“You’ve got to give it a real kiss,” he said. “The kind that make people forgive things.” Then, slowly, he kissed me. It started with his tongue poking soft and flat into my mouth. Both our lips were warm and burning with alcohol. When it was over, I gave him that look that asks for more, but he pointed me towards the ice needle. “I am gay,” he said, also slowly, as though I’d had more than enough time to figure it out.
I stuck out my tongue that still tasted of his booze, which was a more grown-up booze than I had been drinking, and pushed it right against the needle at its very base. I channeled warm and loving thoughts. For a moment I felt at peace.
Then I realized I was stuck.
The slow man broke his trademark and quickly left. I stood there for awhile, watching the guests stare at me, laugh, and then take the pick from my arm, which was still wrapped around the needle, and help themselves to some less-gigantic pieces of ice. Since I was attached to the sculpture, when they chiseled it I felt like they were breaking off a piece of me too, and I protested in grunts and wrapped it more tightly around myself. The chiseling made everything vibrate in a threatening way. I wanted it to stop.
I grunted louder and mounted the sculpture fully, like it was a tree and I a koala. I was wearing a thin dress and the ice numbed my skin.
Finally my bosses approached. They’d never touched me before, but somehow their hands felt familiar. They chiseled off the piece of ice around my tongue and then told me go to a sink and hold it under warm water. “You’re not the first person this has happened to,” they kept saying, but they weren’t reassuring about it. As we walked towards the bathroom, I looked back at the needle. All the places where I’d been pressed against it had melted smooth; its calibrated numbers had disappeared, and the handle now curved inward in places.
As the hot water began to flow, I couldn’t help but notice my bosses looked sad, a bit like me when I have to kill the ice sculptures.
“We thought you would work out so nicely,” they lamented. The stream of faucet water was big and roaring in my ear. The water was so hot that I imagined I was traveling into a volcano, that my tongue was made of lava, and my hair. I let the water run all over my head and neck, staying under the stream as I heard my ex-bosses leave the bathroom.
Beneath the faucet, I pictured myself in another, similar universe on a night much like tonight, finishing out the party then hosing the sculpture down needle-first. As my drunken warmth returned I stayed with the small relief of that image, the still absence that comes when the head melts clean of its body.
HELLION
I never had breasts until I went to Hell. When I died at the age of thirty-nine I was barely an A-cup. I often used to purchase bras from the preteen section. The bra I died in had tiny unicorns patterned across one nipple and tiny rainbows patterned across the other.
At first I thought it was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for type deal. All my life I had wanted a bigger chest, and now I was going to be saddled with one and learn all the ways that it’s inconvenient—back pain, unwanted attention, etc. But as I walked around I began to notice that all the females had them. I was looking down my shirt when another woman patted me on the back. “They’re for defense,” she winked. I didn’t understand until later that day when a fellow Hellion began hitting on me, a real know-it-all. The kind of person who always has a toothpick in his mouth. When I first got to Hell, I was shocked they’d let people have sharp objects like toothpicks; I expected the rules of prison. But that is lesson #1. Hell is not the same as prison.
As I grew angry with the guy, my breasts began to make a percolating sound. It felt like they were being forcibly tickled. My nipples hardened into nozzles and a bubbling green liquid that smelled like motor oil shot out of them. It sprayed all over the man’s face and his skin began to smoke and blister.
I watched him run over to the lava pond and look at his reflection. “I’m a mutant for eternity!” he screamed.
A giant man named Ben walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. Ben is intimidating at first: he is covered from head-to-toe with eye implants. “Sorry about that,” he muttered. A bat poked its head out of Ben’s beard. The bat was wearing an eye patch.
Some people in Hell are nice. They just happened to have done a very reprehensible thing at one point. I killed my husband once, for instance. But I felt bad enough about it to also kill myself.
Hell isn’t that awful, but it does smell. People often ask, “What died in here?”
The answer is complicated. It could be a lot of things. Our currency is little coins made of hair and liver that we have to spend before they rot. We get a weekly allowance, enough to keep most people entertained, but if we want more money we can mop the floors, etc. It’s common for people to start a collection as a hobby. For example, Ben collects eyes and surgically embeds them all over his body. His best eye is in his belly button. He wears little high-rise t-shirts so that his belly-eye can see and be seen at all times.
I expected a lot of axe murderers to be running around, licking bloody knives and looking sinister. But Hell really isn’t that violent. Something about the heat. Everyone is lazy and sluggish except the Caribbean pirates —they were already used to high temperatures. But now they can’t ravage women because of the bosom-acid, so they try to catch their flies with honey and are really quite chivalrous. If someone accidentally drops her purse into a lava river, they’ll use their peg legs to fetch it out. Wild serial killers are totally the minority down here. Hell is mainly full of people with tempers, or people like Thor.
“I still feel bad about Thor.” I heard the devil mumble this one night at the bar and inquired around. Apparently every few millennia Hell gets a case like Thor’s. He lived during the 1600s and was a brain-eater in both his real and after-lives. Normally Hell’s heat encourages people to slow down, but in Thor’s case it seemed to give him momentum. It became quite problematic, Thor running around brain-eating, so the devil turned Thor into a large rhesus monkey whose brain had already been eaten out.
But the change was too dramatic. It was like a father yelling at an irritating kid who then becomes completely quiet and joyless, so much so that the father feels remorseful. Prior to the change Thor was known for his relentless war chants, but after the metamorphosis he forgot all their words. He did nothing but silently pick insects from his fur, and the devil felt this silence as guilt. To make amends he gave Thor a sort-of brain, something similar to the motor from an electric pencil sharpener. Now everyone in Hell treats Thor with kid gloves.
Hell also has an incredible number of nurses, so many that it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why, but the bar is always full of them, guzzling fake beer and talking about how they wish they could go back to earth for just a second and pull someone’s catheter out really fast. There is only one small bar in Hell but everyone manages to hang out inside. The beer is nonalcoholic.
I was complaining about this the first time I actually got to talk to the devil one-on-one.
“You’d get dehydrated,” he mumbled. “Alcohol is a great idea if everyone wants a headache.”
The devil’s voice sounds like that of a leprechaun who’s been smoking for centuries. He wants to quit, or so he says. He began telling me how he once put on a trench coat and went into an earthly gas station to buy nicotine gum.
“I never had any luck with it,” I commiserated. I think that’s when he took a shine to me.
Newcomers experience a placebo effect in the bar during their first couple visits, and I was no exception. As the night progressed, I started to feel intoxicated and my conversation with the devil took a turn for the worse.