Cover Issue Two

  

Pushing Up Roses

By Calvin Beam

Dickie Ray woke up, and there was a gnome standing at the foot of his bed. Sports Center played a bit too loudly on his television.

He felt this should startle him, but he was only inquisitive.

“You’re not what I was expecting,” Dickie Ray said.

This was the first line of every conversation the gnome had engaged in since he joined The Firm.

“Not everyone gets The Big Guy,” the gone said. “That doesn’t mean you’re any less important. It’s a vast world out there, and well, there’s a lot of work to do. We try to match our ambassadors to situations.”

Dickie Ray was ambivalent about this: Why did his situation match this ambassador? He didn’t want to make an issue of it, so he stayed quiet.

The gnome opened a manila folder he was carrying, then looked up at Dickie Ray.

“Would you like a cup of tea before we get down to business?”

“That would be nice.”

At that moment, Dickie Ray’s youngest sister, Eunice, knocked on the door, then came inside with a steaming cup, which she placed with a saucer on his night table. “I thought you might like this. Do you want some breakfast?”

He picked up the teacup and blew across it, then sipped gingerly. “Than you, no thank you. Could you turn off the television, please?”

Eunice left the room without turning off the TV or saying a word about the gnomes. There were two. The second ones stood by the door, rocking from side to side.

“What’s with him?” Dickie Ray asked the one he assumed was the head gnome. He did not look up from the form he was examining.

“My assistant? He’s from the city,” he said, as if that explained everything. When the puzzled expression remained on Dickie Ray’s face, he added, “All the metro gnomes act like that.”

The assistant switched off the television and said, “You can program this so it shuts off automatically after you fall asleep, you know.”

Dickie Ray frowned. “Who has time to learn all these gadgets?”

“Well, you don’t,” the assistant said, which earned him a harsh look from his boss, and he scuttled silently back to his place by the door.

Dickie Ray propped himself on his elbows and took another sip of tea. He felt very one of his 94 years in the simple movements. “So how does this work? Will it hurt? Will I have time to set my cup down?”

“To set your mind at ease, everyone has a lot of questions and none of the answers really matter. I will count down from One, and then it will be over.”

“Could you maybe count down from 10 so I have time to get ready?

“Except for the tea, is there anything vital you would do with the extra nine seconds?”

Dickie Ray thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“Don’t let yourself be embarrassed. He motioned to his assistant, who had silently appeared at Dickie Ray’s elbow. “I had a client last week who drowned in a sewer while trying to retrieve his keys. Now that was a mess.”

“Mmm hmm.” Dickie Ray felt he should be listening attentively, but his attention roamed to the bedroom window, and he gazed through it at the pride of his retirement, his garden.

He worked for 30 years at the post office, stayed married to his beloved Rosemary for 54, raised two find boys and never missed a church Sunday. He never heard anyone in town say an unkind word about him. And he had never heard of anyone who had heard anyone say an unkind work about him. Those were memories. The garden kept him looking to the future.

He shook himself out of his thoughts and refocused on the gnome. “Will I go to heaven?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Dickie Ray raised his eyebrows and the assistant gently took his teacup and placed it one the nightstand.

The one in charge scrawled something on the form and slipped it into the folder. “Mostly beings get the afterlife they deserve. Notice anything different about your garden?”

The assistant was already helpfully holding his glasses. Dickie Ray placed them high on his nose, the way he liked to wear them. When he looked through the window now, there was a garden gnome that he had not put there, right next to the rosebush he planted when Rosemary died.

“You’re going there.”

Dickie Ray paled and shuddered. I’m going to be trapped in that for eternity?”

The gnome’s voice was calming. “Of course not. Your spirit will be free to go anywhere. Think of this as a ‘gnome base,’ where you can return any time you feel the need to be grounded.”

Dickie Ray smiled. “That sounds nice.” He wondered if Eunice would find him smiling and wonder what he had been thinking. “Is it always this friendly?”

“Mostly,” the gnome said. “Most beings accept death’s inevitability. People can be prickly. They can’t change the outcome but sometimes they put up a fuss. That’s why we started sending pairs to deal with humans — they are an un-gnome quantity.”

Dickie Ray rolled his eyes. “When people groan right before they die, it’s not always because they’re in pain, is it?”

“I do like an appreciative audience,” the gnome said. “One.”