The Interims: When Between Time and Place

By Missy Crider

“The INTERIMS: When Between Time and Place” sheds light on the fundamental reality of family, suicide, overcoming grief, the illusion of physical death, the idea of a placeless and timeless reassessment period between physical lives, para-psychological ideologies of reincarnation, quantum telepathy, and the ultimate victory of holding sheer compassion for one another. In the soul journey of Mirabelle Persephone Steidelhauser and her twelve year-old son, Jacob, we traverse many para-psychological states of mind, while contrasting between a bustling borough in modern New York City. The interwoven connectivity of the Earthbound to The Interims proves a suspense filled journey. The Interims offers a comfort to those haunted by suicide or death of loved ones, exploring the quantum principle that physical death is an illusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982261832

Missy Crider

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, and raised in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Crider is an Emmy nominated SAG-AFTRA actress, singer, producer, author, coach, and child welfare advocate who has starred in over 60 American TV series, miniseries, and major motion pictures. Her body of work from decades in the entertainment industry is found at IMDb.me/missycrider. She achieved her B.A. in Psychology in 2018 with honors and was awarded by The Norman Mailer Institute and The National Council of Teachers of English for a memoir that she penned about her grandmother. Crider works with the homeless veteran population, their children, and families. Her novels, poems, children’s stories, and other literary works can be found at CriderInk.com. A world traveler, she calls The Heartland her home.

Book preview

The INTERIMS

When Between Time and Place

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MISSY CRIDER

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Copyright © 2021 Melissa Anne Crider.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained

in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any

technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the

advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer

information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-

being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your

constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6182-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6184-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-6183-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900878

Balboa Press rev. date:   03/16/2021

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Epilogue

Cast of Characters: A Character Breakdown for The INTERIMS by Missy Crider

The Book Of Hands

CHAPTER 1

I KNEW NO ONE. I DIDN’T carry any luggage, not even a purse. My fingers and wrists were naked, empty of jewelry. I stole quick glances, flitting around while realizing no one else in the vicinity displayed any possessions on their bodies either. People’s physical proximity belied the noises they made, which registered too distantly within the faculties of me to make any usual sense. It was a clear day, but my senses seemed to be soaked in some echo tube. The soft sounds soothed—as if hundreds of FM-band radio waves simultaneously whorled in unison—a single convolutional score that the sum of each part had made.

Why couldn’t I land?

Each new moment shuffled as if a soft machine jumped from slowed pause to pause. I strove for each of them while stuck in the one that had just dissipated ceased, trying to catch and sustain my presence in each glimpse of this gawkish new game. I focused through each stark fading image in hopes of being able to waken a bit more with each machination in order to behold it. Try and fail, each new shift fled as a wave of forgiving bliss, blanketed and rescued from time and the cold cage of its memory bank—a thief in all of its tedious pecking out, in all of its indifferent recording.

Punctuated degrees of yearning tirelessly bookmarked this newness. I required a sense of place now. With the rapidity of gravity, some effortful déjà vu apathetically pulled against me like sand cascading down within its very own pitiless force of entropy, teasing and sifting its way down-down-down through open-jointed bones, merely to evaporate then like water on a July sidewalk.

There were no flowers, only trees. A flood from elsewhere seemed to work against my balance as if some merciless teacher were prodding my body with new registrations. I stopped walking at the end of the bridge and stole aside from the bustle to glom on to my center as one clutches a toilet if trying to commit enough to endure the utter humiliation of being coerced by the body to vomit. Holding it all down, I felt disengaged from myself, as if my tongue were waking back up hours after a faceless dentist had injected me.

Where am I?

It was like an airport, in a park—some kind of roguish gilded holding tank for the transient. Why am I—here? Where is here? Olden forms of things seeming relative to each other would not fit, so I advised myself not to try them in order to keep caught up. I stood, trembling in some strange location of here that I knew not, utterly devoid of any memory of where I had actually come from or why. All that I did know was that I had just traipsed off of a large main bridge that connected a place that I felt I knew, to a place that I knew not. I yearned in each new blink for this indistinct veil to dissolve.

It persisted. A newer fog blanketed my mind and then all too quickly it settled in as if a stage manager had just called action. It stirred in me, reminiscent of the deep thirst that follows an endless flight over the great water, or when disorientation strikes as if trying to wade through talcum powder that was just squeezed at once into the air through its little diffusion holes, watching it fall to speckle one’s feet.

Just ahead, two indoor-outdoor sidewalks moved to and fro from within a tubed tunnel lit with most unnatural fluorescent light. This didn’t fit in any kind of satisfying way because for all I could make of it a bright day that boasted no weather was definitely in progress. Like in some airport terminal, people were hurrying to pass through the lit tube, swarming in both directions on the double moving sidewalks past each other. Unlike any airport, they scurried amongst each other while humble disoriented looks soaked the air regarding their destination. They looked as if they had been slapped awake by amnesia.

I tried to make sense of all of it some more. Tiny decorative bridges connected knolls covered in thick ordinary grass. To the right of the bridge, water trickled out of the grass. The area resembled a contrived put-put golf course, a faux-pretty game-like park that seemed mainly there to pacify, not to play in. It invited a few people to walk freely, sit, or lie down for a spell.

Vertigo sloshed around; it was as much as I could muster through the haze by way of making earnest systematic effort to clear the thick stupor of this strangest occasion. My heartbeat began striking off at an increasingly discernible pace. Grateful for its familiarity, I feared yet that I could not trust my own obscure thoughts while under its spell. I had no idea where I was, so the suspicious comfort of the pounding that accompanied me while surrounded by such surreal and sudden setting still perplexed more than it settled. A flock of picnic tables flanked the electric sidewalks to my left, just off the large bridge where I was bewildered … to find myself.

The sun illumined all edges like a fixed lamp cocked in a four o’clock sky. Distant whispers reverberated like the roomy echo of a bell after having been struck—soothing sounds, but no wind, temperature, humidity, or weather to register. I stifled my angst, hand-over-mouth, naked inside, suffering to wake in my own private hell that was too distracting in and of itself to allow me to relax in order to be able to register anything else. Vertigo swung around some more like a pesky monkey from some vine inside. I felt comfortable only in that this place was not foreign—something felt familiar and yet absolutely brand new. The relentless seesaw rattled far more than my ability to welcome its newness. I couldn’t shake it.

No one was eating at the picnic tables. A few men in shorts and brown shirts seemed to be talking to one new person at a time across the tables. Two were standing as if they had just finished a discussion. The one in charge summoned me over. I did not want to appear as if I were lost … because I was. The mental fog that had baffled for elongated moments finally vanished with a sudden clarity landing in its place.

It finally all came together and hit me: I did not know where I was—at all.

The matching men in brown and white garb wore large single-digit numbers on their chests in yellow and black.

The man who had summoned me bore the number 4 on his left shirt breast. He was cordial and relaxed, not necessarily warm or friendly. His ethnicity seemed to be of mixed decent and was completely unidentifiable to me. His eyes shone clear purple; his skin stained of tea.

With remote sincerity, his eyes smiled quickly into mine.

Welcome, he offered. He gestured for me to sit down at his picnic table bench station.

I scooted to the middle of the bench so that no one else might sit next to me.

Do you know why you are here? he asked. He kept standing instead of sitting across from me.

No… I do not, I whispered. I crumbled. His identity interested me more than my own inner shock’s prowess.

I am here to direct you, he said. He sat down, leveling.

"Who are you?" I asked, meekly, hardly audible. He smiled at the etched puzzlement that must have mapped the misshapenness of my strained face.

"My friend, you will not be knowing of me for long, so you may think of me as 4." He tapped the yellow number pinned to his left shirt breast as if he had grown used to breaking the ice with bewildered people.

We shared a silence in which the obvious spoke loudly instead. I glanced back to see that some people were running off the moving sidewalks and rushing in and through the others in the opposite direction, scrambling to cross over the bridge that I had just crossed to get here to talk to 4. I snapped out of my reverie, turning back to him.

I became aware of my clothing. I groped the garments that enveloped me, inspecting—an ordinary pale mint-blue summer dress that resembled my late Granny’s home-stitched soft smocks from ago. I held zero recollection of ever having put the dress on. Panic brewed as I touched the clothing. The tips of my fingers shook. A fever of utter defeat and insecurity washed over as a tidal wave. I clocked up the dizzied moments by pretentiously clearing my throat, meeting back with 4’s calm brown face.

"Mister 4? …Uhm." I swallowed, exhaled hard. It hurt. Frantically, I tried to slow the mental rat cage by breathing and swallowing while converging some semblance of feigned sanity before him. Rendered utterly naked by my own anguish, I clasped the tremble of my fingers together to cease the awful shake, straightened my posture, and succumbed to the sway of ubiquity that streamed from his gaze. Fat tears funneled down my face in a legion of tributaries too fast to catch. Stunned silent, my mouth held captive the question that my mind screamed to burst forth from it.

"What is going… on?" I implored of him. My voice shuddered, freeing the heave of my angst as it finally gave way, crumbling out from the very guts of my lungs.

"Is this some kind of... joke? I panted in a shoved whisper, What is this place?!"

When I tried to remember where I had just come from, it was as if sand took trite pleasure in washing up as poetic