Once he had come to this realization, he pondered whether or not it even made that big of a difference. If the man was on Earth, having this same conversation, the observation would carry the same weight of impact to him as it did standing in the line, waiting for admittance into Heaven.

    “But I didn’t think that it’d honestly be this cliché,” She began, as he begun to focus back in on the stories she shared of times at churches in recent memory she shared with her daughter as well as her own experiences in Sunday school. “It’s exactly like I thought it would be. Everything’s so cloudy and lovely. I hope everything’s all covered in gold shine when I get up to the top – it’ll be exactly like I pictured it sitting in the pews as a little girl.”

    “I never really thought too hard about what this place was gonna look like.” The man looked around and saw no clouds – he wondered whether or not him and this woman were even seeing the same rendition of heaven that he was. “I have so many questions.”

    The two converse for a good long while as they gradually ascend up the line. By the time they’ve got just a slight view of what could be a figure towards the top of their eyesight, they’ve become good friends. The man has already given the woman the same exact repeated stories of May that he gave for every nurse in the hospital before his time of departure. The woman gave the man similar stories about her own children and their trips to the Grand Canyon. The man reaches down to tell another story about May and notices his wallet still remaining in his pocket. It first puzzles him that it’s even present, and twice puzzles him because he realizes that he’s reaching for his wallet at the pearly gates – reminiscing with a stranger just as he would at the DMV. Just as the two are starting to have the conversation turn far more existential in nature, the man notices the floor has substantially leveled out – the trail behind him now stretching backwards in a near-infinite, straight, single-file line, and the people in front of him now being led to different areas by a rather tall man in a suit and wings. He’s got short brown hair, a perfectly symmetrical face, and walks around with pitch-black shoes scraping perfectly against the white void – despite having an appearingly fully-functional set of wings to use as well. 

    “Come this way.” He leads the woman, man, and group of ten to fifteen people in front of them into a section marked off by rope in a perfectly arranged rectangle, with chairs set up in rows of five stretching throughout. He takes a seat towards the left corner of the rectangle, with the woman immediately to his right, far enough away that talking was incredibly awkward. On a rather plain-looking gray table in front of the man, a screen suddenly arises from the middle. On it, a sudden image appears of a bearded man – his hair a light shade of brown, looking incredibly well groomed. Yet his eyes were that of complete content – slightly dark beneath the eyeballs yet vivid enough that he seemed to be happy to be where he was. It was less Heaven, more content dad sitting on a chair by a lake – but  the man quickly attempted to near-constantly put those thoughts out of his mind as the weight of his situation replayed in his head.

    “Welcome!” The voice rang out from a grated speaker located just below the bezel of the screen.  “We know this is probably a big surprise for you – or perhaps you’ve been waiting for this moment your entire life!” The odd backing of muzak made the man feel slightly uncomfortable as he tried to position himself as comfortably as he could in his chair. “Either way, you’re going to need these for the next part of the transition.” With a subtle popping sound, a locker opened from below the speaker grill. The man stretched across from his chair to retrieve the contents – a pair of headphones and what appeared to the man to be a ViewMaster – but upon closer inspection more properly resembled a VR headset that his granddaughter May had brought into the hospital during one of her visits. The man had a remembrance of how nauseous it made him.

    “So grab those and head towards your immediate right -  the arrow on the floor will point you to the direction of the next destination. See you there!”

    Waving towards the woman, they both quickly file into another, quicker line to get to the next room – a smaller, more intimate room with what resembled bleachers on each side of it, pointing inwards towards the center of the room. As they took their seats, the same bearded figure from before stepped out of a door suddenly appearing within the white void – opening, closing, and then immediately dissolving behind him as he shut it. He was dressed in much more fancy attire than the man who initially ushered them towards the process. The gold streaks on his clothing appeared much more similarly to someone who would be of much greater importance in the afterlife.

    “I’m Saint Peter, but please call me Pete. Just kidding. It’s “Saint Peter” - if we don’t go by the books people tend to get picky around here. Anyways, just yanking your chain before we get to why we’re all really here. We are here to transition! To move on! To depart! To face our own, individualized, final day of ultimate judgement and eternal salvation! But most importantly, to have fun.” The man stares from an upper row, squinting in disbelief. “Now, does anybody have any questions?”

    The man’s hand immediately shoots up. “Yes, you, Travis M. from Pennsylvania. How can I help you?” 

    “Well, first off, that’s kinda freaky. But I guess you are Saint Peter.” The man started to get a slight smirk. “Secondly, this entire thing seems incredibly nonchalant for a transition to the afterlife. What was the deal with that line?”

    “I know, I know, that’s always the first thing people ask – we try to be as wholly empathetic to the experience that the line brings. It’s always scary when it first happens to people – especially when they don’t know how to handle the transition.”

    “Yeah, I ate it directly into my buddy over here.” A few people on the other bleacher chuckle. 

           “Generally, we attempt to make the transition as easy on everybody as it possibly can be. We have a saying around here, ‘you die how you lived’, which is firstly funny because it’s genuinely true, and secondly funny because we spiritually and scientifically guarantee that your demeanor and moxie stay as true in Heaven as they ever did on Earth.”

    The woman’s hand springs up as well. “Yes, you, Margaret C. from Florida, how can I help you?”

    “Why do I feel like I’m at Walt Disney World.” A larger pool of chuckles unleashes from the aisles to the right the pair. 

    “Oddly, yet truthfully, not the first time I’ve heard that.” Peter continued. “Anybody else? No? Alright! Good! We can get into the meat of why we’re here. Due to some great innovations recently up here, we’re able to streamline this whole process of sorting algorithmically. Once you slip on those goggles and place the headphones on – you will be instantaneously transported to your own personalized view of life. I’ll let me on the tape take it from there. So go ahead, give it a go whenever you’re ready.”

    The man and the woman nervously exchange glances. “Eh, the hell with it. Here goes nothing.” Travis locks the band around the back of his head, and with a snap, his vision is replaced by that of a dark blue grid, and the voice of Peter – now at a much, much louder volume and booming directly into his ear canals, rings out to narrate. “Fear not, Travis, my child and child of God. In whatever feelings or fears you may have towards this current Godly process, you truly reveal just how thankful you were to be living your life in a Christlike way.” The man wondered if this was Peter using some kind of divine power to individually implant the message or if it was simply a pre-recorded response that could’ve been assisted by technology. “Watch before you some of the most defining moments of your life – not all of them – but some that we feel are demonstrative of your potential worth as a citizen of Heaven.”

    As if from a camera view directly above, he sees himself laying in a hospital bed with both of his arms wrapped firmly around his granddaughter May’s body. She’s audibly sobbing – releasing snot and wails to God directly into the man’s chest. It shows the man attempting to quiet May, gripping her tightly, and telling her - “Don’t be afraid, sweetie. I’m always going to be with you. Even when I’m gone – you’ll always know I’ll be looking down on you and your beautiful life. You’re so strong. I know you’re going to be just fine.” As he began to feel tears form in the back of his eyes, a green check mark appeared on the screen in front of him. It rated him positively for “consolation” and “lack of fear of death.” The second one struck him as oddly morbid – taking him directly out of the tears he had just previously shed, remembering a final moment with his granddaughter. The booming voice filled his ear again. 

    “I know someone who’s been looking forward to seeing you.” Footage started to immediately roll of horseplay between the man and his brother when they were both children no older than twelve or thirteen in the sixties. Displayed in front of the man were what appeared to be perfectly shot home videos of him and his brother getting into all sorts of juvenile shenanigans. However, Peter’s voice sounded oddly distressed as footage began to roll of the two boys in a later period in their childhood, getting into a fistfight behind their high-school football stadium, surrounded by a group of peers cheering it on. Peter’s voice overall rated their relationship as a “check-minus.”

    “Check-minus? Oh, come on. I love Jim. Jim loves me. That ballbuster had every punch coming to him and he knows it.”

    Memory after memory plays in front of the man’s eyes on two LCD screens with head tracking. Travis ponders that the entire length of cohesive memories that justified his specific, personal representation of Heaven was about, in total, around fifteen minutes. Or at least it felt that way.

    The screens fade to black, and the man suddenly begins to feel as if a rock had settled in his stomach. He wondered if this would be the moment that he truly saw the face of God or Jesus Christ – albeit – through a digital display. Instead, he began to hear a slow drum roll building up as Peter’s voice rang out through his ears again. “Travis, after taking a comprehensive look at your entire life, the adequate heavenly bodies required to make final distinctions on transfers to the afterlife have come to a complete decision.” The drum roll got louder and louder, until the screen suddenly jumped to white in perfect syncopation with a crash cymbal. The word “Admitted” flashed across the screen in green letters.

    “Congratulations, Travis! Your life represented the prototypical God-loving man. You lived your life not only in service of God – but through his words and teachings as with your own family. You’ve truly done great in your life!” The man felt humbled, but still couldn’t shake the sense of it all being way more bureaucratic than he was expecting. He again pondered if everybody else dead in the world was receiving the same exact standardized message when they were going through this process. “You can remove your goggles at any time, and take them to me to be directed towards your wing fittery and pre-admittance final check!”

    The man felt the outline of the goggles create an itchy, uncomfortable sensation around his eyes, and immediately began rubbing them. He then realized that he had been moved from his seated position next to the woman to immediately next to Peter. Feeling somewhat jaded toward the process, he remembers the first moment in the goggles again, briefly picturing his granddaughter as he hands the equipment back to Peter. “Congratulations!” He says, “Come this way!”

    Looking backwards, he sees the woman in her seated position with both hands cupped around her mouth. She’s got tears streaming from both eyes down from the headset, and is audibly crying. Concerned, the man begins to ask if the woman will be following along. Before he can even finish, Peter moves him into the final room where the man will get his wings. He only appears to gently grab the man’s shoulder, and they are instantly transported into the room with a sudden movement forward. The woman fades out of sight.

1. HOW STRANGE IT IS

    The man and Peter arrived in the room with another sudden snap of the fingers. In this rather small room, the man saw a myriad of wings laid out in front of him on a table, namecards gracing the bottom. They were arranged alphabetically by time of arrival. Next to Peter stood what appeared to be a coat rack, adorned with wings aligned in perfect organization – coat hangers holding them to the metallic bar. 

    “How are you enjoying the transition so far?” Peter asked in a somewhat less enthusiastic, slightly managerial, yet still exuberant tone. “What happened to that woman?” The man asked – the image of her sobbing in her goggles still beating relentlessly in his mind. “Well, she probably didn’t make it.” Peter attested, “She dealt with struggles in her faith throughout her entire life – and her cardinal sin of adultery made her increasingly unfit for admittance the later it went on – even though we generally try and keep as open of a mind and as thorough of an understanding as we can. It probably didn’t send her all the way to damnation. She lived very innocently – she’s probably chatting it up with some of the other rejects now in Purgatory.”

    The man processed just how nondescript of a complete process the entire situation seemed again. Saint Peter was directly in front of him, directly referring to the entire sequence of events that had cataloged the woman’s life, and he was doing it in a manner that more easily resembled that of any middle-class husband in America reading off his grocery list. “Anywho,” he continued, “you’re just about all set for your paradise! We just have to get a few technicalities out of the way before I can officially license you.”

    “License?” “Yes, well, you see, despite the omnipresence, there are a few socio-personal nooks and crannies we like to nudge into before we can truly construct what we know will be the most spiritually and personally pleasing Heaven we can possibly assemble for you. Just a few small holes in the system.

    “Holes...in the system.” “Yeah.” “...like what?” “Oh, just the little things that make you you, y’know? We can know the history of all your action – but we can’t judge just what kind of individual angel you’ll be until we know for sure! So, I’m just going to have you answer a few questions, if you don’t mind.” “Do I really have much of an option?” The man answered, chuckling.

    “I don’t blame you for being offput by the entire nature of the process. To be honest, it’s become incredibly more ‘streamlined’ and ‘digitized’ over the last couple years – whatever that means. This technology has made it way easier on the angel labor – but I think it’s really taking some of the real, personal, soul out of the process, y’know? Like, why go through all this trouble to put everything up through the Cloud if we still can’t really be a hundred percent sure until I’m standing right here, talking to the guy like I always have been? Pen and paper was way more spiritual, in my opinion. Whatever that’s worth.”

    “Is it not worth a lot? You’re Saint freaking Peter.” “Less than you’d think nowadays.”

    The two go through the standard operating procedure for admittance into Heaven. Peter goes through some of Travis’ personal life with him in grueling, intricate detail – yet never to the point where the man feels uncomfortable sharing anything he’s lived through. The man feels that his life is his life – and receives ample praise from Peter during the screening process for dealing with problems as they arise and not letting them fester through his future endeavors. Along with his standard familial stories, the man seemingly blinks and he’s testified to the most emphatically personal and heartfelt moments of his entire life – along with all of the events that have caused him to tick a certain way.