Landing (Finished Business)

..Achiel didn't even realize that he had begun his fall until he landed.

Heavily.

He even managed to slide for several feet after he hit the ground. He went through a telephone pole, through a bicycle chained to the telephone pole, through a partially opened door and, apparently, through a human being.

Achiel stood, pulled his gore-filled hair out of his eyes, and did a quick scan of the room. He was apparently in some sort of workshop.

A sculpture of sorts sat in the corner. It was made of bicycle parts. Achiel looked down at his leg. A spoke was sticking out of his calf: a souvenir from his landing. Achiel pulled it out of his flesh, and added to the work in progress.

He seated himself on a nearby stool. A pad stood near his elbow. He skimmed over it and scoffed..

"Dilettance isn't even a word, dumbass." He informed most of the corpse, which was now adding a whole new oeuvre to the mural on the far wall.

Achiel wove a hand over himself. Pieces of sidewalk, plasterboard,and Greg rose off his clothing and hovered, waiting for his command. He swung them into the corner, and looked directly up into the sun.

"I'm here." He called out. "And I'm afraid we've made a bit of a mess."

The voice that replied wasn't low, exactly, but that's the only word that comes close to describing it. Some who have heard the voice have done their best to create a better term for it, but it simply defies adjective or verb. The closest that anyone has ever come to depicting it was a 90 year old German woman named Amelia Gerzhuite who, on her deathbed, recalled the one time she heard it, at the age of five.

“Allesvoll” She said.

"Full of Everything".

Anyway, that Voice is speaking now.

"I'll clean it up later." The Voice replied to Achiel. "Don't worry."

"What now?" Achiel asked.

"Take a look around". The Voice told Achiel. "And tell me what you think,when you get back".

Achiel nodded and started to leave. The voice phrungled* after him.

"You get nothing while you're here. Save for one miracle, to be used whenever, and however you choose."

Achiel knew this. He could feel it, twinkling in the back of his mind. At Home, his head would have been buzzing with Miracles. But down here, he could only feel the one.

Also, some of the Others had told him of this arrangement. It was a well-known clause, where he was from. When you get to Earth, you get one Miracle. So it had been written, and so it was so...blah, blah, blah...

Plenty of the Others that had gone before him had gone the whole trip without needing their Miracle. But all were in agreement that simply having it was a great comfort, during the experience.

The knowledge that, at any time, they could call out, And (S)He would reach down and pluck them out of this existence made the place much more tolerable, they told him.

This had always kind of baffled Achiel. Why would he want his experience here to simply be tolerable?

"I'll spend it now", he said.

The pause seemed eternal. But it really wasn't. Sometimes pauses just seem that way.

"Are you sure?". The Voice asked, confused**

"Yep". Said Achiel (who really wasn’t sure at all). "I want to live down here,like they do. I think it’s the best way to learn."

The clouds pondered.

The horizon shrugged.

The heavens smiled a little bit, but not so much that Achiel could see it.

"I like you, Achiel. Do you know that?"

He blushed. "I always had a feeling."

"I always have."

The Voice got back to business. "How do you want to spend it?"

Achiel pointed to the gruesome addition to the pastoral apocalypse on the wall.

"Give it to him."

Achiel turned and strolled off into the street. The cosmos waved behind him.

"Have a good life, Achiel. And have fun."

A chuckle seemed to roll through the Universe, as Achiel walked away. An instant later everything was back to what it was before. You would never have known that someone had just landed heavily on the Earth.

* * * * * *

Greg shook his head. He must have blanked out for a second. He did a small mental evaluation. All systems seemed normal...save for an odd, unfamiliar twinkling in the back of his head.

He stepped through the door and blinked in the sunshine.

He made an important decision.

No more procrastination. From now on, he was going to finish all the stuff he started.




*This word was created in 1819, by Bertram Harvey, a bookseller and pamphleteer, who had heard the voice in boyhood, and hoped the word could serve as an adequate reflection of the Voice that is currently speaking. It doesn't, however, so it never caught on. That always made Bertram a little bit sad.

**I don't really know very much about the Voice, but I do know that it's possible for Him/Her to get confused. How do I know this? From the memoirs of La Bok Chin, a Chinese Noblewoman who heard the Voice in 1905. According to her tale, when the Voice spoke to her (S)He said "I Am Confused".