Death is Not the End, Daddy

by Nate Allen

flip to the next month on the calendar. Wisdom is the focus there, too. My quiet guide has become loud again. I’m tempted to turn back. Just trust, the voice is saying. Just believe.

  It’s not enough. It hurts too much. I can’t just believe, not anymore. I have been betrayed by my Best Friend, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  “You’ve taken my sons, Lord. You didn’t protect my daughter, even though Your word says that no harm will befall her. You are so much bigger than me. You are Creator, and I am mere creation. But, sometimes I think you just want to see what I will do. What will Matthew Mills do, now that his girl is gone? Will he stand strong, and just believe? It’s cruel to ask of me. It’s cruel for You to take our second baby, and then a week later, our daughter too.

  “What am I trusting for? Is it just for the strength to get through another day? Is that all? Life is a series of worsening storms. You used to be my shelter. Now, I don’t know what You are.”

  Sometimes it helps to speak out loud. Today, it only hurts. I’ll keep the thoughts inside. It doesn’t feel like Anyone is listening anyway.

  My mistake was letting Marcy go to school this morning. Had I just kept her home, she would still be with me. I could have made her hot cocoa, and grilled cheese sandwiches, and watched Disney movies with her all day. Maybe Janet even would have joined us. My mistake was letting her out of my sight.

  The Lord told me to anoint Marcy. I thought it was to protect her from the evil in our bedroom. That’s why I anointed Janet, too. Now, I realize it was to see if I would do it. It’s like the dream of dad’s resurrection all over again. I believed it could happen. I waited for it. And when it didn’t, I nearly drowned amidst the drifting.

  The dream of dad’s resurrection was a promise You broke. The anointing of Marcy is just another broken promise. I am merely a jar of clay. You create jars of all different kinds, and use them in many ways. You picked up my pieces once, after I broke into countless, and put me back together. You filled me with the sweetest gifts: a wife, and a daughter. I was privileged, on a shelf many never see. But now, you have dropped me again. And I don’t know why.

  John Doe

  I’ve left the shed. Fear isn’t crawling over me like I expected it to, like it has so often before. I still have the feeling of power. In fact, I think it might be growing. Teddy can’t control me like he used to. If he could, I wouldn’t be stepping toward the car, at least not at this rate, and not with this sense of security.

  I’m not alone. Even though Jesus hasn’t said anything more to me since dad’s entries, I know that this path is guarded by Him. This power—feeling power whatsoever should feel strange to me, since I have never had it. But, somehow it feels natural, like it’s been in me this whole time.

  Teddy made me believe I had a friend. Now, I think it’s actually true. Jesus is still a stranger to me. I don’t know His voice like I know Teddy’s. What I do know is this: ever since I found that paper in M’s hand, a part of me that I didn’t know still existed has come back to life. Ever since I started speaking His name, a new me has started to rise from whatever was left of the old.

  The car is only another forty or so feet away. I can see M’s head barely poking out from behind the driver’s side seat. My steps are long and quick. The end is near. I can feel that reality starting to stream through me.

  Every step. Every moment. They are both numbered now. There is an answer in Teddy, leading to something big. I can feel it.

  The truth will hurt, John. these words just formed from silence. Blunt and honest, yet comforting. This isn’t Teddy. The truth is something you haven’t been able to remember, something you haven’t wanted to remember. When you take the blood out of the bear, you will. But, it won’t just be a memory. You will relive it, exactly as it happened.

  The end is near, only steps away…

  I think I’m ready.

  Matthew Mills

  My mind is full of Marcy: her smile, her voice, her goofy personality. Deep in my center, there is that quiet voice telling me that she is nowhere near that evil place, but that she is home with Jesus.

  “Shut up!” I’m screaming. It’s all I want to do. “You take! That’s all You do! You give in abundance to the foolish! They watch their kids grow to be a success! But, I can’t even keep what I have! And now You want me to find comfort in these words?! You want me to just accept losing my daughter?! Accept losing the position of being a father?! I am starting to hate Janet because You lifted her up, and are letting me drown! I’m broken, but you don’t care! You don’t care! Why should I?!”

  There isn’t a lot keeping me from veering this car into the ditch. Going the speed I am, I would probably die not long after impact. It’s a thought that I am seriously considering. I would only have to turn the wheel slightly. And then…

  What would happen if I did die? Would Janet continue without me? Jesus told her ‘it’s going to be okay.’ Would those words still be true? Or maybe the most important question is this: what if I try to die, but live?

  I just hit something on the road. It lifted my vehicle for a moment and made an ugly sound. My reaction is immediate. I glance in the rearview mirror. I see my face before the reflection of the highway. My beaten eye is nearly swollen shut. My healthy eye is red—no blue. Blue and flat. But, it wasn’t. It was red and sharp, like the thing that looked at me from inside Ms. Brands. Is it inside me now?

  There is another sound. It’s in the vehicle this time. When I look in the rearview again, I see Marcy sitting quietly in the backseat.

  It’s not her! I close my eyes, and when I look again, her face is turned away.

  “Sweets?” it just comes out, a fatherly reflex.

  Her face turns. But, it’s not hers. It’s old and wrinkled, yet her body is still small, like Marcy’s. The sounds she is making are giggles and growls. “Yes, daddy. It’s inside you!” her smile is wider than humanly possible. I can feel that I am probably going twenty miles over the speed limit, but my eyes won’t pull away from the mirror, my foot won’t let up from the accelerator. “And it is powerful!”

  My hands have locked up. I am able to only glance at the speedometer: 100. And rising.

  “Just a slight turn of the wheel.” she is whispering.

  And my hands are following. I can’t control them, no matter how hard I try. I can feel the wheels going off the road onto the warning bumps of the shoulder.

  “Je-Jesus!” I scream desperately. “Sa-save me!”

  Immediately, my hands are mine again. And I am able to lift my foot from the accelerator. She’s gone from the backseat.

  You are in danger. Turn around, Matthew. Trust Me when I say it’s going to be okay. I see everything. There is so much more at work here than you know. That small and quiet voice isn’t so quiet anymore.

  “I don’t want to face it, Lord. I don’t want this to be another slow process, where Your plan unfolds over many years.”

  It’s quiet again. There is a ramp in half a mile. I’m going back. My little girl is nowhere near that evil place. She is home with Jesus.

  John Doe

  This is the first real time that I feel bigger than Teddy. He’s just an old bear in my hands now. Nothing more. His eyes aren’t red, but brown: the color they used to be. I’m not afraid of the truth. I’m not afraid of the hurt. Most of my life has been lived in this fog where my thoughts, my desires, and my feelings were his. I don’t know who I am, because I don’t know where Teddy ends, or where I begin.

  I don’t even know what it feels like to hurt anymore. Even that word is strange to me. Teddy has hurt me before, physically, but it never really hurt. It was still numb. It was still his influence on my mind. Even when he hurt me, I believed it to be friendly. When Jesus said that the truth is going to hurt, there is no moment in my life that I can look back on. There was hurt after mom’s death. I know, because it was the one thing that Teddy said would never go away. But, was that hurt, or hate? When I think about it, hate was the o
nly thing I fully felt. It was the only emotion that Teddy brought to the surface. Every other human quality has been buried deep inside me.

  Or, did I give it away? There is something with my blood on it stuffed inside of Teddy. My finger wasn’t bloodstained after the shed, but a week before. Maybe I gave away my human qualities to Teddy before dad ever did anything to me.

  I can feel a slit in Teddy’s back. With both of my pointer fingers I push in. My right hand digs inside. The stuffing seems new, catching on my dry finger tips, even though it is very old. I can feel where his arms begin, and where the stitching starts. The stuffing is thick. I grab a chunk and pull it out of him. I can feel a folded piece of paper in my palm. It wasn’t inside of the stuffing, but tucked behind it, near Teddy’s front.

  I unfold it:

  FOR MY FRIEND

  I drew four eyes of different sizes with my own blood beneath those words. I don’t remember doing it, but I did. To my friend? I gave Teddy a hold before anything happened with the shed. The truth is going to hurt, because it already does. And there is more to come. The reveal is only starting. I drop Teddy to the ground and step away from the car. It’s nighttime. It was just day. My surroundings are rippling, like reflections in disturbed water: the trees, the sky, even the car.

  There is a feeling of being pulled out of