I am dead flat serious, let him try.
Anyway, our wonderful life goes on, and while I'm upstairs doing this, Robin is out in the garden watering the rose bushes, since we had/this sudden weird hot spell (she loves roses). And from downstairs I can smell the apple pie (the gooey kind with (he crumbly stuff on top) that I m baking in the oven. I hear Robin come in and yelled down to her to come up and see me write "The End," (a writer's two favorite words, unless they'd be 'time for dinner') but she doesn't answer. Hrnnun. Then, I hear her on the stairs OKAY! only the sound her step makes is too loud. "Robin," I call out, "honey..."
This is weird-I don't like this-hand on the door, knob turns, why am I so scared? Awww, it'll be her and Fit edit this and the door is opening and HEY, WAIT A MINUTE
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Michael Armstrong
Nuliajuk, the seal woman, came to Qawik in his vision. He was swimming deep below me pack ice, down where the tungai- animal spirits-lived, paying his respects to the souls of the sea animals. Qawik was swimming with a seal, diving and turning, and when he looked at her face she smiled at him-woman's face, seal's body.
"Nuliajuk," he said.
Nuliajuk smiled. "It is time for you to go to the surface. You must push the water aside and rejoin your people."
"I am dead," Qawik said. He tugged at the woman's knife, the ulu, stuck point first in his skull. The knife would not come out. "I cannot rejoin my people. I am dead."
"You must go to the surface," she said. "Now. Push the water aside. Go. Go." Qawik shook his head. Nuliajuk stared at him, and then he yielded.
"Go."
He rose. He kicked, fought, swam through the cold water, up and up. The darkness gave way to light. The ice thickened, became a great mat of dark dirt, roots shooting down, timbers and old houses in the permafrost. He pushed. The dirt cracked and groaned and split apart. He floated on his back.
He looked at his hands: flesh reformed on the bones of his fingers. There was a squirming around him, a twitching. His legs flew back to his body. He watched as a wolf spat out his liver, saw the liver fly back into his groin.
The muscles spun and wove around the skeleton, the skeleton grew back into his body, his body became whole.
His parka came back out of the dirt. The spots of the reindeer hide grew together. His sealskin mukluks wrapped his feet. His cheeks grew back around the quarter-sized labret in his left cheek, the dime-sized labret in his right cheek. His scalp itched as his hair grew back. He licked his ops and tasted cold dirt. Qawik spat, kicked, and rose out of the ground.
Above him was a great whale's jaw. As he watched, the arches of the mandibles leaned into each other and collapsed, settled into the mire, and sank. He blinked his eyes, squinted; the world was a blast of bright. He breathed, one deep lungful, another, the air filling his whole body.
Qawik coughed. The air smelled like rotten -eggs, humid and thick, the smoke from a dying blubber lamp. He spat, breathed again, coughed.
Nuliajuk flopped around in the swamp, mud dripping from her flippers, mud on her face. She shook her head and drops of bloody mud flew out of her long black hair. She sat up on her hind flippers, smiled, and with one flipper waved her arm at the great swamp.
"Welcome," Nuliajuk said. "Welcome, Qawik, to Hell."
"Hell," Qawik asked Nuliajuk. "What is this Hell?"
"The world below," she said. "The place where the tungai live. The land of the devils."
"Ah," said Qawik, smiling. "That Hell. The missionaries spoke of it often. Is this where Satan lives?"
"Satan does not live," Nuliajuk said. She turned from him, drew her seal body behind her over the mud.
"Satan exists. It is not life so much as... so much as something else. We do not live here. We ... well, you will see soon enough."
"Why am I here?" he asked.
She shook her head, scratched at her neck with a flipper. "Always with the why, eh? You humans: why, why, why?"
"Why am I here?" he asked.
"You are here, Qawik, because you are a heathen and a sinner. Didn't the missionaries explain that to you. Qawik followed her across the mud. "I was baptized," he said. "I received the good news of the Lord. I accepted his spirit into my body." He stopped. "That was shortly before I became an angatkok."
"An angatkok!" Nuliajuk stopped, sat, furrowed her brow. "Ah: a shaman." She crawled on through the mud. "You were baptized. You must answer to God." She turned, looked at him with intense green eyes. "That is why you are in Hell."
She swatted at the back of her seal body. "Oh, Heaven. I am sick of this body and this goddamn swamp. Take my hand."
"Hand?"
"My fucking paw. Take my paw." Qawik reached down and grabbed her paw. "Close your eyes, babe. We're going to New Hell."
She twined and oozed and the swamp went white, then gray, then became a whitewashed room that smelled of disinfectant. The walls and floor were bare, except for a metal chair bolted to the wooden floor, and an alcove along one wall that held a great granite throne. Two lanterns hung from hooks on either side of the throne; the wicks hadn't been trimmed in some time, and the chimneys of the lanterns were black with soot Nuliajuk squeezed his hand. Her paw felt warm, soft; as he watched, the flipper wiggled into a hand. He looked up at her: same face, but no more seal body. She was a little shorter than him, but fleshy, big, the way a bearded seal looked. She wore a sealskin parka, sealskin boots and breeches; the black and white spots matched her old seal body. She had braided her hair into a complicated coiffure, two plaits from above her ears that Joined below her chin into a long red braid that came to her waist.
"Nuliajuk?" he asked.
She shook her head. "No, not the seal woman. I am the Welcome Woman. This is my real body," she ran her hands over the parka, "though I do like this coat."
The Welcome Woman pointed at the metal chair. "Sit," she said. "The Lord Satan will pronounce your sentence."
"Satan?"
"Sit," she said.
He sat, and when he turned to her again, she was gone.
"Qawik." a voice said from the throne. "Qawik?"
Qawik looked up. A man sat in the throne - not a man, an inua - a naked man with the head of a bear; an immense cock dangled from his crotch almost to the floor. A tungai, some spirit, sat on the man's broad shoulders; the tungai had the head of a bat and the body of something that looked like an ermine, with a long tail and small hands. The granite throne glowed dull red, and the inua's skin sizzled like caribou steaks frying in fat.
"Satan?" As the words came out, the chair shocked him, and Qawik winced.
"Lord Satan," the inua said. Satan's teeth clicked as he spoke. "Christ, how I hate these primitive religions. Yes, I am Satan, Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, all that crap. You call yourself Qawik. But I see here," he waved his hand and a long yellow parchment unrolled from his fingers, "that you have other names, too."
"I am also called-"
"Don't say it," Satan said. "It's probably one of those godawful names that only He can pronounce. Qawik. You will go by Qawik here. If means ... Oh, blast, it's here somewhere."