The Hall of Elysium's Secret

"Oh, my god," I said. "I'm dead."

"What?" Clarice asked. "No way."

I looked around the table. Old friends and perfect strangers were sitting with us, drinking and talking. I knew every one of them was dead as well. My heart beat faster with every person who looked at me as I took in their eyes and recognized them as another late-night visitor to the Hall of Elysium.

"So... where are we?" I asked, afraid to know the answer, but unable to resist the question.

"We're in the Elysian Fields," Clarice said. "I mean, this is what it's like here, right?" She looked around, then back at me. "Is this not what it's like?"

"Yes," I said, "this is what it's like." The woman sitting next to me smiled and nodded at me while she sipped a drink through a straw. She had been my first grade teacher when I died of a freak accident at the age of 21. Now she was here, with me, in the afterlife. And if it was true that she was dead, then so was everyone else here. This was definitely the Elysian Fields; this was definitely Hell for people with low-enough status to be sent here instead of Heaven.

Well, that wasn't quite true: there were some people here who weren't just mere mortals. My eyes moved over to the other side of the table from me, where a man sat alone drinking himself into a stupor. He wore black and gray robes with symbols embroidered all over them; a hood covered his face and he nursed a bowl of soup by himself while he waited impatiently for his drink to arrive. Death had claimed him only weeks ago when a gunshot wound had rendered him brain-dead: his body kept on living and breathing while his mind lay dormant inside of him, waiting for some miracle cure or reanimation process to bring him back to life.

Those miracles rarely happened anymore; medical technology had advanced so far by now that curing fatal ailments no longer required divine intervention: even if you didn't have any money or find yourself stuck in a situation where your social status prevented you from getting treatment before you died, modern medicine could still save your life... unless you were too far gone before they found you or arrived on scene, whichever came first in most cases. It was rarer yet for someone to die without having been declared legally dead before they received treatment-- which meant that most people who came here after being killed were at least officially alive when they died-- but those who did end up here ended up here regardless of their status in life because nobody had wanted to waste money trying to save them when they were practically considered already spent, doomed to live out their days in purgatory until death finally came for them and brought them here instead of wherever else they would have ended up otherwise.

"When did you die?" I asked Clarice. She shrugged at me and glanced down at her drink; I realized she didn't remember her own death date anymore than I did mine, but we both knew better than anyone else how long we'd been dead-- especially since it felt like we'd known each other forever now that we were together in Hell instead of Earthside (as far as either of us knew).