John stood in the line.  How long had he been here?  He looked at his wrist automatically, but he wasn’t wearing a watch.  It must have been hours.  Hours upon hours.  Days, even.  How could he tell?  Maybe the seasons had changed outside.  Who knew?

He was bored.  He had examined the back of the head in front of him in minute detail.  He knew every hair, every flake of dandruff, every goose-pimple of flesh visible through the crown.  There was nothing to look at around him, just bland white nothingness for ever and ever.  He wondered what the back of his own head looked like.  Was the person behind him as bored of staring at a stranger’s tonsorial idiosyncrasies as he was?

Then, when he felt he could stand no more torment, the queue shuffled forward two paces, and the next interminable ache of boredom started.

John leant sideways.  The queue stretched forever.  For ever and ever, amen.  One or two heads peeked out further down, craning, like John, to see the end.  But he dare not step out to improve the angle.  If he lost his place, he’d have to start all over again.

The queue on the other side of the tape barrier was invisible, indiscernible, infuriating.  It wasn’t even a queue, just a path marked out for a queue.  Every once in forever a figure would stride down the path, walking as fast as he or she cared to go.  Leaning out the other side, John couldn’t even see where that queue started.  Maybe there wasn’t even a queue there, the official at the end idly doodling until a customer appeared at the counter.

John debated whether to duck under the tape barrier and join the other queue.  The indecision gnawed at him, but he knew he could not.  If he left this queue, suddenly his old queue would start moving and the new one would grind to a halt.  Or he would reach the end and they would know he was in the wrong queue, and send him back to the very far end to start examining the back of a fresh stranger’s head.  But most of all he just could not bring himself to defy the unquestionable authority of an official tape barrier.

Shuffle, and he progressed to a spot that was two feet further on than he had been before, but he had no way of marking it.  There was no point of reference as to how far he had travelled, nor how far he had to go.  He should have counted the number of shuffles, multiply by two to get the feet, divide by three to get the yards, divide by one thousand, seven hundred and sixty to get the miles.  How many miles were there in a light year?

He wasn’t hungry or thirsty.  No matter how long he stood he didn’t need to rest or sleep.  There was no distress to speak of, save for the screaming, chronic tediousness of it all.

Not only seasons had passed in the real world; surely years had passed by now.  The people he knew and loved would have missed him, then moved on.  Then passed on.  Perhaps they were in the queue behind him, a billion shuffles back, counting the hairs on the head of their own stranger.

His gran had always said, “Count your blessings.  There’s always someone worse off than you.”  How could anyone be worse off?  What could be worse than stuck in this everlasting queue?  He could, he supposed, be stuck behind a bald man, with no hairs to count at all.  The thought didn’t comfort him.

The system must have been designed an age ago, back when there were mere hundreds of thousands on the planet.  Now the population was measured in thousands of millions.  The system just could not cope.  You could give Saint Peter the fastest software running on the latest hardware, but there was still that single bottleneck.  With the wars and poverty in the world, the casual violence and the compassion fatigue, there must be millions demanding service.

What would judgement be like, when he got to the end?  Would there be compensation for this interminable wait?  If you were in a perfect heaven, what sort of compensation was even possible?

Had the people in the other queue purchased a fast-track ticket?  Was there some form he missed when born, some celestial check-box he had failed to tick, that said, ‘VIP when RIP?’  What had they done to deserve that?  What had he done to deserve this?

Shuffle and he moved from one spot to an identical spot.  Or maybe he just moved his feet but stayed where he was.  How would he know?  Was there even anyone at the other end?  What if the angels were on strike, or the saints had lost the key?

Well, he would have a word or two to say when he got there, to the end of the queue, to the judgement seat.  Yes, a choice word or two that the saints had probably never heard before.  He’d half a mind to storm off and take his custom elsewhere.  Except then he’d lose his place in the queue.  No, he’d waited this long, he’d wait a little longer.  Until he could be judged.

Knowing all the while he had been judged already.