CHAPTER 1

To Whom it May Concern:

I’m dead. Twenty-six years old and deader than dead, my last memory being a face full of sand as the truck rolled over and threw me alongside the road. The last thing I heard was the snap of my neck, and that was it for me. Now I inhabit the place we go when we die. News flash: there is no heaven. There is no hell. There’s simply another layer where your energy goes without your body. My name is Charlie Day. The late Charlie Day, which is ironic, since during my life, I never could be anywhere on time.

When you die, it’s like your spirit is a vial of mercury that’s been dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. It shatters into zillions of tiny pieces, but each piece is a whole and complete element of you. Let me explain. You can go as many places as you want to go.

You can:
(a) hop into the body of a baby or a puppy or any animal you like, and try another go of it in life;
(b) hang around and watch your loved ones who are still on Earth;
(c) find old soul partners from other lives;
(d) work on your evolution into the big fantastic universal energy field (which most earthlings think of as God, since they can’t imagine anything other than a version of themselves);
or, you can
(e) communicate through a living person who is receptive to you and can handle your voice clicking and tapping away in their head like a persistent woodpecker.

You can do all of the above, plus more, simultaneously. Which is what I’m doing. That’s why you are able to read my words. It may seem like an extreme avenue to travel in order to reach my goal, but it seems like the only way. You see, the person that I want to talk to is too sad to hear me. So, I picked a somewhat neutral party. Someone who tries to write, someone who can handle hard realities. I picked someone who understands my desperation. But my writer is just an implement to me, like a word processor. If I can put something out there that’s interesting enough, lots of people will read it. The law of averages says that it will get into the hands of someone specific. Because everything you read here is really for one person and one person only. She is my wife, and her name is Violet.

Dear Violet: letter from a desert grave by N. Sigafoos

©2007 Sigafoos & Witcher Publishing • Olympia, WA