She won! With the Lord's help, with God in her heart, she won! She could feel the victory in her spirit. She could sense His presence with her.
Still gasping from the shock of it all, Dolly closed her eyes and hugged the feather before something horrible dawned on her.
"Bill!" she screamed. And with a few curlers still in her hair, Dolly bolted for the front door of their home.
* * *
On the freeway, Bill was signaling for his exit and making sure that his briefcase didn't slide off the seat next to him when the pavement fell away revealing fire and brimstone.
His hands tightened around the steering wheel as he felt the tires immediately begin to melt against the molten rock that had become the pavement beneath him. Heat radiated. Flames licked. Bill's car fishtailed on the slime of its own melted tires and came to a clunking rest in what used to be the shoulder of the road.
It's not real, he thought. This is what, he thought in the insanity around him, the earth is going to look like if there's ever an all-out nuclear war. This is how we're all going to be punished.
The morning rush-hour traffic around him faded out with a series of heat waves, seeming to dissolve into non-existence. It's as if the other cars, the other drivers, had never been there at all. In fact, as he watched one of the cars that was just preparing to pass him on the highway continued on its way merrily, vanishing as it climbed an invisible slope in the road.
The blue sky was infected with gigantic plumes of black smoke, jetting upward and out in sinister spires. Heat, in deep waves, flashed like digital cameras being fired all around him.
They say, Bill thought, that in the last minutes of your life, after you sip in your last breath, that your brain is oxygen-deprived. Storms of electrical impulses take place in brain tissue that is confused in its own death. And when we reach out and touch something...are we really touching it? Is it really there? We're trusting those electrical impulses to convey messages from the world around us to us, our being. But if there's a storm of impulses, what is going to do inside of our minds?
Maybe, Bill thought, I'm really dead. I'm not here. I never flew with an angel, I never kissed Dolly goodbye this morning. Those were just storms. I'm really in bed, clinically dead. My brain is attempting to jump start itself by throwing off random electrical impulses. But in my mind...this is what it's producing.
It was like he was in an oven with the heating elements above and below him glowing and glaring an angry red-orange. Instinctively, Bill loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt to try to get some air circulating.
The air inside the car was increasingly hot. And in the rearview mirror, he could see droplets of sweat already forming on his forehead.
"Where am I?" he whispered.
Fire and molten rock and smoke, as far as he could see behind and in front of him. To the left was a wall of crumbling, radiant cinder. To the right, a cliff.
It seems real, he thought. The heat, it's becoming unbarable! The air is too hot to breathe!
He felt the car around him sag as the metal began to relax its shape under the hot. The soles on his shoes began to run like black melting candle wax.
Bill began to scream.
Just then, someone tapped politely on the driver's side window. The rearview mirror shattered in the building heat, and Bill looked out the window to see a stately-looking gentleman, wearing a black business suit, slightly bowed at the hips to peer in at him.
"I'm sorry to bother you, my friend," the man in the black suit said. And oddly, Bill had enough time to realize that this man was beautiful, flawless. "But it looks as if you're in a pinch there."
Bill began to wheeze and clawed at his throat, trying hard to harvest what oxygen he could out of the blasting air around him.
"I can help you," the man said. He frowned then, and tapped on the glass again. Bill wondered how this man could be so relaxed when the world was burning around them. "Are you listening to me? Can you hear me? I said I can help you. Roll down your window, my friend. That looks awfully painful, my goodness. Roll down your window and take my hand, good sir! I'll get you out of this dreadful place at once!"
(Your turn!
Thanks for making this so much fun!
)