When I was eight, Grampa told me the chariots would carry him away, just like Elijah. He told us how there would be fire and a whirlwhind out of the sky, and the prophet would come down in a chariot of flaming gold with horses of molten brass, and it would carry him over a golden road straight up to heaven. Whenever my mother heard him talking like that, she told him not to teach me such things because I was only a kid. But when she turned away, Grampa would wink at me, and then I knew it was true.

When I was ten, Grampa had to settle for a silver chariot– a wheelchair. “This is nothing,” he would tell me. “Wait until you see what Elijah’s got for me. That’s riding in style.” But Grampa looked older and weaker to me. Why, I wondered to myself at night, would Elijah want him?

When I was in high school, Grampa and I didn’t talk much. Grampa didn’t talk to anybody much, except for a little muttering every once in a while. We never talked about the chariot story, but I had long abandoned it as the ramblings of an old man. I loved my grandfather, but my friends were more important to me. Sometimes, Grampa would look at me, and I would see the golden chariot look in his eyes, and know he was thinking about Elijah and those horses. But we never spoke about it. And I worried about what really would happen to him.

I went away to college in a chariot of my own– a Greyhound bus to State. I majored in Computer Science, and learned what they were really doing with minerals like gold and silicon. I wondered what Grampa would think of the chariots they were building. I wondered if his heaven was a place technology was building for us.

On the phone, I heard from my mother that Grampa was getting worse. He fell once, had a stroke another time. He had a nurse that came to our house and took care of him, but things didn’t look good. She didn’t know how soon, just not good.

When I was home once during college, I heard something moving the hallway. I got up and saw nothing in the middle of the night. I walked out past Grampa’s room, where his oxygen machine was running, and into the living room. Outside, through the porch doors, I saw a weird orange glow on the porch outside. I walked toward the doors to see what was on the other side, when one of them slid open.

It was Grampa. The glow reflected off of his face, and whatever gave it off was just outside of my view. I didn’t think to ask Grampa what he was doing out of bed. Or why he was standing without his walker or wheelchair.

“He’s here, boy,” he said. “I told you so. Have a good one.” And then he winked at me and smiled. It was like I was eight all over again.

Grampa walked off into the glow, and there was a flash before I could look and see what was there. When I finally got a look, of course there was nothing.

The next morning, they said he’d gone peacefully in the middle of the night. The funeral was later that week, and everyone said he’d lived a good life. They said he’d passed on.

But only I knew where he’d passed on to. And how exactly he got there.