Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
– Pablo Picasso
Tag: soul
Fiction: The Devil You Know
Satan slouched on his throne, one leathery wing idly beating time to the off-key tune its owner hummed.
He watched the parade of souls stream by him. Some quailed and screamed at the sight of the overlord of evil; others, hoping to be spared a little misery, genuflected before the throne, not realizing that Satan fried every 417th person to do that.
As the endless line of wrecked humanity slunk past him, he would meditatively torture one in a particular fashion and another in a different way. For the better part of an hour, he drilled holes in various sordid souls so that he wasn’t the only one in Hell who was bored.
A flash of movement caught his eye; he turned his horned head to see one of his lieutenants rushing toward him. The demon bowed before his infernal lord.
“What?” Satan demanded.
“My prince, there is … something odd. Something new, and none of us in Admissions can explain it.”
Fiction: Souled Out
Darlan, an agent of Hell on Earth, sighed into his coffee. A good, strong cup of coffee was one of the few things that made up for being trapped in human form to do his infernal majesty’s will.
You couldn’t get any in Hell.
Today, though, even coffee wasn’t perking Darlan up. He was waiting for today’s mark to come along. Another soul to speed on its way to Hell.
Big deal, Darlan thought. The place is overrun with souls as it is, cluttering things up, screaming, pleading, whining — oh, the whining.
Three hundred years earlier, when Darlan was first given the job of infernal shepherd, it was exciting. He always exceeded his quota and liked to take on the tougher jobs. But any job begins to pale after three centuries, and Darlan was doing little more now than putting in his time. Other agents were showing him up, but he didn’t care.