hwango

This is my entry for the writing activity on the

brigits_flame community. The prompt for this week was "Demons."

What is wrong with you people? I thought we'd decided on a pretty good system - the virtuous go to Heaven, the damned go to Hell. I figured we'd have the workload split with Heaven pretty much fifty-fifty. Hah. Right.

You've probably got this mental image of Hell that looks like one of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. You know, with fire all over the place and tormented souls being poked by cackling demons. Let me tell you what you're going to see when you get here: you're going to see lines. Great big winding queues. It'll be like the Disneyland of the Damned with everyone waiting for the same roller coaster.

Or maybe not. Maybe you'll live such a long life that when you get here we won't even have room for lines. We'll just have all of the souls stacked up like firewood.

Let me tell you, none of us are cackling right now. We're all pretty pissed off.

We have so many damned people (literally) down here that we barely have time to torment them anymore. Instead we're spending most of our time just sorting souls into the correct part of Hell, trying not to let the ridiculous backlog of sinners waiting to be assigned get any bigger.

What happened to the world up there? How can so many of you screw up so much? There's this list of ten rules that would pretty much guarantee that I never see you face to face. Ten freaking rules! Ten! Jesus, Monopoly is more complicated than playing the game that will get you into Heaven. A few of those rules are even negotiable. Of course, you'd be amazed at which ones people think are negotiable. Or at least I was.

The shear numbers of you ending up down here astonish me, but what really leaves me speechless are the excuses. "It was only that one time." "They started it." And my personal favorite, "I didn't think I'd get caught." What a great justification that one is! You know what? You might think no one saw you and that no one will ever know, but the fact is that the big guy in the sky will know, and he's the one you have to worry about.

Do us both a favor and put in a little extra effort to be good, okay? It will make things a lot easier for me, and you really, really don't want to end up down here. Yeah, I'm sure that waiting in a line doesn't really sound all that horrible compared to what you might have been expecting from Hell. But you know what? Eventually you'll get to the end of that line. Eventually you'll meet one of us face to face. And when you do, you're going to be sorry that you made us angry.