Maybe Won’t Use
In my desperation, I came across a lone man leaned against a sign post. He wore all black with what I know now was a cigarette perched between his lips.
“Cassius,” he sneered from beneath his wide-billed hat. “Funny seeing you here.”
“Do I know you?” I might not have asked, for his presence in the night was intimidating, even as I remember it.
“I know you,” he mocked, his clothes and demeanor from another time, a style I would eventually adopt for myself. I was distraught when I came across him, the pain of my wife’s sadness too much to bear. “You’ve been naughty,” I vaguely remember hearing, the word ‘naughty’ most of all because it seemed so out of place both then and in my mind’s eye.
The man was confusing, both condescending and strangely flirtatious. It was only when he flicked his cigarette to the side and approached me that I realized the interaction might be dangerous.
“Leave me,” I demanded, my voice stronger than my sinking stomach, the stranger’s presence no longer welcome.
“Don’t you want to discuss?” Smoke dripped from his lips even in absence of the cigarette, and rather than dissipating in the air, it fled into his nostrils, only for the man to exhale the smoke like breath once more. “I admire you. Your tenacity. Your diligence in destroying your wife to extremes. Your…” A fresh puff of air flooded from his nose with his next word: “malfeasance.”
“What do you want from me?” I remember thinking without vocalizing, taking a step back from the stranger as he continued to approach.
“I want to extend to you an opportunity,” he finally purred, his hands tucking into his pockets. “I think I have the perfect life for you.”
There’s a blur in my memory, skipping to the infinitely bright, infinitely loud venue that was Hell. I don’t remember travel, just that we were there, suddenly before a massive throne, on which the being I knew instantly was Satan sat. He was tremendously intimidating but I tried to stand tall, nothing about the situation seeming real in the least.
Screams and moans filled the air but when the throned being spoke, everything seemed to silence to make way for his voice to travel to its intended target. I remember so little of what it said, the sound so loud that I couldn’t hear more than a deafening pierce, but my mind was transformed into the mindset I assumed he meant to put me.
The man in black knelt next to me, his head bowed to the being, though Satan didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t following suit. Instead, I was suddenly flooded with knowledge, history and lore of a world I never knew existed. My brain seared with the experience and I suddenly found myself on all fours, my body seizing with the pain of overwhelming knowledge and clarity, and then it wasn’t, I was suddenly dropped in a new universe, left with only the information I needed to know who I was, what sort of being I was, and what that meant for me. The rest faded like a dream, only jumping to consciousness when triggered by something in the world.
Fri Dec 08, 2017 11:39 pm
