Writing Exercise #4

I didn't follow this prompt perfectly, but I really like what I wrote. I'm playing with the idea of filling it out more to make a nice length short story.

Prompt - You wake up in heaven but know that you don't belong.

            Micah opened his eyes and knew that something was wrong. He was lying in his childhood bedroom, a room he hadn’t seen in more than ten years.  He glanced around and noticed that everything was how he always remembered that room looking, a mess of sports equipment and school books.  He could hear the sounds from the rest of the house.  It must be a Saturday; the sounds of his brothers watching television were the first to reach him, followed by the sounds of his mother in the kitchen.  The only sounds missing were those of his father. Micha laughed, he had woken up in that weekend, the only weekend of his life when he could remember being truly happy.

“Micah are you ever going to wake up?”  His mother knocked on the door before pushing it open enough to pop her head inside. “Breakfast is almost ready, get out of bed sleepy head.”

Micah was scared to even try to get out of bed; what if it was all a dream and his standing up would end it all. He’d wake up in some hospital room with machines all around him.  He could remember being shot, the feel of the bullet tearing into his skin as it pieced his heart.  He knew he should be dead.“If I died, is this heaven?” Micah whispered to himself.  Why shouldn’t heaven been his happiest memory, it made sense.  “This isn’t right.” Micah stood up and started to pace the room. “Why am I in heaven?”

“Micah! Breakfast!” His mother called out from the other room.

Micah stopped his pacing and looked towards the door. Some one obviously made a mistake, Micah knew his Catechism and he would never have passed into Heaven unless someone had screwed up processing his soul.  Micah hadn’t lived a good life, things had never been good growing up and it all just got worse the older he got.  The day he died he was being chased by the police for robbing a store, he hadn’t needed the money, and it really was just something stupid to do because he was bored.  Well if someone had screwed up this time, Micah was going to capitalize on it, he was going to enjoy every moment he had here inside his favorite memory.

Micah could live in this day forever; he could direct the actions as if he was a famed director.  During his few prison stints, he had spent hours remembering and reliving this day, but never like this, never as if he was living it again.  He couldn’t remember why, but is father was gone for the weekend and with him the dread left the house.  His mother would be smiling as she served her sons their breakfast. There was no ridged schedule to follow of chores and lessons, she let them be boys.  Micah had swallowed his teenage adhesion to playing with his little brothers and spent the late morning romping with them in the backyard.  It had felt wonderful to be a kid again.  Later in the afternoon his mother gave them what little money she had left after the shopping and the boys were able to buy ice cream from the truck when it made its appearance on their street.  They ate dinner in front of the television, something his father would never allow.  Another rule broken on this special day, the boys were allowed to stay awake as long as they liked with the promise that when their father got home there would be issue of bed times.

It wasn’t long after this special day that things started to really get bad. It was only a few weeks later that Micah had gotten arrested for the first time. Micah took a deep breath and opened the door. He stepped through but instead of the hallway of his childhood house he was standing in the middle of a cold white room.  Shit, Micah thought, they figured it out.