Day Twenty Nine : Comestible - Pop-T-Ping

Comestible 

Definition

: edible

Did you expect comestible to be a noun meaning "food"? As it happens, comestible is used both as
an adjective and a noun. 

My eyes opened onto a scene of hell.

Quite literally. I actually woke up in hell. There were souls screaming in anguish, demons with
pitchforks and the sticky smoke that stank of burnt meat curdled about the red lit air.

“What?” was my first, rather muzzy, thought. I yanked feebly at my arms. They appeared to be
chained to the wooden cross i was lying on. I stared up at the storm laden sky, small figures flitting
against the lightning lit clouds, dropping smaller, screaming figures from the great heights. 

“Seriously, what?” was my second, rather crankier, thought. 

A red face suddenly loomed above me, huge ram horns curling up and above his forehead. He opened
his mouth to show a bunch of yellowing crooked teeth and breathed down at me. My nose scrunched
up at the stench of rotting meat permeating his breath. 

“Behold Sinner!” he boomed, throwing out his arms wide, showering me with gross spittle that burnt on
contact with my bare skin. “Know that for the crimes of your lifetime you have been condemned to an
eternity of hellfire and suffering.”

“Wait, what?” I asked indignantly, cutting off the maniacal laughter mid guffaw.

“This, hell.” he gestured around us, as if i was particularly slow. “You sinner. You burn.” He added
helpfully. 

“Uh, I don't think so.” I retorted. 

The demon shrugged. “That’s what they all say.” he hefted up his extremely sharp looking pitchfork
which suddenly looked a lot more menacing up close and in person than it did in all those cheesy
cartoons. “I begin torture now.”

“Wait, no!” I protested, in vain. He raised the pitchfork high above his head, then slammed it down into
my midsection, no doubt intended to impale and entangle my guts on its tines. 

What actually happened was that as soon as the pitchfork touched my body it exploded into a sparkling
dust cloud of gold glitter. 

After a few minutes of confused blinking on both our parts, i spat out the glitter that had inevitably
wound its gritty way into my mouth and asked “was that supposed to happen?”

“No.” the demon said mournfully. He gloomily raked through the pile of glitter that had exploded
everywhere (as glitter is wont to do) “Bugger. Our equipment is rented from the company. They’re
going to take that out of my wages for sure.”

“You get paid?” I asked, surprised. 

“No. This is hell after all. But they’ll definitely take the cost of this out of my hide.”

I for sure was not going to ask if he meant that figuratively or literally. 

“So what do we do now?” I asked, a bit nervously. “I mean, are you going to try something else or, like,
untie me maybe?” 

Not like i had any idea what I was going to do if he did let me make a run for it. I mean, I was in hell.
Where was I going to go? How did I get here? Was i dead? How did i even die? What was the last
thing I do remember?

Nothing.

Ok, veering far away from that line of thought before i induce a panic attack.  

The demon looked at me dolefully. “I can’t afford to have another weapon go poof. I better take you to
the pencil pusher.”

He began quickly undoing the locks on my chains. I crawled off the cross and noticed I was naked
(hey, I'd woken up in hell. Sometimes other things just have to take priority over whether or not you
release you’re in the buff.).

“So, I'm naked.” I remarked, you know, casually as possible. 

“Yes?” the demon said.

“So….. could I maybe get some clothes?”

The demon hesitated and then said “I only wear loincloths.”he gestured to himself, proving his point
that yes, he indeed only wear loincloths. 

An awkward pause. 

“Are they clean loincloths? I mean, i assume you regularly wash them right?”

Another awkward pause where the demon avoided my eyes. 

“Naked is fine.” 

“At least you have shoes on.” the demon offered optimistically.

I did indeed have little furry ankle boots on. Something that suspiciously looked like dried blood had
matted the fur into chunky knots.

“Yeah, so why give me shoes and not clothes?”

“The floor of hell is treacherous and sharp. We would not like you to injure your feet before we have a
chance to torture you. Messes up the schedule you know.”

“.............ok then. Total sense. Let’s just go see this pencil pusher then.”

He led me off, through a large open planned area, with many demons hard at work diligently torturing
their assigned sinners in their own little cubicles, each seeming to have their own preferred method of
torture. My own demon had appeared to have been a bit of a classicist with the pitchfork, but I saw
one demon had strapped his sinner to an office chair that definitely hadn’t been ergonomically
designed, with a phone super glued to his ear that alternated between the world’s worst hold music
(with a sweet female voice insisting every five minutes that he was a valued customer and would of
course answer his call as soon as someone became available) and random customer complaints that
he would try to resolve by typing various commands into the keypad his fingertips were stapled to, he
would of course fail and the customer would get more and more irate at him, calling him every name
under the sun and questioning his worth as a human being. All the time the demon standing over him
would hit his repeatedly with a paper file, giving him papercut after papercut after papercut. Even the
cute positive kitten poster on the side of the cubicle was giving him the finger. 

Someone had clearly been taking notes on Earth’s call centre culture. 

Who would have guessed I would be grateful i got the pitchfork. 

Sitting dead centre in this hell nest of cubicles was the manager. Scowling into the depths of his old
style tube monitor, angrily chewing on his vape (which was spitting out sulphur, petrol fumes and
blueberry scented smoke) and idly shredding the mountain of paperwork littering his desk with his
frankly ginormous claws.

He looked up as we approached and scowled even harder. 

“What do you want?” he snarled. 

“Well sir,” my demon started nervously, “she uh, she exploded my pitchfork into glitter.”

He stared at him for a minute, then turned to me. 

“That true?” he asked.

I gestured at my naked body which was currently covered with a heavy dusting of the stuff. I looked
like a discount hooker. 

“Yup.”

He let out an almighty sigh. “Then why are you here?” he demanded.

“I………………….don’t know?” I answered honestly. “I just woke up here.”

He grumbled and started tapping, quite daintily, on the keyboard of his computer. I noticed that most
of the letters had been scratched off and they surface of all the keys had deep grooves scored into
them.

“If you’re making our weapons go poof, that means you should’ve gone up there, not down here.”

I could have told them that. My little sister once dropped her dead goldfish down the toilet and dashed
out into the garden for some flowers to ‘do a proper funeral’. In the ten seconds that she was gone,
my older brother having partied with his friends a little too hard the night before, dashed in and emptied
the contents of his stomach into the loo (a wretched combination of blue alcopops and the mostly
undigested contents of a late night kebab), on top of the body of said goldfish. 

I walk into the bathroom to see what all the commotion was, only to find my hysterically younger sister
beating my hungover brother black and blue with the toilet scrubber, who was screaming about her
poor goldfish’s soul being defiled. 

I put my hand in that vomit filled toilet and fished (ha) that dead goldfish out, just so my sister could
give it a proper burial (outside in the garden with my brother exiled to his bedroom with a bucket).

If that didn’t earn me a place in heaven, then i demanded to speak to the person in charge. 

“You.” the manager demon grunted. “Someone’s messed up the paperwork. You be in heaven.”

I breathed out. “Oh, great. So what happens now?”

“I’ve put in a transfer for you.” the manager confirmed. “They should be here to pick you up in about,”
he squinted at his screen, “a millennium or two.”

“What?!” I screeched. 

“Bureaucracy and red tape.” he shrugged. “What can you do?”

“But, but what am I supposed to do in the meantime for a millennium?”

“Get a job?” He offered. He looked me up and down. “Any good at torture?”

“Uh, no.”

“Pity. always call for that around here. So what are you good at?”

I stared at him, drawing a huge blank. There were massive gaping holes in my memory, in fact it was
more hole that substance at this point with only random flashbacks occurring when something
triggered them, like that memory of the goldfish. 

I mentally  scrabbled about desperately for anything, anything at all that I actually knew i was good at.

“I’m brilliant with microwaves?” 

What the hell had just come out of my mouth?

The manager stared at me then gave me a massive, shit eating grin. “Oh really now.”

Which is how I got assigned to hell’s staff cafeteria. Apparently, although demon’s are quite good at
studying various human artifacts that can be used at torture devices, they’re total useless at basic
domestic electronics. Plus, the work life was so harsh that they didn’t have time to cook anything from
scratch so they’d been subsisting on uncooked frozen microwave meals. My first day I'd watched in
horror as they staff had picked up the ready meal, still completely frozen and just shoved it, package
and all, into their mouths, making large crunching noises, blood streaming down their faces as the
sharp bits sliced the insides of their mouths to pieces. 

I managed to get a routine going with the hundreds of microwaves that filled the kitchen (why they had
so many when they didn’t know how to use them was just another hellish mystery) i could feed as
many as 150 demons at a time, once I'd trained the miniature imps to deliver the food to the correct
person as soon as the microwave dinged. 

I ruled over the kitchen like a queen - with the demons becoming my faithful devotees after they finally
had food that a) didn’t destroy their mouths and b) tasted good (they had super low standards if
microwave food was gourmet standard to them but since I didn't know how to properly cook, i wasn’t
going to argue).

It was actually kind of fun, but still, this was hell. Screams constantly filled the air, the rain burned my
skin, the only other humans around were terribly evil people who deserve eternal torture (and made
lousy conversational partners, what with all the begging/threats/cursing to be released). The sinners
were such a whiny lot that I actually felt sorry for the demons who had to listen to them all day long. 

The demons were nice but they still tended to avoid me - after all, if either they or I weren’t careful i’d
accidentally poof their weapons into gold dust. I think some of them worried I'd accidentally poof them
too. They were nice and genuinely sincere in their well wishes (especially if it meant I'd slip them
something extra at lunchtime) but they were still distant.

I wanted to go to heaven where I belonged - maybe somewhere there would recognise me and fill in
the holes in my memory. Or at the very least I'd have someone to talk to who wasn’t a
murderer/rapist/professional torturer

I kept chasing down the manager to ask him about when my transfer was going to get expedited like
he promised. He just kept mumbling, soon, soon. I scowled at the memory. It’d better be soon or no
more lamb hotpot with red wine jus for him.

I sighed. 

Only 9, 998 and a half years to go….