Confession of a Ghost. F.M. Dostoevsky award. Playing Another Reality. Alexandra Kryuchkova

Guardian had no time to answer – a dark entity, from the witnesses of my dance in the Hall, chuckled smugly, looking into the Guardian’s eyes, and exclaimed,

      “One more ours!”

      “Don’t say hop until you’ve jumped over!” the Guardian answered, and we walked out the door into the Universe to the Stairs.

      “Angel, why did the devil say that?”

      “Never mind, everything is in our thoughts. So, the Staircase has 40 steps, but every soul descends to Earth along a personal corridor. Each step is a detail of your heavenly passport. Here it is, take it!” the Guardian handed me a little book with incomprehensible numbers, degrees, signs and formulas. “Everything becomes clear step by step as you descend!”

      “Is there something bad? I want to fulfill my destiny and return to you here!” I exclaimed.

      “You are a soul of Light, but not everyone on Earth remembers Heaven, and life sometimes puts one in a bind, and when there is a predisposition…”

      “To what?” I kept on wondering from the frightening suspense, but the Guardian didn’t answer me.

      ***

      At the House with the inscription “No. 1” on the front door, a girl in a white dress and a man in a purple robe were already waiting for us. They both had danced with me in the Hall.

      “I’m Selene,” the girl smiled, “and he is Sirius. At the moment of your incarnation, we are right at the point of your first breath, above the door to House No. 1. Each House represents a Sphere of Life. You’ll pass through them all and get to know the planetary spirits with whom you’ve danced in the Hall to learn about your mission and destiny. The incarnated tend to forget everything, but the Astral Tablets remember everything about everyone and your Guardian will help or prompt you.”

      “I’ll try to remember!”

      “You have to,” Sirius clarified meaningfully, the Guardian sighed, and Selene stroked my head and said,

      “In one of the scenarios, you’ll fail the test of life by violating the Heavenly law.”

      “Am I going to kill someone?” I exclaimed in horror.

      “You’ll return ahead of schedule,” the Guardian replied.

      “No, this is impossible!” I exhaled in relief and laughed.

      “It happens sometimes even to very bright and kind souls,” Selene stated. “Earth is full of temptations, not all thoughts are from the Guardian, and Heaven sometimes seems too distant and unfair. Before descending the Stairs, every soul has the right to move once to any fragment of any possible scenario of one’s future life, since all of them have already been fixed in the Space of Options. Think, Rukh, what’s there to see, what is worth getting known, or what important things can be done there now. After the incarnation, any information about such travel is unlikely to penetrate to the level of Consciousness, but in critical points you can remember a lot by connecting to the Astral Tablets through the Subconscious in order to correct the scenario.”

      “Well… Let’s suppose there is a worst-case scenario, in an unknown segment of which something happens as a cause that leads me to an erroneous action-effect. Neither the cause itself, nor the moment of its occurrence can be guessed by me. So, I need to talk to myself a minute before the action-effect to find out the cause, in order to remember it on Earth beforehand and either prevent its occurrence or react to it differently in order to avoid the effect. Right?”

      The Guardian sighed, Selene glanced at Sirius, and he said,

      “We have no right to prompt you now, and if you formulate it wrong.”

      “I don’t see any other options!”

      ***

      Sometime in the Future

      A rainy night. Me in the Future was sitting on the windowsill by the open window in a black hoodie with a rosary in hand. Noticing Me the Rukh, she turned around, stood up at full height on the windowsill and breathed a sigh of relief,

      “Oh, finally! I’ve been waiting for you for so long!”

      “But why?!” I asked.

      “Why what?” she asked me calmly.

      “Why don’t you want to live?”

      “Everything about everyone is known there, especially to the Angel of my death!”

      “I’m not an angel! I just need to understand what has happened!”

      “In this case, you’ve got the wrong address, and we have nothing to talk about,” she said with annoyance and turned to face the rain.

      “I beg you, by all the Saints, tell me why!”

      She turned around, holding on to the window handle with her right hand, and with her left, still fingering the rosary.

      “I don’t remember anything. It hurts remembering. The pain would have killed me, one of us had to die – either me or the pain. I prayed asking to erase my memory so as not to exit life, but it was only an illusion of choice! God heard me and erased my memory. Since then, I wake up in the morning remembering nothing, not even the day before. Such life is worse than any death. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. You can’t escape your destiny! I tried to avoid what I ended up with. However, I’m not afraid, since I died at the same time as my memory.”

      The Guardian hovered in the air in front of the window, and the same devil who had whispered to me in front of the door, “One more ours!”, appeared next to him. The drenched devil was rubbing his disgusting hooves and impatiently beating his tail on the slippery ledge.

      Me in the Future noticed my gaze, turned to face the rain and, seeing the Guardian, cried out,

      “It’s you!”

      She was about to take a step towards the Guardian, whom she had clearly mistaken for an angel of death, as I rushed towards her, trying to grab her by the black hoodie in order to… but – what a horror! – it seemed to me, it happened precisely because of me, because of that movement of mine, the wave of energy, – she suddenly slipped on the wet windowsill and… with the window handle, that couldn’t withstand the load, in one hand, and with the rosary in the other, instantly collapsed into the darkness!

      “No!” I screamed.

      The happy devil disappeared, the Guardian sighed heavily and hugged me.

      “Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you save her? She remembered nothing! She had a rosary; she prayed, you see! And you didn’t listen to her! You knew that I wouldn’t be able to find out the cause and change anything, since you had taken her memory away!”

      “Calm down, Rukh! Everything will be fine. We have to go.”

      “Wait. Perhaps there is some hint here.”

      I looked around. It was the kitchen. There was a table by the window with a candlestick in wax, some icons on the left wall, a stove and a sink on the right. The scanned fridge turned out to be almost empty – half a lemon and cottage cheese.

      I left the kitchen for the hallway and went further into the room: again the icons on the walls, a fireplace, a rocking chair, a bed and a wardrobe. There was a prayer book on the bedside table. The contents of the wardrobe, in terms of the number of things inside, resembled the fridge.

      “I don’t understand,” I whispered. “Was she a nun?”

      The Guardian shook his head negatively. I returned to the corridor. As everywhere, there were icons on the walls. Suddenly, I noticed another door with a rusty lock and found a hidden room behind it, where – wow! – there were bags with miscellaneous