Prompt: Lost and Found

"I once was lost but now I'm found," Carla sang, not loudly, at the back of the church. She stopped, let her mind travel from Uncle Bob's funeral. She thought about God's Lost and Found, wondered if He had a big box sitting next to Heaven's door, a box full of things people had forgotten, had left behind. What would you find there? Lost souls, of course. She imagined these must look like Peter Pan's shadow: flat and flimsy as silk, easy enough to scrape apart from a body, and then there's no telling whose is which. What would happen, she wondered, if somebody accidentally picked up someone else's soul, didn't realize it, just draped it on and went on living. Of course if you took someone else's soul on purpose, that's different. Of course you'd go straight to hell. But what if it was an honest mistake?

Carla looked down at her scrawny body, covered in black out of respect for her dead uncle. She wondered if this was really her own soul, or if a wild wind one night had blown hers off and down the road, if that wind had slammed her neighbor's soul right into her insides while she dreamed at night. Maybe that explained her naughty thoughts. Maybe that explained her confusion.

--Alida Thacher