The Great Day

As the great day approaches everyone is happy and smiling. People you hardly know come up to you to wish you well, and all around the Sanctuary people are making arrangements to meet each other again on the other side.

The coffin-man has never been so busy. In the past year and a half he has built 332 coffins, with the assistance of just a handful of apprentices. They are all deluxe, with cushions and even a music player, everything we could possibly need to keep us comfortable as we wait. Each person is allowed to take a bible and two other books, as well as a compilation of their favourite music from the authorised list and one personal item. There will, of course, be more than enough oxygen to keep us alive in our final resting places until after the Great Event.

Our Leader, Saint Simon, curses the rest of the world, who refuse to prepare for the End. “The bodies of the unbelievers will litter the planet, their rotting corpses symbolic of their moral decay,” he warns. No god will come for them. Only those of us within the Sanctuary will be safe in our coffins when Armageddon comes. A lever mechanism will be operated at the moment of apocalypse, dispatching the coffins into pre-prepared holes in the ground. Our corpses, as well as our souls, will be cleansed and ready for taking up.

It was Saint Simon, and he alone amongst the world’s religious leaders, to whom god chose to divulge the forthcoming end of all things. Only members of the Sanctuary were deemed fit by god to make The Journey.

I am lucky they are letting me go . I spoke an abomination last week. “What happens if the world doesn’t end?” I said, “shouldn’t there be a way for us to get back out of the ground?”

I could feel the chill of 600 piercing eyes staring at me in disappointment. “How dare you question the word of St Simon,” they said. It was very foolish of me I know, to question the accuracy of the prophecy. Mike pleaded for me to be excused and eventually Simon agreed, after warning that such talk would not be tolerated in the next world.

Mike wasn’t allowed to share my coffin. Nothing ‘inappropriate’ should be allowed to mar the purity of our divine journey. My baby is allowed with me though, as she is still too young to be named and her soul wouldn’t find its way without me. She counts as my personal item.

I will take a final cleansing shower to remove the last of my impurities, say a prayer of thanks to god and then I will be ready. I am privileged to be the first of the Sanctuary members to be dispatched and the whole community will be there to see me off on my Journey.

I am really looking forward to seeing them all again.