HumorIs – Adam Overland

Sometimes I think about the pearly gates. About how, if there is such a thing, maybe when I arrive someday a bunch of people will be there, and as I walk toward them a few will rise and begin clapping, and then a few more, and then hundreds of them, maybe thousands—a standing ovation. Maybe all the humans who have ever lived and died throughout history will be there—all 100+ billion of them—cheering me on, not for any significant accomplishments, but just because I made it to the end, and that’s something.

I will see my grandparents and all my relatives who’ve passed smiling at me, so proud, even though my grandma once got really mad at me for sneaking too much candy out of the candy dish. But she is still standing and clapping and smiling all the same. They all are. “You did it! You didn’t quit, even though it was pretty bad at times,” they will say. “We saw you almost quitting, too, don’t think we didn’t! We saw. And we saw you masturbating.” 

But of course, this is a ridiculous idea, because there are just too many people dying—more than 100 every minute. Earth is big and there are lots of us. And so all those 100 billion people would just be hanging around clapping constantly. And the 100+ new dead people every minute would each then be entitled to, what… maybe a half a second of clapping, max, before they’d have to turn around and start clapping for the newer dead people? You’d be clapping before you even realized you’d been clapped for. 

So maybe they would have to have shifts or something, and then it would probably start to feel a lot like work, and who wants that? Then again, who knows how things might work in heaven. It could just be infinite clapping. In any case, I don’t think I’ll actually find out, because of a duck. 

When I was a kid I threw a stick at a duck way out on the water on a neighborhood lake and, almost impossibly, it hit him in the neck, breaking it. The duck immediately flipped over, his legs, now skyward, still paddling, as though he was swimming upside down. I still think about that duck pretty often. And so I know that, if there are pearly gates and I get to them, that duck will be there, waiting for me. And when I get there he will be blocking the gate and he will point his wing toward the path down to hell, and I will bow my head and knowingly go. There won’t be any clapping. Maybe some distant quacking. 

And it’s kind of weird that I still feel terrible about it, because I grew up hunting ducks and pheasants. I had notched my hunter’s safety course at age 12 and pretty soon I was armed and awake at some ungodly hour, my dad driving us to a slough in the middle of nowhere to paddle out onto frozen water among the reeds in late fall, our canoe cutting through a thin crust of ice that would return to water as the sun came up. He would set out decoys while I nodded off in the boat, then masterfully work the duck call, and soon they’d be fooled, and we’d have duck for dinner. 

I never felt triumphant when I killed an animal, but since I was eating it, I never felt terrible, either. But that duck with the stick… I guess I killed it just because, or for sport, and that is no way to treat ducks or any other animal, except for maybe spiders. And mosquitos. And sometimes you have to admit that blue jays are really asking for it. They just don’t know when to shut up. 

But for the most part, I guess I feel like you should eat stuff you kill, which is why now when I find ants in the house, which isn’t a common occurrence but does happen, I’ll often just pick them up and put them outside, because they don’t taste very good.