A short story for mature readers.
“A dead egoist is sentenced to Hell and, in one all-in effort, tries to send a message of support to the family he left behind. It doesn’t end well, not that it would.”
Lukas Hassic was an asshole in life, and when he died, he went to Hell. One afternoon, when he was all by himself, he suffered a massive heart attack in his office gym. A soothing voice recited affirmations from his portable speaker, as he lay on his back on the cold hardwood floor next to his weight bench, exacerbating the chills he felt through the sweat that had seeped through his t-shirt.
It was not Luke’s intention to damn his soul – so could say anyone – and his first thoughts out-loud in front of Saint Peter weren’t to ask of the wife and two children left behind in his wake, but why he needed to be reviewed for entry at all. He hooted & hollered and raised a stink at the front of the line before the closed doors of Heaven and its gatekeeper, making sure everyone behind him could hear: he prayed every night with his family; he made sure to work hard in his thirty-four years of painting homes for a corporation; he consciously attempted to remain nonjudgmental, pushing up the people around him; and he canvassed every year for Jeans Day. There was more, but it just didn’t make any sense to him why there was any question he shouldn’t be sanctified.
Lately, Peter had been binging “Judy Justice” on Paradise’s on-demand service – which contained every episode of every court show ever – and he was curt and to-the-point with Luke: he was fake.
“Well that’s not fair.”
“Be quiet! I’m speaking!” The ground in the four-feet around them began to shake under the tremor of Peter’s voice. As quickly as they were needed, flashes of moments Luke had fogged with his own narcissism played before him as clearly as if they had just happened: moments that, when they are reflected on for what they are, temporarily break a man’s defences in their afterglow.
The brief silence that followed was disrupted by Peter, who enjoyed the privilege of calling Luke “a piece of shit” without repercussion, said goodbye, and then pulled a wooden lever to his side that disappeared into the clouds underneath him, triggering a mechanical system which opened a trap door beneath where the answerable stood, sending Luke plummeting towards the depths of the non-denominational Underworld, where the likes of Adolph Hitler, Robert Pickton, and the child molester down the street from you, all reside.
*
Luke fell. He fell and fell, hitting the cracked edges & craggy ends of rock that formed the ninety-degree tunnel around him, shattering bones, amputating limbs, and drawing massive amounts of blood. But as his mortal self ceased to exist, none of this mattered: the pain registered on all cylinders, but his body would regenerate itself practically instantaneously. The drop lasted all-of five minutes, but in Luke’s shocked, disorientated state, it felt like an eternity, as he hoped & prayed in the brief respites he was allowed – where his weightless shell was perfectly aligned in the centre of the circumference of the cavern and thus was permitted a few seconds where it didn’t hit anything – for it all to stop. And stop it did, eventually & abruptly, as Luke ended the first of his post-passing adventures by landing head-first in a very deep lake of oily, lightly-coloured, half-solid diarrhea on the shores of Hell.
Recounting the warranted tortures that Luke endured over his ensuing stay in these pages, unabridged & in full – which, like his fall from grace, had only occurred over the length of one hour of commercial-less network TV but felt in each isolated instance like their own lifetime – is fruitless. Know, reader, that on the whole they were varied, and surpassed even the most depraved thoughts of your modern-day basement dweller – the irony being that Luke, after everything so far, was still incredulous to his cries for help going ignored, blended with that of the rest of the millions of victims of Lucifer’s retribution who surrounded him. In non-laments, an anti-prayer communication shield surrounded the Underworld, which guaranteed no in-ingoing or out-going mail, or the Archfiend would get his money back.
In the brief – often microsecond – respites between pokings, the survivors would spread grassroots legends of optimism amongst one-another. They would sit on a bench side-by-side as if in a baseball dugout, if the dugout carpet were furnaces at broiling temperatures turning their human feet to mush like melted candle wax, and the bench had homeless-prevention spikes coming out of it, sticking the individuals up their asses while they spoke, adjusting themselves in the agony & surprising ecstasy as they ate their peanut butter, banana, and pickle sandwiches. Luke had never heard of “sending a dime” before, but as the others explained, for those who believed, when one found a single dime in the real world, it meant someone who had passed on was trying to connect with them. Maybe it was because they had an important message, and the dime would urge its recipient to seek out a medium. Maybe it was only intended as a reminder of the deceased. But either way, it was a means by which you could let someone know you were still there, and still cared, especially if the beneficiary was deserved it in their grief. Luke latched on to this idea: finally, after 45-minutes, a way to let his youngest son know that Dad was still keeping an eye on him, and never letting him forget his legacy.
By that point, the break-time whistle had ended, and the bench lifted up on one side like a teeter-totter, pulling the damned up by their asses – still affixed to the bench by way of their pokey enemas – until the starved, emaciated skin at the side of their rears tore under the pressure of gravity, and one-by-one they ripped themselves from their seats, sliding down the bench like marbles, one at a time bumping into one-another, and then off the side and into a trash-grinder, turning them into regular ground meat one minute, only to come out the other end whole again, falling a short distance into a portal which opened at the other side above the trash-grinder, causing the accursed, reconstituted flesh to fall into the machine once again, over-and-over in jumbled lumps of carcass until a point, unknown to them, was well-and-truly made.
Luke had to make his escape. Where he was to go and how he was to get there wasn’t important: he was flying high on his own rediscovered sense of self-importance. He sat resolute, waiting to be called from the waiting room vestibule to be seen by a grabby-handed gynaecologist. The exit door was guarded by your typical 8-foot tall demon spawn wielding a large red trident and a cock as long as a snake’s tail, with a bulbous head at its end that leaked something smelly on the floor around it. Now was Luke’s chance. He stomped on the demon’s dick as hard as he could, with sinewy muscles he had grown rock-hard with squat-lifts, crippling the sentry to its knees, as Luke opened the door behind it and stepped out.
*
With determination, Luke absconded across the peaks & valleys of the damned: through the maze of animal kennels filled with shelter dogs, each more pathetic-looking than the last; down the river Styx, where he didn’t have a gold coin for the boatman and had to suck him off for a ride instead; to playing the casualty in a clip show of the most violent scenes from movies directed by Mel Gibson. Soon, several lifetimes later, he blinked and found himself floating to a gentle landing in a dark, empty space – so tranquil it was that he felt a tingle he could be saved. He caught his breath and looked around him: there, up ahead, a pinprick of light, high in the air. He thought he could hear an angelic voice calling to him: “Luke, come closer…”
He did. But the demon whose dick he stepped on was in hot pursuit, followed by its entourage of unholy sadists, licking the tips of their dirty blades at the possibilities Luke’s fragile human frame held for their personal gratification. Luke was steadfast: all that working out in life must have been building up to this moment. He was about to be the first person committed to Hell able to get a message out: he could be a beacon. He could be a hero! He used the power of his burpees to gain tens of feet up in the air, onto the heads of the goombas, launching himself closer and closer to the pinprick, now bright like sunlight piercing a bullet hole in the pitch-black darkness surrounding it. All the while he was guided by the voice, who – as he approached – took on the cadence of his soulmate, his first wife: “Luke… Luke… you can do it… come closer…” Reflected in the puddle of white that was this wormhole in the sky was the face of his youngest son, looking back at him, smiling, with his arms outstretched.
Meanwhile, back at Hell HQ, Satan was watching the monitors closely, which had broadcast everything from Luke’s journey direct in real-time. All of this perishable’s exploits had amused the Evil One greatly, everything except this recent development. Beelzebub turned to the shrimp behind the desk that controlled the anti-communication barrier: “What’s going on?” “I don’t know, Sir! There appears to be a crack in the shield!”
“What!” Apparently everything breaks down without regular maintenance, and this particular crack was so deep in the system – in a folder marked “Shed Photos” – it had gone unnoticed. The Dark Lord admired Luke’s tenacity, as he continued to watch the screen, and held his arm out behind him, choking the shield rep from across the room like a kind of force, until the rep’s mutant head popped like a water balloon & sprayed green goo like a sprinkler, sploshing the faces of the associates around him. “What are you all waiting for? Get that hole fixed immediately!”
In the space between Luke and his son’s rippled image, a dime materialized. Luke willed as hard as he could, and the dime – heads-up for good luck – transferred through time and disappeared like a drop in a puddle, before the light curled back in on itself, taking the light with it. The shield computer was being rebooted, and Luke’s pursuers – a mob climbing over one-another to get higher to their prey – grabbed ahold of his ankle and pulled him back to perdition just as the portal closed and the lights turned out.
In the coming weeks HQ boosted security on Hell’s floor to ridiculous levels, killing the chatter among the lost souls, and the software bug that generated the dime was patched in the shield’s next firmware update. Luke was kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his ageless, pitiless stay in his own private purgatory, with flames for running water and no toilet. And the world goes round…
*
We find ourselves back in the real world, in present day. Luke’s second wife walks down the aisle of a local grocery store with their son in-tow. He’s young enough to sit in the buggy, but that’s where the woman’s purse goes, so he’s walking beside her.
Lately, the boy has been thinking about the notion of God, and the stories his father told him of Jesus Christ, from that big book with lots of words and tiny print that he tried to read himself but was too bored to commit. What a funny guy, Jesus! He did all those things for other people like an olden-day Superman, but the people he helped killed him anyway! What’s with that? In his under-developed subconscious, however, the boy is unfettered by the possibilities his free-will truly holds: how every person is their own individual, capable of growing up with their own beliefs and morals, with the right to live their life the way they want to, without being forced to act or behave what goes against their genuine self. Unless they’re a piece of shit, whereas we all get our just-deserts in the end.
No, the boy is not held back by these concepts: he is a child, and innocent, although he is awake to the truth that his father is gone, and – until he is old enough to ask questions – believes his father is in Heaven. His mother, on the other hand, is all-too-aware of the bastard legal system that had locked her former husband’s assets away in probate because someone thought he was going to live forever – money that the child & her needed to get through the transition of moving back in with her parents, across the continent in a different country.
The boy sees something on the ground. But he was just looking at the ground, wasn’t he? Did this just appear out of nowhere? It was totally possible in a mind that still believed in magic. The boy picks it up: money! A whole dime! “Look, Mom, look!”
“Put that down, it’s dirty!” “But Mom…”
“Listen to your mother! It’s worthless! Don’t pick dirty coins up off the ground and then smell your fingers!” Next time, the boy would pocket it and not tell her. But for now, he puts the dime back on the ground, tails-up, and walks away with her.
//wd 1.27.2024
Photo by Han Sen on Pexels.com
theory of a daskeman 