After We Die by Andrew Kozma

After We Die by Andrew Kozma | Issue 1.10

The Falls appeared in the sky over Houston without warning. It was the middle of summer during the year summer never ended. In hot, humid Houston, the Falls hovered over the Third Ward, pouring the souls of the dead from the pure blue sky like water from a faucet. At first, people were frightened. The surrounding blocks were cleared, and fire trucks and police cars and ambulances crowded the roads. But after a month, the city began to lose interest. After a year, the news stopped covering the Falls, satisfied to leave it unexplained and go back to dissecting the candidates for the coming election.

On the edge of the Third Ward, there were no longer any crowds, just a few groups of tourists waiting for a guide to lead them to the Falls. The run-down neighborhood was still marked off with wilting police tape and faded orange cones. Temporary trailers to house the displaced filled Memorial Park with those former residents who’d decided not to leave. Very few had moved back into the neighborhood.

I couldn’t blame them.

From a distance the Falls did look like a gigantic waterfall, some impossible Niagara or Victoria dropping from the clouds, a beautiful mix of white and blue threaded through with dark lines of shadow. But the closer you got, the clearer the bodies became. Hundreds of thousands of bodies falling from the upper limit of the atmosphere to disappear into the ground and go God knows where.

Who would return to their home with that outside their windows?

My theory was that the falling bodies were the souls of those sent to Purgatory.

When I was younger, I took a trip to Europe. Before I’d left, my father and I’d had a fight—on the difference between his hopes for my future and my own—and I’d left without saying goodbye. Three weeks into the trip, my father died. I cut my trip short, entered law school like he’d wanted, and confessed it all to his grave.

From my townhome across the city, I could see the Falls dividing the horizon and it looked no more threatening than a skyscraper. But as I neared it, I felt a sort of vertigo as I craned my head to keep the entire Falls in view as I walked. I felt terrifyingly small and almost weightless, as though at any moment the Falls would suck me in to join all those falling bodies.

The Third Ward wasn’t completely deserted. I passed the smoking remnants of a trashcan fire. Fast food wrappers, still slick with grease. Makeshift homes built from cardboard, blankets, and duct tape. As I walked down alleys untouched by the afternoon sun I noticed shadows moving in the distance, silhouettes that could’ve been mischievous children or skulking adults.

I walked faster. All the bodies falling from the sky, it was the Rapture in reverse. There were no birds calling out in the trees, no cats sunning on abandoned cars, and no wandering packs of desperate, skeletal dogs. It felt like walking through an abandoned graveyard.

No, it was worse than that. I knew these corners. I’d eaten at these restaurants, now emptied out like crawfish shells sucked dry. Of my friends who’d lived here, every single one had moved away for a better life in an unhaunted city. I hated them. I envied them.

When I turned a corner and finally saw the Falls in all its glory, something caught in my throat, like a prayer refusing to be said. It was wider than a city block and curved into the distance. A large public square had been hollowed out, buildings razed to give it room. The asphalt, the broken sidewalks, my skin, everything was glazed with the Falls’ blue light.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?”

I turned to see an old man dressed in clothes that looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. His face was nested in a wild thicket of brown hair, the hair on his head seamless with his thick beard. Two blue eyes peered out at me like forgotten marbles.

“Yes, they are,” I said.

The bodies descended slowly, sinking feet-first as though through water. I had studied the pictures online and in the papers, and I’d watched every video on social media I could find, but nothing had prepared me for the reality. The bodies were pale and insubstantial and naked. Through the Falls, if I concentrated, I could make out the abandoned Goode Seafood Warehouse. If I unfocused my eyes, I saw the bodies behind the bodies on the edge, and the bodies behind those bodies, hundreds of them passing every few seconds.

All of them sank through the air with their eyes open. Their chests didn’t move. They were absorbed into the ground without protest.

They weren’t alive.

Why had I come here? My dad wasn’t in the Falls. And even if he was, there’s no way I’d find him. And even if I found him, he’d be a ghost. Less than that, he’d be the ghost of a corpse.

“A few years ago,” the man said, as though commenting on the weather, “I lost my daughter to cancer. She was only twenty-three, and in good health otherwise, but it was cancer of the bone. Months, that was all we had, and then she was gone.”

The old man’s eyes were wet. The wind changed, and I smelled the rankness of his sweat.

I had thought we were alone, but on the other side of the Falls I noticed a woman staring into the Falls, as still and unassuming as guestroom furniture. Off to the left, a young couple stood close to the Falls, the man’s hand outstretched, their features smudged with the spectral light.

The Falls continued to fall. The bodies continued to drop. Every single one of them looked out onto the world without emotion. The living looked back.

“It’s not fair,” the old man said.

—

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been or will be published in ergot, Apex, Analog, and Hexagon. You can find him on Bluesky at @thedrellum.bsky.social and visit his website.