[Fiction] Heaven's Gate

Read the second-place entry for our week of February 23, 2025 prompt, The Uncanny

Heaven’s Gate
by Grace Kinsey

The small, strange hours.

There are no windows in the maroon coffee shop – its walls bear cheery Italians captured in sepia. They pause for espresso on sun-lit cobbles.

I bought one coffee yesterday evening. I use all the sockets within a wire’s reach.

Throaty blasts and mechanical rattles obscure functional exchanges between staff and the odd patron.

A man sits on an upholstered bench and stares, clouds in his eyes. His wife sleeps in the foetal position. His lap is her pillow. Next to them, a young woman slumps onto her hand so that her face is distorted, skin stretched upwards, lips pulled apart to reveal gums and, if mine are anything to go by, unbrushed teeth.

Wax models.

If it weren’t for airborne notes of overwarm, unwashed bodies, I might say that’s what we are.

Finally, it’s announced. The wait is over. We all rise.

Rushes of blood pooling into extremities. Pins and needles.

We take off, faster and faster until we’re marching en masse. Through lounges, past shuttered shops, along corridors and corridors and corridors, across travellators.

Up escalators and stairways. Heading for the heavens.

Boarding. Go to gate.

Towards flight.

A Note From Our Guest Judge, Emma Stephenson

This one had me from its bizarre establishing first sentence and only grew on me more as it continued to offer weird little turns of phrase like “maroon coffee shop” and “all the sockets within a wire’s reach.” I read this as a mundane spin on purgatory—it captured that universal feeling of friction between what we anticipate and what we are forced to confront as we share ordinary spaces with our fellow human beings. It read kind of like a prose poem, and I couldn’t get the image of the woman stretching her own face/mouth out of my mind after reading it. Really excellent.

About Grace Kinsey

Grace lives in London, where she writes copy by day and other things by night. She loves life drawing, line dancing and libraries.

This piece was written in response to the prompt The Uncanny.