Satan's here, and he punishes
everyone.
If you ever get to talk to
him, or read his memoirs, you can find out all about the history of Hell, all
the different iterations and improvements he made over the centuries.
Man is the greatest source of despair, he wrote in his memoirs once. Twenty minutes with a person can give you
twenty ideas for new, terrible tortures.
I read the memoirs in between
being flayed, being burned with lava, being slowly crushed under massive,
freezing cold boulders. This was an early innovation Satan came up with. It
can't be torture all the time, otherwise it gets predictable and constant. The
best torture comes in waves. Fits and starts.
Everyone has a job in Hell,
but all the jobs are terrible. Boring, repetitive, physically and mentally
draining. People who liked to sleep in late when they were alive have to wake
up at five thirty. People who liked to wake up early work from ten until eight.
My job is to read the
memoirs. I sit in a hot, stuffy box with a bullet-proof glass window. There's a
sign on the box that says: INFORMATION. New souls come to me every day, every
hour, every minute, seeking some kind of explanation. Asking for directions, or
recommendations. Asking for it all to be a dream, a terrible nightmare.
But I can't answer. I just
have to sit there and read Satan's memoirs.
I've tortured history's greatest torturers, Satan wrote. But the best ideas always come from children and addicts. From knowing
too little, or knowing too much, I guess.
Animals go to Hell, too. Hell
is full of snakes, bears, weasels, elephants, cats. Insects, too. Spiders
everywhere, long columns of them destined to wriggle through pools of even
smaller spiders and parasitic wasps that bite their legs and poke at their
eyes.
Children are forced to
struggle for their parents' attention. They get left behind on field trips.
They get picked last for the kickball teams. Then they have to eat the spiders
covered in smaller spiders, swallow them whole and feel them crawling around in
their guts.
I spent so much of my life
trying to turn off my brain that now it has to be on, all day, every day, just
really concentrating. Really thinking about things. I think this is part of my
punishment. But I'm often not sure. Which is also part of my punishment, maybe.
Sometimes I have to fill out
little reading comprehension quizzes. Sometimes I have to proofread a thousand
pages. Sometimes I have to write my own thoughts and memoirs in the margins,
forced to believe that someone might want to read them.
I like to think of the living world as a test
market for Hell. We crowd-source new tortures and pains and free up our own
resources down here to make things worse for everybody, Satan once wrote. Every new day in the living world reveals a new way to cause misery.
Often times, in Hell, the living surprise us with their inventiveness.
Every day, in Hell, a billion
people are sent a letter informing them that they've been allowed to leave and
go to Heaven. This was just a test,
the letters say, and God has seen the
good in you and wants you to join Him in the light of Heaven.
Demons dressed like Angels
show up and escort them upwards into new, terrifying chambers of Hell. It's a
whole production, and the reveal is personalized for each soul. A billion
unique chambers for a billion unique people.
For some, the newly revealed
Heaven is just a new annex of Hell, and God is revealed to be a slave to Satan
-- they see God himself, exuding a holy light of infinite forgiveness, but he
is shackled, and he renounces each soul who comes before him.
I've been tricked. I will
continue to be tricked. So will you.
I could lie and say that my task is carried out
begrudgingly. That it brings me sorrow to bring sorrow unto others. That it
brings me pain to inflict pain unto others,
Satan says in his writings. But, as it
often is with man, the joy that comes from hurting others is the closest thing
to Heaven that anyone could experience.
People fall in love in Hell,
just so Satan can intervene and break their hearts. He lets them organize
wedding ceremonies, put down deposits, invite all their friends. Sometimes he
doesn't even have to get involved – the
happy couple starts to argue, starts to worry about whether they've found the
right person, whether this has been a trick all along. People are left at the
altar just as frequently as people are dunked into boiling oil, down in Hell.
Everyone is born with this infinite eventuality
looming below them, Satan writes. Some people never experience hope up in the
world of the living. These are the most challenging ones to punish.
Sometimes Satan lets people
go back into the world of the living. It's like reincarnation, only they are
born into broken, deformed bodies, and every night, in their dreams, the truth
is revealed to them. Sometimes their bodies are fine, but they suffer great
emotional pain, mistaking the futility of escape with hope.
Some people in Hell are
doomed to not remember anything. But I am doomed to know too much. To knowing
all the little tricks, all the secrets, how high the electricity bills
sometimes get and how many of the walls are just painted to look like brimstone
to save money.
Some people, like me, end up
unsure about whether Hell is such a bad place after all. They wonder why things
don't seem so bad for them. Why they seem so special. Among the living, this is
often a positive thing, the result of inheritance, privilege, or sheer luck.
But in Hell, even the most narcissistic break down after a few hundred years.
And if they don't, they start to wonder. This is also part of Hell.
Zac Smith lives in Boston, MA, where he likes to walk his dogs. His stories have appeared in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit, Philosophical Idiot, Soft Cartel, and other very sweet online journals. His twitter is @ZacTheLinguist
