lisette
I’ve seen hell. Twice. And it’s not what you think. No fire, no brimstone. Just emptiness. Emptiness and flowers. There are flowers there. Plain white flowers, carnations, I think, clumped together in sporadic patches all over the place. Plain flowers, but still breathtakingly beautiful. Beautiful is not a word that springs to mind when you think of hell, but that’s only because you believe what they told you to believe. I didn’t. I have my own thoughts and beliefs. And despite what your thoughts on hell are, it’s actually quite chilly there. I suppose the draft is due to the huge open spaces around hell. The best I can do to describe it is to tell you hell is a lot like a tundra. An Alaskan tundra with nothing but emptiness and flowers as far as the eye can see. Hell has no penguins, though; I checked the second time I was there. Apparently penguins don’t commit sin. I didn’t even see that many people. I stumbled across no more than five other wandering souls-of the human kind, that is, and that’s a combined total for both visits. I think that’s the point of hell-to spend an eternity alone; loneliness can take its toll on you after a while.
I made eye contact with one of them, a girl about the age I am now, with troubled pale blue eyes. She looked at me, and she tried to speak--I saw her lips moving-but no sound came out. She kept trying and trying, she got more frustrated with each attempt. Then she gave up and kept walking. I caught up to her and picked a couple of flowers and gave her one. She took it gratefully and smiled. In the middle of hell, she smiled, a brilliantly white smile, filled with a great deal of pain and distress, but a smile nonetheless. I spent many a night wondering how she got there, what she did that could have possibly been that bad to send a child there; I could never come up with anything logical. That happened during my first visit; the second time-when I went voluntarily-I made it a point not to connect with any of the wandering souls I might encounter. At first no one believed me about my experience. And then I produced a crumpled carnation from my pocket; carnations-or any other flowers-don’t grow here, they haven’t since the Clearing. They believed my story then, but felt that I had gone to heaven and not hell. But I know it was hell. How do I know? Because my mother wasn’t there.
The first time I went to hell, I was seven. I had been in hiding from Atherton and his followers for a few months then; I was bound and determined not to let them get me. My will to fight was at a low that day, and somehow I had managed to let them corner me with little resistance. Either from lack of food, dehydration, or overheating, I passed out before they had a chance to get their hands on me. When I woke up, they told me I had been clinically dead for ten minutes and that it was some type of miracle that I awoke. My little recovering from the dead stint would prove to be more trouble than I wanted to have. After sharing my story of the afterlife with the crowd that had gathered around me in the meeting room that I had been carried into, the entire town labeled me a godsend, an angel, a divine being. The attention given to me and taken away from Atherton was enough to anger him and solidify my place as his number one nemesis; since then he’s wanted to get his hands on me more than ever. Unfortunately the very thing that made my life even more miserable was also what kept me alive up until my second visit to hell--Atherton’s desire to win over his public was so strong that he kept me alive, unharmed, for many years following, afraid to upset the balance of things among the people by having me killed, which he could have easily done at that time. It would have saved us both a world of trouble.
I made eye contact with one of them, a girl about the age I am now, with troubled pale blue eyes. She looked at me, and she tried to speak--I saw her lips moving-but no sound came out. She kept trying and trying, she got more frustrated with each attempt. Then she gave up and kept walking. I caught up to her and picked a couple of flowers and gave her one. She took it gratefully and smiled. In the middle of hell, she smiled, a brilliantly white smile, filled with a great deal of pain and distress, but a smile nonetheless. I spent many a night wondering how she got there, what she did that could have possibly been that bad to send a child there; I could never come up with anything logical. That happened during my first visit; the second time-when I went voluntarily-I made it a point not to connect with any of the wandering souls I might encounter. At first no one believed me about my experience. And then I produced a crumpled carnation from my pocket; carnations-or any other flowers-don’t grow here, they haven’t since the Clearing. They believed my story then, but felt that I had gone to heaven and not hell. But I know it was hell. How do I know? Because my mother wasn’t there.
The first time I went to hell, I was seven. I had been in hiding from Atherton and his followers for a few months then; I was bound and determined not to let them get me. My will to fight was at a low that day, and somehow I had managed to let them corner me with little resistance. Either from lack of food, dehydration, or overheating, I passed out before they had a chance to get their hands on me. When I woke up, they told me I had been clinically dead for ten minutes and that it was some type of miracle that I awoke. My little recovering from the dead stint would prove to be more trouble than I wanted to have. After sharing my story of the afterlife with the crowd that had gathered around me in the meeting room that I had been carried into, the entire town labeled me a godsend, an angel, a divine being. The attention given to me and taken away from Atherton was enough to anger him and solidify my place as his number one nemesis; since then he’s wanted to get his hands on me more than ever. Unfortunately the very thing that made my life even more miserable was also what kept me alive up until my second visit to hell--Atherton’s desire to win over his public was so strong that he kept me alive, unharmed, for many years following, afraid to upset the balance of things among the people by having me killed, which he could have easily done at that time. It would have saved us both a world of trouble.