Sunrise

SUNRISE / David Keller Just outside of hell, the pagan souls think of themselves as choosing to live in limbo. I imagine the place with a courtyard of brick or stone, the weather discolored, like an old shopping center in the suburbs, the dim light I'd passed a thousand times. They must've heard of the man who had passed through and led the best of the group off some where. This past winter turkey buzzards, vultures took to roosting in the trees back of my house. I tried to convince myself, it meant nothing. Even when I forgot them and walked outside, the sudden explosion of those huge bodies, a dream, leaping into the air and the wings taller than I am shook me into thinking there was something I'd done wrong, something. They must have been as startled as I was, one March morning stumbling outside to find the world just at sunrise: bands of pink and yellow above the fields and the front lawn, though the back yard held the blue night-shadows cast on the five-day-old snow by the half moon tucked up between the house and the spruce trees. For all those people care, life will go on forever. No one, even after the worst nights in the dark, thinks of himself as truly undeserving. The damned, the displaced, want to feel lucky, too, and I was suddenly shaken at this event. Closing the door, I might have missed a sudden explosion of light falling through the sky. I did not look twice, uncertain what I might have been told it meant, wary of anything like joy. The Missouri Review · 29 ...