Retail Hell

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Retail Hell

By Plot Roach

When people told me to go to Hell, I often joked that I was already there. I’ve worked at various retail jobs for over eleven years, and trust me, it’s the closest thing you are even going to get to Hell in a civilized world. But then the day came when I died, hit by a car while crossing the street, and I was sent there quite literally.

Dying really doesn’t feel like much. At least, it didn’t for me. I didn’t feel the impact of the car or my body fly across the pavement. All I felt was an incredible pressure in my head as the world shook violently around me. Then I found myself at the base of a big black mountain, the stars around me glittering red.

There were others around me, some that had been standing around for a while and newcomers like myself who seemed to appear out of the shadows.

“We’re dead” said a man who was feeling for his pulse on his throat after he failed to find it on his wrist.

“Yeah, but where are we?” I asked.

“Does this look like what Heaven is supposed to look like?” the man asked mockingly before climbing the rocky path up the mountain.

“Where are you going?”

“Where everyone else is.” he said. And sure enough, humans traveled the rocky road up the mountain like a horde of ants. It was either climb the mountain or wait down at the base and try to find a nonexistent pulse. I thought that I would wait a moment to catch my breath before attempting the climb. Then I found out that I wasn’t breathing at all.

Once at the top of the mountain, people were funneled into an office. We faced someone who looked like a human but was decidedly not. It looked neither man nor woman, but like something was wearing a human skin like it was a puppet suit. The voice was grainy and kept changing pitch, like someone was doing a human impersonation. It directed us to a series of doors, each person was assigned a number before they left. Mine was so astronomically long the only thing I remembered was “seventeen”, the last two. And I hoped that whomever was in charge would know the rest.

I was directed to the last door on the left. When I entered found myself in a stuffy office filled with sickly coughing people. There were no seats open, which was just as well since I didn’t want to get sick. Then I realized that I was already dead. So could I really get sick? I tried to sign in on the sheet at the front counter, but the pen was out of ink. I spied a burning candle on the corner of the desk and held the tip of the pen over it, remembering from my “living days” how it could sometimes get the roller ball of the pen to spin again and release the ink. Sure enough, it worked enough for me to write “seventeen” in the last space provided. Though it jammed up again in the hand of the person waiting to sign in behind me.

I tried to pick up a magazine, only for the pages to be stuck together. If I pulled, it would rip and the articles inside would be unreadable. So I threw a handful of them on the floor to make myself a seat while waiting for my number to be called.

“You there.” said the receptionist, finally materializing from the back. “Troublemaker.” She pointed to me as she eyed me over broken horn-rimmed glasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles.

“Me?” I asked.

“Seventeen. Get in there, we can’t have you causing a scene in here.”

“But what did I do?” I asked.

“Enough.” was all she would say before waving me on towards an office in the back.

I walked down the hallway, its floor sticky with an unknown substance I did not wish to investigate. I knocked on the door and was told to enter.

“Welcome to Hell.” said a well to do looking man in a crimson shirt. “You must really be something to get Edna to come out of the back room and promote you so soon after your arrival.” Upon closer inspection I realized that the shirt had once been white, but that he was bleeding so profusely it was now every color of red and little of the original white had remained. “Forgive me for my appearance, it always happens this late in the day. I was a bill collector in my former life, so I get to bleed now instead of bleeding my former victims.”

“So I’m dead and in Hell?” I asked.

“Yep. Dead as dead can get.”

“But I’m not Christian…”

“It doesn’t matter, this place is a holding tank for a lot of different religions that need someplace to store excess souls until they can be properly processed.” he said.

“So how long do I have to wait?”

“Now that depends on your god and what you do with your time here.”

“Ummm… I kind of believed in a ‘Higher Power’, so….”

“So it’s going to be a while before an entity claims you.”

“But I believed in reincarnation, can I do that?”

“Not right away, I’m afraid. Even though the population of the planet has exploded over the past few hundred years, bodies for second timers are in short supply. You’ll have to wait for something to come up , and you won’t be able to choose which place to be born to.”

“What about an animal body?” I asked.

“No good, the animals on the planet were installed automated souls a few thousand years ago. Ever since a few people got it into their heads to act like humans and teach apes how to use tools.”

“Damn.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, so to speak.” he said. “But the good news is that there is no set job or torture set aside for you. So you can do just about anything here that you put your mind to, provided that you keep out of the business of those actually sent here to be punished.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“You can wander and take in the sights. Hell is quite a large place with natural formations that I’m told are quite beautiful as long as they are not part of your torture.”

“Like pushing boulders up hills and things like that?”

“Now you’re getting it! The point is, use your time creatively and it will pass by much quicker than you can imagine.”

“Really?”

“No, but I’m required by my job to lie about that part.” Another jet of blood pulsed out of his body, staining the paperwork in front of him. He sighed and waved a silent goodbye. I took it as a hint to leave. I opened the door and found myself on a strange street instead of back in the waiting room.

There were all manner of creatures about, but most were a special hellish sort I had only seen the likes of in Bosch paintings and modern videogames. A few had humans in chains and were leading them to and from buildings in various states of disrepair. I crossed the street as a few unlucky souls, naked and bleeding, were chained like oxen to a cart that was being driven by a bird faced man who lashed a cat of nine tails at them. He leered at me as I hid in the shadows of the nearest building. I remained silent until he turned the corner and could no longer stare at me, then a hand on my shoulder spooked me back into my immediate surroundings. “Molly, is that you?” I asked, disbelieving my eyes.

“I thought it might be you, Susan.”

We hugged, grateful of the motion even if the body we hugged was not necessarily a warm one. “But how did you get here?” She asked

“I’m kind of a jack of all trades when it comes to religion, so I’m waiting for reincarnation. And you?”

“I’m pagan, but my god is asleep for the time being. So I’m not going anywhere for a while. Were you given the whole ‘wander hell in all its glory’ bit too?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, at least we each other. Maybe the time will pass faster.”

We laughed hysterically at this until a bulldog faced demon shushed us from a window in his torture chamber. “Some of us have to work for a living, you know.” he chastised us. We wandered off in search of an abandoned building to call our own and make up for the time we had lost. We caught up on gossip from our former “living” times and discussed what we had seen of Hell so far.

“If there was just something we could do, you know?” she asked.

“It’s not like we could get jobs. And even if we did, would you really want to work here?”

“It couldn’t be worse than the time we spent working for Kathy in Bric-a-brac Paradise.”

“Oh I hated that mall job! That was truly hell on Earth!” I laughed out loud. And then an idea hit me. “You know, my counselor never said that I couldn’t open a store.”

“You’re kidding, would you really want to? Here?”

“It beats getting glared at by demons and chastised by torturers.”

“What would we sell?”

“What do we have?”

So we went through the wreckage left behind on the streets and cesspits of urban Hell. We visited the offices and took items deemed useless for even slight torture of those ‘waiting their turn’. We set up a spa treatment featuring cold coffee mud masks. It was warmly received by those whose daily torture included scalding in sulfurous pits. We made special motivational pictures for torture victims to focus upon while enduring excruciating pain. And I even managed to make a special shirt, made from a discarded plastic picnic sheet, for my counselor to wear during his appointments. It was quite literally a wash and wear solution to his bloody wardrobe.

We seemed happy with our little experiment and our clients grew by the day. Then the trouble set in, we were making people too happy. And no one was supposed to be happy in Hell. So Molly and I were forced to bid farewell to one another as we were each promoted to the next available bodies for reincarnation. We couldn’t choose our destination, of course. But the demon on shift there had been one of our best customers. He winked as he calibrated the rebirthing machine, pretending to regale us with the fiendish bodies he had waiting for us. But we played along, he knew what we always had fantasized, if given the opportunity. We had talked about it enough while giving him his coffee and mud facial. As the machine lurched into life, I felt a pressure in my head and the world shook around me. I tried to keep a smile from my lips as I thought to myself: Mansion in Beverly Hills, here I come!