"The Right Side" by James Wymore follows Jennifer Fairbanks, a recently deceased elderly woman who arrives in a demonic processing office where a leather-skinned demon named Xandern informs her she is dead and that he must determine her eternal fate. Jennifer is surprised to find herself here, having spent her entire mortal life in strict religious observance, sacrificing personal happiness in the belief that dutiful compliance with church teachings would earn her a heavenly reward. Xandern challenges her assumptions by pointing out historical and theological inconsistencies in the concepts of hell and eternity she had accepted unquestioningly, before telling her she will go to the very heaven she always imagined. He warns her, cryptically, that she is being sent there to learn something. Jennifer is transformed into a cherubic angel and deposited in a vast aerial world populated by similarly childlike souls, all living out versions of their believed-in afterlives. She briefly enjoys the weightless, painless freedom she craved in life before a group of malicious angels traps her inside a wooden box, which falls to Earth and lands near an Icelandic volcano. She spends what amounts to decades imprisoned in the box, during which she masters her harp, reexamines her life without arriving at different conclusions about her choices, and begins to question the nature of the realm she inhabits. She is eventually discovered by Norse warriors who use her box as a musical charm, then as a weapon in battle, inadvertently freeing her. She returns to the sky and falls in with a faction of angels campaigning for access to a Gothic cathedral floating on a solid cloud. After participating in a chaotic but ultimately bloodless siege that wins her group control of the cathedral, she forms a meaningful connection with an angel named Juan, who has spent centuries in this realm studying its library of scrolls. Juan explains that most angels believe the scrolls suggest their current existence is a temporary state, a transitional hell shaped by the beliefs and expectations each person carried in life, and that the way forward into something genuinely transcendent requires learning something essential that each soul has thus far failed to understand. No one Juan knows has ever managed to leave. Jennifer, still defined by the same driven refusal to accept her circumstances that shaped her mortal life, resolves to read the scrolls in search of whatever it is she has not yet learned, accompanied by Juan and newly anchored in companionship after the long isolation that nearly broke her.
By James Wymore · Genre: Political Thriller, Contemporary Fiction, Social Commentary