Last night I dreamed.

There were two tribes of people.  Believers and non believers, not necessarily in the Christian sense.  It was more generic, less Jesus.

The believers consisted of a variety of people who followed God.  Each person was in different stages, levels, heights of belief.

The non believers consisted of a wide range, from really good people (who just didn’t follow God), all the way down to the basest most disgusting criminal.

I was on the bottom rung of the believer’s ladder.

We all lived on an island and there seemed to be an invisible line separating the different tribes, though there was some mixing.  The believers preached about the end times, heaven, their god, hell, and the non believers scoffed or ignored it.

One day while living in my tribe, on this island, which was a world, my throat started hurting.  I reached deep into the back of my mouth and pulled out a locust.

Repulsed, I released it into the world.  It flew, killing unbelievers and believers alike.

I ran toward the sea, trying to breathe, and felt another one in the back of my throat.  I was compelled to remove it for breath, so I reached in with forefinger and thumb and dislodged it from the back of my throat.  I could feel its legs and wings fluttering on my tonsils, then on the top of my mouth.  It too took flight and began devouring people.

Screams and fear filled the air.  All was chaos.

I wanted to keep the locusts in, but I couldn’t breathe and my throat hurt.  After each extraction, there was only a moment’s relief before another rose to take its place.  And they always came out backward, so my fingers sometimes squished their bodies before they left my mouth.

I freed thousands of locusts from the dark hive of my aching throat.

They killed everyone, with buzzing relish.

The last one killed me.

Suffocation.

I arrived in heaven to serve the same faces I knew on the island.  There was much complaining and jockeying for positions.  Some who were expected did not show.  Some, believed unworthy on the island, stood tall amid shocked elders.

I was thankful to make it.

My job in heaven reflected the spiritual growth I attained on the island.  I was named mail man to the condemned.  The job was unsavory and everyone in heaven was secretly glad they managed their faith a little bit better than me so they weren’t forced to do it.

A great lake separated the condemned from heaven.

A thick rough rope hung above the lake and stretched from heaven to the place of torment (which looked exactly like the island, sans believers).

The condemned broke into groups.  The “good people” split off from the criminals and built a Mayan city.  Other factions formed.  There was constant war.

My job was to climb hand over hand on the rope, feet dangling, careful not to drop into the lake or be lost for eternity in its murky depths.  I took mail to the condemned, but never from them.  This was my duty to help me remember that I did not toil for my faith in life, so I would toil forever more in heaven.  Always aware I was barely, just barely, granted access to heaven.

So every day I fought, sweat, and breathed hard while hanging on to the rope.  The mail sack was heavy and often caused me to lose my grip.  My hands were rough and calloused.

Every visit to other side convinced me the wars were getting worse.  The island began to crumble.  The ground shook, the houses fell, floods swept houses away, yet no one noticed because they were too busy fighting.  The good people started to go bad.  The bad people got worse.

The condemned were no longer glad to get mail.  Still, everyday I swung myself across the massive expanse of the lake.  Until the day they tried to keep me from leaving.

They chased me.  They sent boats out on the lake to shoot me off the rope.

I ran through the flooded floors of fallen down houses, the barren fields with dead soldiers and bodies of snakes, the sticky floors of dark cinemas where visitors drank blood on ice.

I needed to get back to the rope!

Couldn’t breathe.

My throat started hurting.

I felt the familiar scratching, reached into the back of my throat and pulled out a locust.  One by one, hundreds, thousands, until every single condemned soul was assigned a torment by an individual locust.  The locusts burrowed into their skin, tormented them, tortured them, for eternity since they could not die.

When my throat finally stopped hurting, I dragged myself to the rope and went hand over hand back to the other side.  I looked down at the bodies writhing in the boats below me, my empty mail sack flapping on my back.

Defeated and hurting, hands bleeding from the journey, I dropped to the white sand beach on heaven’s side.

A high ranking member of the faith lay on the beach, attended by many servants.  He summoned me.  I crawled over to him.  He took in my bloody hands, my grief stricken eyes, my tattered clothes.

“Better to be a mail man in heaven than a ruler in hell.”  He sniffed and turned away from me.

My throat started hurting.