Still

Annie Johnson | Issue 2.1

Hell consists of a series of menial tasks. Sometimes we draw circles in the sand with long sticks; sometimes we draw lines. Mostly, we spend our days moving very large boulders from one end of the desert to the other. It turns out that the Greeks were quite close with their estimations of Tartarus: the whole thing is very Sisyphean in its imagery, toiling laborers clawing feet into the sand, straining against the perpetual stone, dwarfed by its size and disheartened by its insignificance.

Topography is the only thing left to complete the picture: there are no mountains or valleys in Hell, just a level plane of purple desert sand beneath a ruminating, empty sky. The vast purposeless of it all is supposed to torture us, I guess, but three months have passed since my death, and I really haven’t found it all that taxing. I like to think of one boulder successfully moved as one sin atoned for.  If I move enough stones, then maybe eventually I can make it into Heaven.

I like to use idle time to reflect on the choices that brought me here. Never the religious type, when I first arrived at The Pearly Gates, my first thought was, It looks just like it did in The Simpsons, which should indicate something about the depths of my spirituality. And Saint Peter, he looked sort of like this guy I hooked up with in college, Derek (or was it Daniel?), minus the vape pens and tattoos, plus several inches of beard hair. During the sex he kept shoving my face into his armpit, which I found strange. A few weeks after graduation, he veered off of the interstate while high off a cocktail of Percs and Svedka, which I found even stranger. The accident killed him and a family of six, plus a Boston Bull Terrier, who were probably all up in Heaven by now (including the Terrier). But, somehow, I doubted that Derek was so lucky.

His funeral had a lousy turnout—so lousy that his younger sister, a mousy, anorexic law student, invited me to sit in the front row with her and the rest of their family. I pitied her so badly that I spent the entire reception spinning stories about the myriad ways Derek had enriched my life: the rooftops we hosted late night conversations on, the books on philosophy and pastry brushing we traded, the sneakers we embroidered, the hours we spent divulging our greatest loves and fears and aspirations to each other. With every detail I conjured, the sister’s eyes grew wider and wider, like a fruit fly gorging on sugar water, such that, when I finally managed to tear myself away from her, I did so with a new contact in my phone and a reinforced pit of shame in my stomach, the same one I felt 15 years ago when my Bible camp counselor rubbed my back with suntan lotion and I first experienced the sensation of lust, and from there only multiplied with each following transgression: smoking, drinking, taking the Lord’s name in vain, premarital sex, homosexual thoughts, homosexual actions, eating shrimp on a Friday, shaving my legs, failing to honor my mother, failing to love my neighbor as I love myself, failing to love myself, and loving the wrong things too much.

That’s why, when Saint Peter opened his mouth to make his judgment, I held up my hand to silence him: there was no need. I knew where I was headed. My one request was to be placed in a part of Hell that didn’t have too many locusts. I was still picturing fire and brimstone, brass bulls, little red men who would lop your tits off piece-by-piece and then feed them back to you. Even now, I still sometimes wonder if I somehow ended up in the wrong place by accident. Maybe there’s actually a second Super Hell I don’t know about, one where the real sinners go to be punished.

This can’t be the depth of human suffering, I think, heaving my stone over and over across the sand, feeling its smooth even surface file down the tips of my fingers, already worn down to the nub from months of pushing. There has to be more.

Often, I think of Derek’s sister. What did her life look like now? Did she graduate from law school? Did she marry? Did she still have my number in her phone?

Did she come to my funeral?

Maybe my own little sister—Rory, newly nineteen—saw her at the service. She always dreamed of being a litigator but never quite had the gumption. When we fought over romance, over wardrobe, over whether life was worth living, she would scream, and she would fight, but in the end, she would always begrudgingly surrender.

One of our most spirited debate topics was over the existence of the afterlife. Rory insisted that there was nothing after death; that dying was equivalent to floating, untethered, in a cold, endless void for all eternity. She did this, I guess, to try to discourage me from doing something drastic. We had these types of conversations every time I ended up in rehab. I suppose, in the end, I really showed her. Another victory for big sister. Another victory for me.

Sometimes, in the pallor of night, I dream of Rory coming down from Earth and slicing my fingers open. Occasionally, she does this with a butcher knife, but most of the time, she just needles her nails underneath my skin and pries it apart. Even though I know the blood isn’t real, in the few split-seconds before fully gaining consciousness, I find myself longing for the warmth of it.

I wonder how Rory would react to these dreams, if she knew about them. I’m certain she would laugh, though I’m not sure how hard or long. You know, it really is a fucking pain to miss her. It really is a massive fucking pain.

—

Every Sunday, I get a phone call from my mother back on Earth. I know it’s Sunday because she refuses to enunciate her words when she has her church lipstick on, lending her voice a sort of sibilant hiss. She insists that her mouth is her most important feature, and as a trophy-wife-turned-psychic-medium, I suppose it’s not untrue. Before landing in Hell, I always had my doubts about the legitimacy of her practice, but now, her supernatural intuitions are essential to our family chats.

They usually go something like this:

“Reagan!”

Instantly, I am hit with a splitting migraine. Clutching my head, I abandon my rock and stumble to an empty part of the desert. The souls around me shoot disapproving looks.

“How are things?”

I explain to her that things are, definitionally, always neutral—that we aren’t allowed to smell or taste or experience anything too strongly, not even anguish.

 “That’s good to hear. Have you made any new friends?”

Not exactly.

“. . . ‘Not exactly.’ What does that mean? Does that mean ‘no’?”

No. Yes.

“God, Reagan. What do I always tell you, huh? Why do you have to be such a stubborn little shit? You need to stand out, be social. How do you expect to ever make it into Heaven if you never get noticed?”

I’m in purgatory, Ma. No one is noticed. That’s the whole point.

“Why can’t you make friends with some of the other gays down there? Is it because they can tell you’re not a Gold Star? I always said, Reagan, if you wanted to be a dyke, you might as well have gone all the way. Shaved your head, and all.”

Jesus Christ.

“Not to mention how fat you’ve gotten recently.”

What?

“Grandma Dolores’s presence is lingering in the kitchen—I can tell. She thinks so, too.”

Mom, that literally makes zero fucking—Whoa. Who’s that playing the piano in the background? Is that Rory?

“Oh. I guess it is. Would you look at that? I didn’t even notice. She’s been really going at that thing lately. It never stops—I’m worried she’s gonna break it, or something. Like she’s trying to dig a confession out of the keys.”

Can I talk to her?

“Trying to dig a confession out of the keys. . . . That’s good. That could be a poem, or something. I should really write that down.”

Can I talk to her, Mom?

“No, Reagan. You can’t.”

Why not?

“Because, last time you guys talked, she wouldn’t stop crying for three days.”

. . .

“God, it’s sad. She never used to be such a wreck. Back when you were alive, there’s only one time I can remember her crying, and it was over that hamster—you remember your hamster, Reagan? Stuart, or—what was its name, Stevie?”

Stanley. After my seventh-grade boyfriend.

“Stanley. Christ, what a disaster. Just a 10-year-old kid—how was she supposed to know almonds were poison to hamsters? I thought they liked nuts.”

Almonds are poison to a lot of things. Sometimes even humans.

“Remember how you read out that poem at his little hamster funeral? God, it was adorable. I think I still got it on tape. Your aunts loved it. But I wish there was a way to cut out Rory’s crying—it’s depressing.”

. . .

“She cries a lot, nowadays.”

. . .

“Did you really have to do it, Reagan?”

I gotta go now, Mom.

“Whuh –”

I stand up. I close my eyes. I go back to pushing the rock.

—

Heeding my mother’s advice, I decide to spend the next rock-rolling session getting to know my fellow tormented souls. The guy rolling the rock next to me introduces himself as Juan, a sullen-faced Bolivian. With my high-school knowledge of Spanish, I experience his story in brief glimpses: he traveled to America to escape the political situation in his home country and made a living shuttling rich college girls from Wellesley to the Boston Logan International Airport in the 1980s. In his free time, he pursued his dream of becoming a world champion bowler, or maybe it was bodybuilder; my vocabulary didn’t extend that far. He died when the brakes on his powder blue Chevette failed and he was decapitated by the guardrail on the I-93—but it’s okay, he says, because he knows that the Ethiopian guys that gave him such a shoddy repair job are destined to rot down here right alongside him, and that simple fact is enough to make even the darkest days in Hell a little bit brighter.

To the right of me is a young Englishwoman who introduces herself as Bridget, the daughter of two world renowned foxhunters whose unlikely romance gained them microcelebrity status in the 1920s Equestrian world. She died when her purebred Irish Draught, “Money Shot”, threw her over an oxer, landing a thousand pounds of purebred muscle directly on her skull on the come-down. Even though the creature killed her, she still claims that riding is the one thing she missed the most about living: the thrill of the chase, the wind in her hair.

“There’s hardly any wind down here at all,” she says, scrunching up her nose. Her accent is languid and addictive; it takes everything in my power not to repeat her words back to her in a vague imitation of her voice. “Did you ever notice that?”

“I did,” I reply. I look at Juan for his reaction, but he’s long since abandoned the conversation to focus on pushing his rock.

“You know, we should really do something about this whole situation.” Bridget purses her lips, talking more to herself now than to me. She’s beautiful, I notice then, in a very old-Hollywood type of way. “Something to help people remember the best parts of living. Maybe we could have some . . . some sort of talent show, or slam poetry night, or something. I’m involved in this Gregorian chanting circle during push-breaks—maybe we could get them in on it.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I say, and sincerely mean it. “Maybe it could even help us get noticed by Heaven.”

There’s a brief pause. I open my mouth, close it, open it again, then, timidly, ask: “Bridget, do you ever wonder about Super Hell?”

“What? Super what?”

“Um.”

“There’s a Super Hell?”

“No. It’s nothing. Forget about it.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, embarrassed. I had thought that since she noticed about the wind, we might share some kind of kinship, but it was stupid to even hope. I was always scared of horses; where I saw fear, Bridget saw beauty and excitement, and that was too wide a gap to be bridged by mere proximity, a rolling of boulders side-by-side.

We separate wordlessly at the other end of the desert. I’ve lost track of how many stones I’ve rolled, and yet, somehow, I feel no closer to God.

—

The day of the talent show, Bridget and her friends from the Gregorian Chanting Circle encourage us to invite anyone we want to spectate, in hopes of adding an air of officiality to the whole affair. They even get approval from Saint Peter to bring the living down for the weekend. I decide to invite Mom and Rory, perhaps against my better judgment. After months of only hearing their voices, I’m slightly terrified of seeing them again, but they look exactly as I remember them: my mother, spotted and severe, auntie-permed, and Rory, sallow-faced, spectacled, smile thinly concealing an inextricable pool of melancholy. As soon as we lock eyes, I can tell she’s holding back tears. We take our seats on the sand as Bridget introduces the event:

“Welcome, everyone,” she says, spreading her arms wide. “We are gathered here today to celebrate our lives, mourn our own passings, and cherish the things we’ve left behind.”

My mom elbows me sharply in the ribs. “When are you going on?”

I clear my throat. “I’m not.”

“What?”

“I’ll go first,” Bridget says, closing her eyes, relaxing into memory. “What I miss the most about living is . . . grass. I miss the grass. Soft and fragrant, itchy—but it’s a good itch. More of a tickle than an itch.”

“Why the hell wouldn’t you go on?” my mother hisses. “This is your chance to get noticed by Heaven!”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

Quietly, my sister begins to weep. I want to vanish into the sand. Bridget smiles.

“I miss hearty soup, I miss sunlight. I miss my dog, so compressed and loyal—and I miss how he used to bite me in the leg when he got excited. He bit me so hard it bled.”

My mom rubs her temples. “Do you think it’s too late for you to sign up?”

“Mom –”

“Excuse me, sir.” She pokes the person sitting in front of us. “Where can my daughter sign up to speak?”

“Mom, stop.”

Bridget presses her hands into her chest and sways on her feet, letting the currents of emotion wash over her freely. “I miss the wind—Oh, how I miss the wind.”

I pull my mom back. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” She slaps my hand away. “What the fuck is wrong with you, huh? Give me one good reason why you couldn’t sign up to talk.”

“Uh. . . .”

Mom lets loose a long, embittered sigh. Distantly, I worry about making a scene, but the spirits around us are far too enraptured by Bridget’s words to even look in our direction.

“Oh, my dear friends, can you feel the wind?” she cries. “Can you let yourself remember?”

“I can’t believe you,” Mom growls.

 My jaw tightens. “You could give me a break, you know. I am literally in Hell.”

Rory weeps louder. People everywhere are weeping. I reach out to touch her hand. “Hey, I’m sorry. It’s not that bad. I didn’t mean it.”

“Yes!” Bridget lifts her arms, swaying like a beautiful willow tree, sexually liberated, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. “Feel the wind! Everyone, come and feel! Feel with me!”

“I just don’t understand you,” my mother says, refusing to look at me. “You had everything you could’ve wanted, and then you threw it all away. Did you ever stop and think about how it would make us feel? You ending up here? We did the best we could, you know. You don’t get to hate us.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Yes, you do.” She clenches her jaw and averts her gaze. Decades of bitterness, of sadness, of luxuries forgone, of white-knuckles and carving-palms, all twist together and harden in her voice: “Maybe Saint Peter was right. You don’t deserve to make it to Heaven.”

Rory rises from her seat, sharp and silent. I close my eyes, having always anticipated this day would come. A gentle, young mind like hers could only last so long in our family; our headiness, our decades of generational curses.

But, instead, suddenly, there’s a sharp snake-crack, like a bolt of lightning, and when I open my eyes, my mom is cradling her cheek, biting tears springing, this time, to her eyes while Rory’s harden with rage. Around us, everyone jumps up, weeping and cheering, as Bridget takes her bows, and suddenly I realize that my mother is right, that I will never make it to Heaven, and there is no Super Hell, that this empty plane of sand is all there is, it’s all there ever will be, and it’s both exactly where I belong and exactly what I deserve.

—

At the end of the show, there’s a new buzz about Hell, a renewed spring of hope. People chat with one another on breaks and when pushing rocks. Art is created, commented on, then destroyed. Some swear they feel a breeze across the desert for weeks after Bridget’s speech. And still, no shuttle from Heaven ever arrives. We move boulders to the right side of the desert. We move them left again.

As for Mom and Rory, things continue as they have for all my childhood: nothing spoken about, nothing apologized for, nothing resolved. The day after the talent show, I did not speak to my sister, refused to look her in the eye for fear of seeing something that had changed or been knocked loose there.

Instead, when I hugged her goodbye, I merely thought of all the things I wished I could tell her, and hoped those things could somehow be commanded through the contact of our bodies, the squeezing of our rib cages and shoulder blades together: Go to law school. Find a job. Destroy the piano. Take an ax and don’t stop swinging until it’s gone. Embody strength. Become a rock. Forget you have a sister. I’m sorry, Rory. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it.

And, through the perpetual stillness of Hell, I hoped madly that Rory could hear what I was thinking, even though I know she probably couldn’t, because she was too busy hoping the same exact thing.

She went back to Earth. As the shuttle door closed behind her, she glanced back three times. If there’s any kind of God in Heaven, she’ll never glance back again.

—

Annie Johnson is an emerging writer from the Columbus, Ohio area. She is currently pursuing a degree in Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The YoungArts Anthology, The Round, and elsewhere. Read more here.