The Soul Sorting Hub

Last night I dreamed I’d landed in purgatory, and it wasn’t clouds and harps—it was a warehouse. Not just any warehouse, but a sprawling hub the size of the UPS facility I worked at in Oakland in the early ’80s. Conveyor belts snaked through the place, machines hissed and clanked, but no parcels moved here. This was a sorting center for souls.

Some souls were shipped out, upgraded. Others were stamped REJECT and sent down a darker chute to wherever rejects go. I was parked in a waiting room with a handful of others, each of us marinating in that bureaucratic dread—half DMV, half Judgment Day—waiting to hear if we were worth the trouble.

When my number came up, the Maker looked me over and decided I’d make the cut. My old, corroded soul was extracted without so much as a twinge. It turned out to be a rectangular device—part ancient relic, part broken office machine—perforated and inscribed with faint glyphs. The sound it made was pitiful, like a player piano gasping out a bad lounge act.

They gave me a new roll, a clean mechanism tuned for beauty. My spirit now ran on melodies that could stop people in their tracks. Freed from the grime of my old hardware, I was incapable—almost physically incapable—of my old toxic habits.

In my new life, I didn’t busk, didn’t carol, didn’t sell myself. I simply stood outside strangers’ homes, and music poured out of me, as if the air itself had been waiting for me to start. People welcomed it. They welcomed me.

The real miracle wasn’t that I made music worth hearing. The real miracle was that, for once, I was in harmony with myself.