By Tyler Sikov
Before I tell you about my experience in Heck, I should probably tell you how I died. I was running around in one of those revolving doors, forcing people to go through the much less fun normal door, I was then decapitated while trying to leave the door, the door was spinning so fast that my head was just gone. I appear inside a room and an attendant puts lotion of my hands and feet. I am then told that I must go to the reception area for processing. This was immediately a difficult task as to do that I needed to open a door, and I could not stop sliding around the room. The lotion smelled really nice so I decided to lick my fingers which gave me a great idea, I could open the door with my mouth. I put my mouth around the handle and the door immediately flies open sending me sledding across the floor. The man in the doorway tells me to follow him. I follow him down many twisting and turning halls with him talking at a volume I could hear but not quite make out everything he said. At many points I lost him only to find myself walking down the wrong hallway and falling down a random pit. I must then climb the long stair case where each step is a different height, this really killed my ankles, get it because I am dead, eh. You living folks will get it when you are dead.
Finally, I find him and am escorted into a reception room. This room is filled with many buttons. None of the buttons have labels so I begin pressing random buttons. The buttons I pressed did these to me: had a group of people run out and lightly brush my face with feathers, had someone play twinkle twinkle little star on my teeth, someone come to give me a hug but it lasted a few seconds too long and he was really sweaty, someone walked near me with a chinchilla and every time I tried to pet it they would pull it slightly farther away. Finally, I pressed a button that brought out a lady who introduced herself as the receptionist. I asked where I was and she said Heck, an eternity of small inconveniences. I thought of myself as a good person but I guess I inconvenienced a lot of people in my life. She tells me that I am all checked in and that I am free to leave the reception room and go find lunch.
I leave the room and after getting lost for a mildly inconvenient amount of time I find the elevators. I was expecting them to be empty but when one arrived it was almost full, there was one spot left. I get in and as the elevator is descending, I realize that everyone else in here has not showered in months. I turn and talk to one of the people to ask them why they are all in here and why they smell bad, yes I am a blunt person, all of the people in the elevator say in unison “We never leave, we never clean ourselves, we make all elevator rides inconvenient”. The elevator then got stuck for 30 minutes. The elevator does not have numbers on their buttons so you would press random floors just hoping it took you where you were looking to go. Once I get to the floor I was searching for, I go and get myself a burrito bowl from Chipotle but they are always out of a random ingredient, so just normal Chipotle. I order what I ordered while I was alive, but when I go to pay, the credit card machine is broken so I pay in cash, I have just enough to pay for it and tip 10% in my pocket. I eat the food but I find a hair in it, I go up to the customer service desk to complain about this.
I get to the desk and the woman at the desk screams at me for wasting her time. She then starts to talk about how she knows corporate and demands to speak to my manager. I finally get a word in and complain about there being hair in my food and this woman smacks me in the face and then punches herself in the stomach and starts screaming that I hit her, so I decide that this is a lost cause, I ate a lot of cat hair in my life so eating a bit of mystery hair in my afterlife is not the biggest of deals. As I am walking away from the desk someone hits me on the back of the head with an empty wrapping paper tube. I ask why, and this guy replies, “Whenever your sibling thinks of you someone will come up behind you and hit you on the head with an empty wrapping paper tube, as I have just done”. Right once he finishes saying this, I get hit on the head again, I have 20 siblings, lucky for me it does not hurt that much it is just more a mild annoyance, just like having a sibling.
Right then I stumble into an alley that is full of people asking me to sign their petitions, I start signing some of them and on one of them I write the date wrong, I go to erase it but the eraser bits stick to the paper and you can tell that I wrote I wrong the first time because it does not erase fully. I then get a notification on my phone that my job has been changed and will be changed every day. I question this because in life I never had a real job, I would just go to a business for a week, reorganize their computer systems and cabinets, then leave without telling anyone where they can find their stuff in the new systems and cabinets. It tells me that today I get to mow a lawn, I am allergic to mown grass so I will be sneezing for a week after today. The map on my phone shows me that I am a 20-minute walk away from the lawn I am meant to mown, and I need to be there in 15 minutes. Right then the path I must take to get to my job is filled with people, not enough to stop me from getting there, just enough that it will be harder for me to get there on time.
When I get to my job, 35 minutes late, I go to shake my boss’s hand and he begins to do the worm. Once he notices that I am attempting to shake his hand he gets up and asks if the culture changed again, I ask what he means and he says that every few months the culturally accepted greetings and other culturally accepted practices are changed, and no one will tell you what they have been changed to, so sometimes you come off looking rude. He then tells me to mow the lawn. Once I am done mowing, I decide to go to a rooftop pool. I get into a swimsuit and jump in. quickly I realize that parts of the pool are salt water and parts are chlorine, I am very confused as to how this works but more bothered by the fact that different parts of the pool are wildly different temperatures.
Once I am done, I get directions to my apartment. It takes me an hour to get there. Once I get there I reach into my pocket and find a ring of keys, and the 15th key I try opens the door. Right as the door opens, some cats jump into my arms. Right when I think that this may be a nice place to be, the cats jump off of me leaving my entire body coated with hair. I walk in and find that I have a dryer full of clothes, I take the clothes out and as I am walking back to my bed to fold the clothes, I drop a sock onto the dirty floor. I pick it up and decide that I should wash it again so I put it into a different basket. I notice that this sock has a hole in it, I look through my other socks and I notice that all of them have holes in different places, many of them will cause some of my toes to be out of my sock. I knew that this could be a bit annoying because I have to walk up hill everywhere I go. Right then I get a message telling me that tomorrow my job is stapling individual pieces of very sticky paper.
I change into my pajamas, freshly clean and folded and go to brush my teeth, while I am brushing my teeth water is constantly dripping down my arms, because of this I wash my hands. I pull up my sleeves so they do not get wet but the second I turn on the water my sleeves fall back down and get soaked. There is a knock on the door, I open it and get hit on the head by an empty wrapping paper tube, again. I go back inside and decide I should watch some Netflix. I go to search for a show I like but every key I press types a different letter or symbol, it takes me a long time to find the show I want to watch. After a bit of buffering because the wifi is slow I watch an episode. The next episode starts after a bit of buffering but it is not the next episode in the show, it is a random episode of the show. I try to find a way to watch the episodes in order but all shows autoplay their episodes in a random order. I look at the clock and see that it is getting pretty late so I decide to go to bed. The bed is part box spring, part memory foam, part air mattress and part water bed. It is going to be hard to fall asleep but soon enough I will and then I will wake up and live in this world of small inconveniences. This is my own personal Heck.
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