The man sat next to her at the bus stop, She scootched a little to the right away from him and gripped her purse tighter. Not that he was particularly frightening, it was just better to be wary in public than to not. Also it was the last part of dusk just before it got fully dark and there was no one else at the bus stop.
"You're dead." the man growled. Her heart skipped a beat and she inched away from him. He turned to look at her, his eyes steel grey and weary. Seeing her abject terror, he continued "No, don't be like that, I'm dead too, we all are, everyone in the whole damn world." "W'what?" She stammered, still on the verge of bolting. "we died", he said with a sigh. "We are here waiting, waiting to move on." "We think this is life, that this is reality, that reality is real". "It isn't, reality is just chemical impulses interpreted by your mind." "This bench looks and feels like a bench because your senses see this light spectrum, and your mind creates shape form and substance from electrical and chemical reactions." She looked at him agape, wishing very much that the bus would get here soon. "So how do you know your dead?" She asked, against her better judgement, and more to be polite than because she wanted an answer. "I figured out that this place is Purgatory." "This is not an ideal plane of existence" He, looked a little more kindly now, like a teacher or professor expounding on a lesson. "Think about it," He paused, to let her think "The weather is too hot or too cold, "life" is an endless struggle to get enough to be content, but it is actually impossible to be content." "We work jobs we hate to buy things we don't really need in a futile effort to be comfortable" "See, purgatory." He stopped having made his point and took a rumpled pack of cigarettes from his coat. He looked at her quizzically with those steely eyes and asked "do you mind?" shaking the pack of cigarettes toward her? She said she didn't, pleased that he was at least polite about it. "So when did we die?" she asked "And why don't we remember it?". He took a drag from his smoke, exhaled a noxious cloud of blue smoke and said, " I'm not sure exactly, I have a feeling that it has something to do with original sin." "You know, Adam and Eve, from the Bible?" "I'm working with the theory that purgatory began when Adam and Eve were expelled from the ideal plane." "You know, The garden of Eden, a perfect human world." He paused and took another drag. " Just so you know," She said, "I'm an Atheist". He looked bemused, "denial is a most common response to horrific situations." "The fact that you can rationalize and come up with the concept of athieisim is proof of sentience." "Sentience had to start somewhere." "Scientists have created AI artificial intelligence." "I wonder how long before intelligence becomes sentience and the new life form we have created no longer believes in us." "Just another fun attraction in the halls of purgatory." "But how do you know this isn't hell?" She asked "easy" He answered, "People move on from here, if it was hell we would be here forever."
A large white city bus covered in advertising pulled up to the curb. The air brakes hissed and the door opened. She gathered her coat and purse and stood up. She looked back to see if the stranger was coming with her, having some notion of continuing this conversation on the bus. She was intrigued now and wanted to know more. But as she looked back there was no one there, just a bench, and a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and a single butt that was still smoking faintly.
