Tale of “Rebirth”

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Broken Bones and Compromise

A surreally good story

A wise man once said, “The snake eating its own tail represents the hermetic transcendence of being able to eat your own ass.”

That level of flexibility requires a discipline that goes beyond the average person. I know it goes beyond what I’m willing or able to do, especially since the reward for my efforts is my own butthole.

Yet, many of us bend over backward for others to where we could eat our own ass — and shove our heads right up it.

When I was a friendless 17-year-old, I worked at a grocery store. One winter, some coworkers wanted me to shovel all the snow out of the parking lot during a snowstorm. I didn’t want to, but I wanted these people to like me.

So we compromised. I shoveled snow off the skylights.

The roof sloped and I had a heck of a time finding the right spots to shovel. Many times I pointed out how dangerous it was, and useless, since it hadn’t stopped snowing. My coworkers pulled the ladder away and wouldn’t put it back until I did the job. So, I cleaned off every single skylight. I kept almost falling off the roof. When I was done, I yelled until someone brought the ladder back. As I was starting to climb down the ladder wobbled and— wouldn’t you know it? — a small airplane fell from the sky and crashed into the store.

What are the odds?

I awoke at the hospital with a bastard of a headache. I tried to speak, but a tube running down my throat impeded my efforts. I tried to move but my body wouldn’t respond. One of the staff removed the tube. My father came to the hospital and looked like he aged a decade.

Which made sense, since I’d been in a coma for 10 years.

A lot happened while I’d been out. The most relevant events were my mom leaving, and taking her insurance coverage with her. My dad said he wouldn’t add me to his. He blamed me for mom abandoning him. I guess she told him it was my fault because I bummed her out.

This proved unfortunate since all the physical/cognitive therapy I required was expensive. The hospital had various finance plans and charities, but none would take me on.

The sweet spot for sympathy is a precarious niche. All those charities required social media promotion — and they didn’t do it for free. People pay for the service with exposure. Meaning, the charity gets to market them for donations.

All my muscles atrophied during my decade-long coma. The staff often forgot about me, so I was covered in bedsores. My skin hung sallow and loose over my poorly mended bones.

I looked fucking gross.

Financing wasn’t an option either. Hard for me to find work, so I had no money to finance with. My dad wouldn’t let me into the house so I slept at the park. I had a 10-year gap in my employment history and no high school diploma.

One interviewer’s response sums up the rest of them. “You worked at a grocery store until you were seventeen. Then, you slept for ten years, didn’t graduate high school, and don’t have a home,” he fed my application into a shredder. “So get the hell out of my office.”

The hospital’s collection goons found me at the park and surrounded the bushes I lived in. The leader of the crew was a bespectacled, paunchy, middle-aged man. He fiddled with his thinning hair and clipboard. His flunkies of aesthetically similar gentlemen beat the shit out of me.

When they finished, he spoke. “Listen, bub, you gots a debt you needs to pay. You can either pay up or we take this show to the docks. Maybe get you fitted with some cement boots.”

That didn’t sound very good to me, so we reached a compromise.

I had two eyes, two kidneys, two lungs, and two testicles. Plus, bone marrow and a rare blood type. Organs are always needed, so I would pay off my bill with my body’s extra parts.

Selling your organs, even to pay off a hospital debt, is illegal. They didn’t want me changing my mind or going to the police. So they kept me in a janitorial closet at the hospital until they needed me.

When someone needed a kidney, they put me under for surgery. Lying there, cut open, they realized nothing was stopping them from emptying me of all my organs.

I always thought Dante Alighieri invented purgatory for his poems. Invention or no, he was onto something. The surgeons took out whatever the last organ was that kept me alive, and I woke up in purgatory. The experience was, at least at the start, like dining at an Olive Garden — salty, but alright.

Purgatory consisted of large buildings like the megacities from Judge Dredd. The sky had an off-white color, with the consistent brightness of an early evening on Earth. The ground was the same but a little dimmer and you could walk on it. I shared an apartment with another soul whose name loosely translated to Mister Clock Pop. They came from a different universe. All versions of reality shared the same purgatory.

Clock Pop looked human, but had four of everything: four eyes, four mouths, four genitals, and four limbs. Sex with them was confusing and exhausting.

At first, I was into it. I hadn’t lost my virginity while alive, and the soul of an ultra-terrestrial seemed a pretty decent first time. As I said, they had four genitals. Two penises, and two vaginas. There were also four anuses.

The mechanics of the afterlife made little sense. I never needed to eat or drink, so I never urinated or defecated. And yet, I ejaculated. The problems arose after our first sexual foray. My virginity gave my juice special qualities.

Clock Pop had been some kind of business genius in their former existence. They realized they could charge others to have sex with me, which I didn’t want to do. No matter how many Soul Dollars I’d make.

So we compromised.

I would ejaculate into containers and Clock Pop would sell them. This worked out great for me since I never ran out of ejaculate. I could masturbate all “day” and at “night,” Clock Pop and I would spend our Soul Dollars at the nearby casino.

Clock Pop knew, but didn’t tell me, that virgin sperm was labeled an illicit substance. Dweeb Juice, its street name, turned out to be one of the few banned substances in Purgatory — along with Mountain Dew, fentanyl, Planet-288 Gush Gush, and the song “Pony” by Ginuwine.

Purgatory had a nasty organized crime problem.

Each illegal good fetched a hefty price — but Dweeb Juice earned the most. It was incredibly rare.

I learned all this when several goons from the Goon Crew broke in, beat Clock Pop to double death, put a bag over my head, and kidnapped me. At their lair, they sat me down in a chair, tied my hands behind my back, and pulled the bag off my head.

The guy in charge of the Goon Crew was an entity that bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever seen. Hard to even describe. Closest I can come to is: an elf the size of a solar system, but made of gears, and those gears were made of energy.

Name was Russell.

The problem with a creature of that magnitude is that their sense of time is wildly different from mine. They spoke in eons.

I mean, long-winded doesn’t even come close.

It was all backstory and painfully forced adverbs. I couldn’t begin to guess the number of universes born and destroyed in the time it took them to get to the point.

Russell’s point was this: I would be hooked up to a machine and pumped for my Dweeb Juice until, in their words, “The godhead has completed its thought, and all reality recedes to the Ein Sof until the next thought occurs.”

Pardon my French, but that sounded désagréable.

Fortunately, we reached a compromise.

Story in response to Kristine Laco and her goopy “Rebirth” monthly prompt.

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