Your Beneficiary

The second hearing in the Hall of King Yama has gone into recess. As you withdraw to the waiting bench below the red stairs, the reaper quietly turns his back and closes the door. You have until one stick of incense burns down to meet your witness. Across from you, someone sits in the witness stand lit by an orange lantern. A face you've never seen, yet somehow familiar. One moment it is the face of a middle-aged woman with a worn shopping bag on her lap; in the blink of an eye it becomes a boy in a school uniform, then the woman again. Recorded in the judges' ledger only as "Beneficiary," this being is a witness formed from the gathered warmth of those, among all the people you brushed past in life, whose lives changed in some way because of you. They have not come to defend you. They have only come to tell what happened to them. The incense begins to burn.