Excerpt from The Other Side of the Sky

I felt that this story would've been a good capstone to Scenes… but, due to deadlines and space, I didn't quite have time to squeeze it in. Like the story All of Yesterday's Yesterdays, it deals with the unaware dead and the afterlife — particularly as it relates to the notion of the Bardo {from Wiki: “Used loosely, the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions.”}. 

I found the idea of the Bardo similar to the Christian idea of Purgatory, except that in the Tibetan tradition, the Bardo offers “a state of great opportunity for liberation…” or can “impel one into a less than desirable rebirth.” I found this concept fascinating and a lot more imaginative (and constructive) than the place envisioned by Christian theologians. Nevertheless, I did borrow heavily from various afterlife accounts (including, but not limited to: Dante’s Divine Comedy and Greek Mythology) — in what I lovingly refer to as my “Neil Gaiman” writing style. The title of the story is tentative.