Maggie Goes to the Beach: A Story of Life After Death

By John Walters

After a Scottish woman dies, she journeys halfway around the world as it subtly and then drastically mutates to keep a long-ago promise to a former friend and lover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Walters
• Release date: Jul 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386648864

John Walters

John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

Book preview

Maggie Goes to the Beach

Maggie awakens to a vision of an olive-green square with flecks of color in it, and she tries to use it like a cursor to create an image or some words on the blank white screen.  She can place her finger on it and move it and draw whatever patterns she wants, but whatever she creates doesn't remain; it dissipates as soon as her finger moves off the spot.

She tries speaking but that doesn't do any good either.  Although she can hear her own voice, evidently nobody else can.

The blank white screen is in her son's mind.  She gives up.  She can't get through.

Her three sons and two daughters surround the bed on which her wasted old shriveled prune of a corpse lies.  Cancer has ultimately been the culprit, but it could have been anything.  In the end, she simply got too tired and gave up the proverbial ghost.

Only the ghost seems less proverbial than she had supposed.  She feels great, as exuberant and alive as if she is in her twenties.  She is slimmed down, her red-tinged brown hair is thick and long, and instead of pain there is only laughter bubbling up from within.

So she stands there watching her own droll deathbed scene, wondering, What the hell do I do now?

She'd stopped believing in the hype the priests spouted from the pulpits long ago, but she still supposed the standard cliché that if she survived the transition from life to death there would be messengers waiting to take her either up or down.  Instead, she finds herself all alone in the