"A Near Death Experience" • Hellogoodbye (by Grant Ellsworth)

Joseph Smith said Heaven is a place you can touch. I looked at the sky last night and found Pleiades, a cluster that’s only been shining for a few hundred million years. Some dinosaurs never saw it. I held an orange today and thought about jamming my thumb into it, tearing that shit open, and sucking out the juice. My dad used to bring Cuties to my soccer games, then he’d lie on the grass in his big sunglasses and doze off. Tonight I thought about how a caveman might react to discovering an orange—spotting the bright speck on a gnarly tree in the distance, plucking one out, all his caveman buddies wondering if he’s got a fire in his hands, how his eyes would go buggy when he took that first twinkly, sugary bite. When my greatgreatgreat grandpa joined the mormon church, he said he saw a vision of a temple dripping with white flames, surrounded by angels spinning. He said he felt the heat from the fire on his cheeks. Joseph Smith said heaven is a place you can touch, before he got shot jumping out of a second-story jail cell, before he hit the grass with a big, wet thud, before he ever saw Kolob, the holy star he named, the one that shines on heaven like our sun shines on oranges. I wonder if the caveman held the orange in his hand and thought that stars might be the same stuff. Last night my brother and I drank a bottle of wine with a planet on the label, we strolled outside, looked for Kolob in the sky—just in case Joseph was right way back when, just in case the light from heaven’s made its way to us by now.

Grant Ellsworth is a writer from Utah, now based in Brooklyn, NY. His work is published/

forthcoming in HAD, Maudlin House, and Fish Barrel Review, among others. You can follow him on Twitter @gantisdant, or read his other stuff on his website gant.foo.