I’d been alone, if the affair had never happened, I would have been downstairs in the kitchen, or in the bathroom, and I would have reached her even later.

But sins of omission have consequences too.

If I’d told Emmett the truth about that day, he could have blamed me instead of himself. He could have been furious, left me, chosen to stay alive.

If. If.

The memory spreads through the group and I feel soothing emotions flowing my way. I don’t deserve that. I wrench myself apart, feeling a resistance from the others before our connection fractures and I’m free.

I’m alone for years, eons—not remembering, not thinking, not worthy of company.

*     *     *
There’s something resting with me. I probe. It’s something small that moves between the underground and the light. I sink into its memories and I’m flooded with smells—sweet, pungent, rotten, musty. I recognize the pleasant aromas of bread and apple, and others that would have nauseated me if I were alive. For this creature there’s no difference. It’s all information: an alert announcing sustenance, a calibration revealing the level of freshness or decay. My own memories—all of them—flow freely to my companion, joining a kaleidoscope of experience from a million other lives. This is an ancient soul.

You’d think it would be overwhelming for a small mind, but there seems no limit to what a soul can absorb when it renders no judgment.

*     *     *
I’ve stopped looking for Emmett. One day I will meet him again, and Hannah, but I feel no urgency. Like Schrodinger’s cat, there’s no way to know whether Emmett has seen the memory yet. But it’s out there, spreading from soul to soul throughout eternity, so you could say in theory he already knows. And because he knows—now, soon, or in the distant future (here, it’s all the same)—I can make peace with my actions and Emmett’s reaction, whatever it may be.

It’s becoming easier to connect with all kinds of creatures. Sometimes I relish the short-lived blaze of microscopic life, and other times I appreciate the patience of a being that lived hundreds of years. And after they leave, they’re still a part of me.

I can sense humans a long way off now. I spend the longest with people from my own era, as the memories make more sense and I enjoy the flash of recognition of places I’ve visited, though I’ve yet to meet anyone who knew me when I was alive. I’ve seen family groups—daughters and mothers and great-great grandmothers across the generations, bridged by overlapping memories of each other. When I find Emmett and Hannah, I think we should do that.

I feel a nudge and open myself to a new companion. We immerse ourselves in a memory of alighting on the branch of a cottonwood tree and preening our feathers to a smooth sheen. We join a chorus of cawing and launch into the clear air above the prairie, flying at the edge of the flock, part of the larger whole yet also separate and distinct. We glide on an upstream current, just for the joy of it, and savor the warmth of sunlight on our wings.