“LEFT BEHIND”
copyright 2010 by Donald Henry Hinkle
812 words
Pepi had a family: mommy, daddy, and Fritz and Hans and Little Bethie. Pepi was a good dog with all of them, but especially he loved and took care of Little Bethie because she never pulled his tail or poked his eyes like the boys did. He slept in her bed.
One day, Pepi was walking Bethie to the school bus. He had stopped to sniff at a butterfly. Suddenly he felt a tug on his leash and he heard Bethie cry: “O no, Pepi!”
He looked up. Bethie was floating up in the sky, being carried by a big angel.
The angel looked at Pepi with gentle eyes as he disengaged Bethie’s hand from the leash.
“I want Pepi to go with me!” Bethie cried.
“I’m sorry, Bethie,” the big angel said. “No dogs allowed where you’re going.”
Her tears dropped down on Pepi’s nose. Pepi barked and barked to be taken along, but the angel carried Bethie up and up until she disappeared in a fluffy cloud.
Then Pepi saw that other people too were being carried up by angels.
He galloped back home and saw that Daddy was being carried up, while Mommy and Hans and Fritz were stood on the ground shouting at him.
“I’m sorry!” Daddy shouted back. “I’ll miss you all in heaven. But I warned you that if you didn’t do good this might happen!”
“I know!” wailed Mommy. “But I thought the Rapture wouldn’t happen until the next generation!”
“Goodbye, kids,” Daddy shouted from higher up. “Try to be good even though it’s too late now before the Apocalypse!”
The boys cried and wept and beat their breasts, but no angel would pick them up.
Hans said to Fritz: “OK, he was good, but not that good!”
Fritz said: “I wonder how he got the fix in?”
All over town, indeed, all over the world, similar scenes happened, as some people were carried up to heaven and many others were left behind. Including all the dogs and cats and elephants and lions. And horses.
Pepi saw a neighbor being carried up. He was a fat man and the angel was very small. The fat man’s mother wouldn’t let go of his hand.
Pepi barked sharply at the angel.
The angel, of course, understood what Pepi was saying.
“I’m sorry,” the angel said to Pepi, “but those are my orders from the Angel In Charge.”
“Who is he?” barked Pepi. “Please let me talk to him?”
The little angel stopped struggling with the fat man for a minute and pulled out a heavenly cellphone, which was pink and blue. He, or maybe it was a she, spoke into the phone.
“Okay,” the angel said to Pepi. “He’ll be down, but I don’t think he’ll change his mind. He’s very strict.”
Soon, a large ugly angel descended and stood facing Pepi.
Pepi barked out a long story about how he had always been a good dog and a loving dog and had never done anything more wrong than mere puppyish mischief, and how Little Bethie loved him and wouldn’t be consoled without him.
The big angel snarled, “No dogs in heaven!” and flew away.
The little angel had finally loosed the mother’s hands from the fat man and had him ten or twelve feet in the air. The angel sighed loudly and said to Pepi: “I’ll talk to the Big Guy and see if anything can be done.”
Then quickly he or she and the fat man soared out of sight.
Pepi sat patiently and waited, his tongue lolling. He watched all the other people being separated from each other. “Like sorting out bad treats from good treats,” Pepi thought, being a dog who liked analogies.
Suddenly the sky darkened dramatically and a heavenly bright light descended.
From its midst, a quiet voice spoke to Pepi. “I see what has gone wrong. The wrong angel was put in charge. He is Quentin Tarantino, a director of savage moving pictures. My people were misled by idolaters who called him, ‘a god among men.’ He doesn’t belong in this Exodus at all. He selected many of the wrong people, so we have a lot of returns.”
As Pepi listened, he noticed a loud wailing and saw a body falling from an unimaginable height, at the end of a trail of feathers, until it disappeared into a boggy swamp.
The bright light spoke once more and said, “Come, good dog!” to Pepi. Pepi felt himself rising.
He rose higher and higher until Earth was far below, and he saw Bethie waiting for him, with a big bone!
The End.
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