A WALK THROUGH DEATH: A SHORT STORY

It reminded me of that July afternoon on a country road in Ontario, Canada.

I was striding along with only the sound of my pant legs shuffling when I stopped momentarily to catch my breath.  On doing so, though, I was startled by what I found.  I was amid a vast, deep silence, a stillness like nothing I'd ever experienced before.

"This surely is what death feels like," I thought to myself; I happened just then to be pondering the recent passing of my father and the great despair that this had left me with. 

This was when, suddenly, there on the side of that dusty road, with not another person in sight, and with a green pall of corn draped beside me as far as I could see, that I felt as though it were myself, not my father, who was now deceased.

Indeed, as the silence around me grew ever more silent, as though I were packed in a box of cotton, I felt myself standing somehow on the other side, no longer of this earth. 

It was only when a fly, or was it a gnat, large and noisy, buzzed by my nearside ear, a clap of thunder it may as well have been, that I snapped out of it, if I've ever snapped out of it.