There Is No I In Hell
Here’s a little short story I’ve written depicting what I think will happen on judgement day and how I picture hell. I think it would make a great movie but I can’t write movies. If someone pinches this idea and makes a movie of it I hope they will say in the credits that it is “Based on a short story by Kim”.
There Is No I In Hell
Flynn was a bad ass and that wasn’t just his opinion. He had his reasons for being a bad ass although he had forgotten most of them. The ones he couldn’t forget were those that involved people treating him badly. Nobody had been stupid enough to try treating him bad for a very long time these days, however, because the last person to do him wrong had vanished without a trace.
Terror washed through Mia as she watched Flynn walk towards her and it drowned out the pain of her bruises and black eye. The beating her last customer gave her was nothing compared to what Flynn was going to do when he found out the John hadn’t paid her. Flynn never listened to excuses.
“What happened to you?” Flynn asked when he reached her. His voice might have sounded warm and concerned to passers by but his eyes were cold and her voice broke as she answered him.
“It was a set-up”, she whispered, “there were three of them.”
“Three times the fee then”, Flynn said casually, “Right?”
The colour left Mia’s face and she struggled to get the words out.
“They didn’t pay.”
A muscle twitched in Flynn’s jaw.
“Guess you will have to make up the difference from your cut of tonights takings then”, he said softly, “you better get back to work or you won’t make enough to cover it”.
Mia knew better than to argue. He was letting her off lightly and she knew it. She would have a pretty bad day when the withdrawal set in but at least he didn’t seem to be planning to beat her for letting this happen to her again. She wished Flynn was like the other pimps who stuck to their girls like glue. Customers thought twice about ripping a girl off when her pimp was close by. Even a minder or a madam would help, she thought, but Flynn was a one man operation. He shared his takings with nobody and relied wholly on fear to keep his girls in line.
Fear of him hadn’t always been enough to keep the girls under control but it was now. Quite a few girls had gone missing before people wised up to what he was capable of. What really sealed his reputation, however, was when one of his girls turned him in to the police. They put her into a safe house but he found her. Word got around town that even veteran morgue attendants threw up when they saw what he had done to her. Nothing happened to Flynn because the police could not find any evidence to use against him and the only witness they had was dead.
It wasn’t until after Flynn walked away that Mia realised she had not been breathing properly and she took a few deep breaths to calm herself before making sure her make up covered all of the bruises. She added more concealer under her swollen eye and went back to work.
Flynn went to a nearby restaurant where he was planning to meet up with his supplier and the head of his stable of drug pushers. Supplies were running low and he had to sort that out so there was no time to punish Mia properly for her stupidity.
The waiter showed him to his usual table and he thought about ordering a meal but he was not feeling too well all of a sudden. The headache, he decided, was Mia’s fault and he turned his attention to what he could do to make the stupid bitch stop losing money that way.
When the nausea began he figured it would pass if he had something to eat. He signalled the waiter but, before the man reached his table, he began to vomit. He tried to get up and go to the rest room but every muscle in his body went slack and he fell. He was dead before his head hit the floor. He’d had a massive heart attack.
The physical distress stopped and, lost in the relief, it was a moment or two before he got his bearings and realised he was floating above everyone in the restaurant. He looked down and saw the waiter leaning over someone on the floor. The waiter stood up and Flynn gazed down on his own face. That was when he realised he must be dead.
Flynn thought he should be afraid but he wasn’t. He looked around and, gradually, the scene began to fade into a light so bright he couldn’t see a thing. A few moments, or maybe it was an hour, he had no idea how much time passed before the light began to dim. All he knew was there was no pain, no fear, no distress and then there were two figures in front of him.
“Hello Flynn”, one of the figures said gently, “It is judgement day.”
“Is that so”, he said defiantly, “I suppose you must be God then.”
“I am”, said the figure and Flynn felt waves of love wash over him. Confused by the love, he looked at the other figure and thought, “that must be Jesus”.
“Yes”, the other figure responded to his unspoken thought, “I am Jesus and I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you never called on me. I would have helped you if you had but now this day has come and I cannot help you at all.”
Flynn stiffened. He didn’t want help. An old saying came to mind and he began to smirk.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of death”, he said coldly, “I shall fear no evil as I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley! Do your worst,” he spat at them, “hellfire and brimstone and all that crap won’t bother me.”
The two figures gazed sadly at Flynn.
“We are not going to do anything to you”, God said gently, “You have done it to yourself. If we could save you from what you have done to yourself we would but it is too late now.”
Flynn was confused and irritated.
“I have done nothing wrong”, he said, “You made a dog eat dog world and I ate a few dogs. So what? You may be a God but you are not my God so, as far as I can see, you have no right to judge me.”
The two figures looked at each other and sighed. The one on the right leaned forward. Flynn found his eyes drawn to a face filled with so much love and sadness it made him want to cry.
“We have no intention of judging you”, the figure said, “you will judge yourself as soon as the connection is made whether we want you to or not.”
Flynn was alarmed. The first thought that came to his mind was the death penalty electric chair.
“Connection? What connection? You planning to hook me up to something?”
The figure of God stood up and moved to Flynn’s side.
“It is time to come home Flynn”, he said gently, “as a severed finger is reconnected to the hand from which it came so you will be reconnected to the body from which you came.”
Flynn took an involuntary step backwards.
“What are you talking about”, he demanded, “what are you going to do to me?”
“You have heard the theories and claims Flynn.” God said. “I have been called the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the creator, that from which all things are made. Some have even claimed that everyone is God or that God is in everyone and, in a way, all those things are true.
I am everything that has ever existed because, in the beginning, the only thing I had to work with was me. I took myself, my body, and created everything from it. In that way I actually am everything. The devil, the angels, you, your clothing, the plastic bag you saw blowing in the breeze yesterday as well as the breeze itself and the fish that chokes on the plastic bag when it falls into the sea. I am all those things because all those things are made from my body but, just as a severed finger does not respond to the commands of the hand from which it came, some of the things that were made from me were separated from me. You are one of those separated parts of me. Now it is time to return to the body from which you came.”
Flynn was horrified. It sounded like he was about to lose himself, like God was planning to absorb him, like he was about to become some mindless thing on the end of God’s hand.
“What happens if I don’t want to return to your body?” he rasped.
“The spiritual blood supply will not be properly restored and, exactly like a severed finger that does not get successfully reattached, you will fall off and be lost to me forever. The only way to guarantee the spiritual blood supply will be restored is with the body and blood of Christ. You have not availed yourself of the provision I made for you to use the body and blood of Christ to save yourself so you won’t survive the reconnection but there is no other way to do this.”
“Sounds to me like I’m lost either way”, Flynn said angrily, “if I don’t reattach I’m lost but if I do reattach I become like a mindless finger on the end of your hand!”
“Not true”, God said, “the only way to give life to my creations was to put a piece of my own life into them. Every living thing has a piece of my soul and it gives them the same power I have to choose for themselves and that cannot be taken from them or given back to me.”
Flynn snorted his disdain for that idea.
“Are you saying there is a piece of your soul in that choking fish you mentioned? What about grass or cockroaches and things like that?”
“Grass has such a small sliver of my soul it is only enough to give it life. It isn’t enough to permit it to think or have free will but yes, all living things contain a bit of my soul, and most of those bits will instinctively return to me. Some, like you, will not but many of my children will choose to come back to me. We will be reconnected but they will retain the piece of my soul I gave them and will continue to have free will. It will be up to them how they choose to spend eternity. They will have all the same power I have once we are reunited and will even be free to create their own world and rule over it although it is unlikely that anyone will actually wish to do that.”
Flynn tried to make sense of what was being said but, before he could think it through, there was a sudden shift in him. His senses were, at first, overwhelmed by the flood of knowledge and sensations that poured into him but, gradually, he stabilised. The connection had been made and he could feel what God felt, knew what God knew, understood everything there was to understand.
For a brief, shining, glorious moment he was like God. He was all powerful, all knowing, one with the most glorious alpha and omega and he looked into eternity and knew what heaven would be like. His heart soared and his spirit shone and then knowledge began to strike at him and it burned and stung like molten rocks.
In the blink of an eye his mind fell from the heights of glory into the brain of a small girl who was crying as a man molested her.
“You like that don’t you”, the man sneered at her, “Like mother like daughter.”
Flynn knew, without being told, he was inside the mind of Mia’s six year old daughter. Mia was still at work. She didn’t know Flynn was dead. She was trying to make the money to stop him from beating her and she had left her daughter, as she always did, home alone. The man was from next door and he had come, as he always did, to have some fun with the slut child of a slut mother.
Horrified, Flynn relived every awful thing that had happened to this child since he had taken over her mother’s life. He felt her fear, her physical pain, her despair. He heard himself pleading with Mia not to go to work and felt betrayed when Mia went anyway. Hunger gnawed at his entrails as he tried, in vain, to rouse Mia from her drugged up state day after dreary, frightening, day. He railed at the childs ignorance and the way she stayed silent about what was being done to her. The mans threats, Flynn knew, were nothing but bluffs but the child was too young to know that.
Before he could adjust to this experience more knowledge struck him and he was in an alley on his knees being raped and beaten by three men. The pain, the violation, the humiliation of the experience was magnified and worsened by the terror he/Mia felt about what he/Flynn was going to do if these men did not pay.
Flynn tried frantically to shut down, to prevent the knowledge from coursing through him, to stop living out the harm and damage he had done to life after life after life when they had come into contact with him. Damage he’d done on purpose and damage he had done unknowingly.
When he began to relive the experience of the woman who had gone to the police he thought he would not survive. He knew what he was going to do to her next so, in addition to suffering her actual pain and terror, he suffered pain and terror connected to knowing just how badly he was going to torture her/himself before s/he died.
Flynn writhed in agony as he journeyed back through his life and lived out everything he had ever done, or caused to be done, to other living things. The agony and terror of the kitten he had tortured, the rapes, the beatings, the physical and mental tortures and abuses.
He could not feel the arms of God around him. He could not hear the weeping that surrounded him as God, Jesus, the angels and the saved grieved for the loss of a part of themselves that his choices had forced upon them all.
The closer he got to his childhood the less damage he had caused. Twice he even encountered a soul he had been kind to and that showed him what joy this journey could have contained but he was going to die and he knew it. He had to die. He could not live with knowledge such as this. He did not want to.
It was an eternity of suffering that made fire and brimstone sound like a picnic. He wasn’t even able to find comfort in knowing those who inflicted evil on him were going to suffer the same fate. He knew, now, why they had done the things they did to him. Some of the people he had hated the most were, in fact, people he felt sorry for as he became aware of what was in their hearts and souls and learned what had happened to them to make them who they were.
“There is no such thing as I,” he cried to God, “there is only us and I must die for the evil I have done to us.”
“Is that your judgement upon yourself?” God asked him.
“That is my judgement!” Flynn responded.
“Is there nobody who can speak in his defence?” God asked Jesus.
Jesus shook his head. “I cannot speak for him because he never allowed me into his life so I never got to know him.”
“You are reconnected to me Flynn,” God said, “You know what I know, you feel what I feel, you have seen your life and yourself through the eyes of truth, justice, and rightiousness. You have found yourself guilty and you must decide what happens next. Will you come with me into heaven and stay with me for eternity or not?”
Flynn shook his head.
“I am corrupt and stained with evil. If I remain connected to the body I might infect it and I can never forget, never forgive, what I have done to us. The connection must be severed so the body can stay pure. Cast me off that my suffering might be ended.”
“It shall be as you have decided,” God said, “but I take no joy in this for you take with you a piece of my soul. Your loss really is my loss too.”
Flynn knew it was true, knew he was hurting God once again, but he really could not bear the pain being connected to God was causing him. He thought the pain would ease when God cut him loose but, as he began falling away from the light and into the dark, he realised that being disconnected hurt too. Piece by piece his body, already dust and ashes from its time in the grave, disintegrated and floated back to become part of God again. Soon all that was left of Flynn was a tiny spark of life, a little scrap of Gods own soul, the one piece of himself God could not take back because it now contained Flynn. It was the source of his free will and he had turned it, with his choices, from something holy into something black and evil.
God, he realised as he fluttered down to join all the other lost fragments, cannot die. He would live, as God would live, forever but he would live disconnected from the body to which he belonged. There would be no hellfire. No brimstone. No demons prodding him with forks.
Just an eternity to regret having chosen this fate for himself.
