The Five People You Meet In Heaven

Eddie is in the darkness when he hears a sound that haunted his dreams since the war. As the noise clears and comes closer, he realizes that it is the sound of children playing in a river. He sees a group of small children with no adults in sight. A girl standing on a white boulder gestures him over.

At 51, Eddie begins treating his birthdays like regular days after Marguerite’s death. On his 82nd birthday, he takes a taxi to the cemetery where he visits both his parents, his brother, Joe, and Marguerite.

The girl is five or six and tells him her name is Tala. Tala tells him that she was hiding in a building at the prisoner of war camp when Eddie and his fellow soldiers burned it down. She is the shadowy figure Eddie saw, the figure he was trying to rescue when the captain shot him. Eddie cries in regret. Tala becomes covered in burned flesh and asks Eddie to wash it away. He does. Tala tells him that he spent his life keeping children safe at