Satan Loves You

There has been a lot of debate over what Hell looks like. Christians serve it up Dante style, with caverns of fire and lakes of lava. Muslims change the names, but they’re mostly on the same page. The Buddhists have Naraka, with its pus rivers and infinite tortures. Jews have an undesirable piece of real estate where everyone gets Saturdays off and someone’s always burning garbage. But when damned souls of any denomination finally come face-to-face with the real thing what they generally feel is disappointment, and that’s the genius of Hell.

Hell falls short of expectations. Hell disappoints. Hell underwhelms. Hell is always worse than you thought it would be. Tackier. Cheaper. Dirtier. Uglier. Hell looks like someone slept in it the night before and didn’t wash it afterwards: it’s soiled, rumpled, stained and unpleasant. Almost everything in Hell is broken and hardly anything works. The things that do work have been repaired so poorly, so many times, that they’re actually harder to use than before. Dante got the general gist – he was there, after all – but, being Italian, when it came time to write it up he couldn’t resist making it seem romantic. Hell is about as romantic as a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen where everyone is naked, dirty and dead.

Hell is half-assed. Demons flog screaming souls but they swing from their elbows, never getting their shoulders into the blows. Flesh is indifferently flayed with dull knives. Once, lining the road between the Sixth and Seventh Bolgias, there had stood an impressive arcade of crucifixes. Over time their crossbeams cracked and their arms broke, leaving them lopsided and, rather than actually taking the trouble to repair them, the demons just made do. The result was an avenue of the crucified who had one hand waving free and, occasionally, a foot, too. It looked very stupid, but no one cared. It was Hell.

Hell was the Broken Windows Theory in reverse: as more and more small things were ignored and the minor aspects of the realm fell into disrepair, it caused a ripple effect across the realm. A feeling of despair infected every corner of Hell, and not just the normal Hellish despair of souls bound in eternal torment, but a more Earthly “Why Bother?” shrug. Fifteen-minute coffee breaks became hour-long naps. Where once Centaurs had scourged, violated and destroyed souls now they just scourged and violated them and their violations were by-the-numbers at best. Gluttons had once been drowned in hot lead, but now the lead was microwaved until it was merely lukewarm. The gluttons suffered, but mostly from boredom and lead poisoning.

The budget cuts didn’t help. A demon who lost his trident or whip knew that it was unlikely he’d be issued a replacement. The Malebranche’s famous lake of pitch was now more of a pond and well on its way to becoming a wide puddle. The flatterers of the Second Bolgia had once been buried in human excrement, but now there was only enough excrement to bury them up to their necks and as a consequence they wouldn’t shut up. It drove the demons appointed to stomp on their faces crazy.

With so few physical resources at its disposal, the important thing about Hell was keeping morale up, which is why self-starters like Minos, who took genuine pride in their work, were so important. And that was why it was even more disturbing that he and his crew were now on strike.

Satan and Nero arrived at The Gates of Hell where a mob of demons were walking a picket line. A small clot of souls were sitting nearby, suddenly seized by a deep commitment to social justice which required that they never cross a picket line. They hoped that their newfound solidarity with labor would spare them from the fires of Hell for a little while longer. Standing on a rock by the Gate was Minos, chanting on his bullhorn. Seeing Satan and Nero approach, he redoubled his efforts.

“Four, six, eight, ten, we won’t be burned for Satan!”

“Hey hey, ho ho, toxic fumes have got to go!”

“One, three, five, seven, give us benefits like they’ve got in Heaven!”

“I’m going home,” Satan said to Nero.

“You must take decisive action, sir.”

“I don’t want to be decisive,” Satan whined. “I’ve got a killer headache.”

“Excuse me?” Nero shouted at Minos. “Excuse me?”

“Whaddaya want?” Minos yelled back.

“I’ve got his attention, sir,” Nero said. “Now talk to him.”

“Hi, Minos,” Satan said.

All the demons were suddenly staring at him. Satan figured he needed to do better than “Hi.”

“So, what’s going on?”

Instantly, Satan regretted saying this because a) he didn’t actually want to know and, b) it sounded weak.

“We’re on strike,” Minos roared from his barrel chest. “And if you don’t meet our demands we’re gonna get you put on the lista Unfair Metaphysical Employers.”

“This is Hell,” Satan said. “It’s supposed to be unfair.”

“Didn’t you read our signs?” Minos asked.

He pointed his long, scaly tail at a placard held by a minor demon that read, “UNfair doesn’t mean UNsafe.”

“Do you know what it’s like ta live the life of a demon?” Minos asked, rhetorically.

The mob murmured.

“We work around open flames all day long with no protection,” Minos bellowed, playing to the crowd. “We may be fireproof, but our hair ain’t! I useta be a hairy guy, now look at me! Bald as a bat! All day long we inhale offensive and hazardous odors. I may be a demon from Hell, but does that mean I don’t like nice things? Why can’t we have some potpourri in da break room? Why can’t we spray down with Febreeze at da end of the day?”

“Yeah!” the demons yelled. “ Potpourri! Febreeze!”

“We deal with all the souls who come in here,” Minos ranted, really getting on a roll. “All day and all night. And they’ve all got complaints: ‘I didn’t do it,’ ‘I led a righteous life,’ ‘I was President of the United States.’ And we haveta figure out an appropriate punishment for eacha dem. And you know what? These torments haven’t been updated in centuries. They’re outta date! Did ya know that some fetishists are coming here because they wanna be buried in excrement? Andrew Johnson loves it! And what about online bullies? Where do they go? Why ain’t there a setta guidelines for these chumps? How come every time I get someone who was born after 200 AD I haveta start from scratch?”

“We want better rules and regulations!” the mob of demons shouted.

“I get a new demon, and I gotta train him from nuthin’,” Minos said. “You know how much time dat takes? Last week I hadta transfer some giants from the Ninth Circle up to the Fifth and all they wanted ta do was hit people in the head with rocks. It took me two days to gettem ta stop and no one paid me anything for my overtime. If you don’t start addressing these problems then we’re all gonna quit and we’ll see how you like that.”

“But...but if you quit, where will you go.” Nero asked, unable to contain himself.

“Heaven!” Minos shouted, and the cavern suddenly got quiet. “They already said they’d take us back.”

“They did?” Nero asked.

“Yeah, because we’re sick and tired of being treated like dis.”

Nero noticed that Satan’s face was slowly turning red.

“Sir?” Nero said. He was alarmed at how red Satan was turning. “Sir?”

“Well, GO!” Satan exploded.

“Sir!” Nero gasped.

“Ever since we restructured and moved you guys up here from the second circle you’ve done nothing but piss and moan. You didn’t like being down there with the wanton and all that dust from the infernal hurricane, so I listened and relocated you up here and now you’re complaining again. What’s it going to take to make you happy? You know what I just did? I fired Death! And now I’ve got to find a replacement. What are you doing tonight? Going home, to eat your little snack cakes and your ham? I’m going to be on a plane to Los Angeles – LOS ANGELES – to deal with this Death situation. Have you ever been to Los Angeles? It’s a giant moron carnival!”

“You really fired Death?” Minos asked in his indoors voice.

“Yes! I really fired him!”

There was a long silence. No one ever got fired in Hell. This was new.

“You’re not gonna fire us, are ya, boss?” Minos asked. “Because we were all jus’ blowin’ off some steam here.”

“Yeah,” a few demons muttered. “Blowing off steam.”

“I haven’t decided yet!”

“Well, you know me. I’ve always been a team player,” Minos said. “We’ve all been team players up here at The Gates. And, um, obviously this is, um, a very bad time for you, and so why doan you go do whatever it is you need to do and doan worry about us, because we all know you’re doing your best, Mr. Boss, and we’ll all jus’ go back ta work and talk about this later?”

“Booo! No negotiating with management,” a minor Demon shouted. Minos gave a quick nod and the dissenter was decapitated.

“Braaaap!” his neck hole blarted, as a pair of demons dragged him away.

“Come on everybody,” Minos shouted. “Back ta work. Look fierce. Balial, brandish that trident like you mean it. These souls ain’t gonna damn themselves!”

“Nicely done, sir,” Nero said as he and Satan walked away. “But I fear that if more demons find out Death has been fired and there is no replacement this unrest will spread. And you know how demons gossip.”

“I’m getting a replacement,” Satan said.

“As soon as possible, right?”

“Would you stop pressuring me? I’m on it. Book me a ticket for Los Angeles.”



Sister Mary Renfro finished adjusting the idle on the carburetor and slammed the hood of the old Chevy. She slid her screwdriver back into her tool kit, and latched its cover. She removed her work gloves, folded them in half, and tucked them into one pocket, then she picked up her tool kit and took it over to the porch and carefully put it down. Returning to the Chevy, she shook out her work mat and then folded it into precise quarters. Then she checked to make sure that each of the doors of the Chevrolet were locked. Way out here in the suburbs of Minnetonka, Minnesota there was no one to steal it, but it was the proper thing to do. When she was certain the vehicle was secure, she went into the garage.

On Saturdays, Sister Mary Renfro took an envelope recycled from the week’s junk mail and on the back of it she wrote a list of the chores that needed to be done at the monastery. She picked up today’s list and carefully drew a line through “Adjust idle on carb.” The next item was, “Check connection on DirecTV dish.” That would require the ladder. Sister Mary smiled to herself. She loved the ladder.

Sister Mary also loved chores, and she loved lists, but most of all she loved routines. At thirty-four she was already an old lady in her heart, and the only passion in her life was her passionate embrace of repetition, routine and habit. Especially now, after that terrible experience at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She had been on her way home from the wonderfully boring God is Green: Environmental Efficiency in Religious Communities Conference and suddenly, while changing planes at the airport, the world had stopped making sense. She had seen people murdered by their own carry-on items. She had seen those same people restored to life twenty minutes later. She had seen a man who was referred to as Satan (very disappointing looking, to be honest). She had seen beautiful, glowing creatures who must have been angels. She had seen a TSA Employee strip naked and attempt to copulate with a Rosetta Stone vending machine. She didn’t know how drugs worked but she suspected they worked a lot like this. The whole experience had left her shaken.

There are two types of nun. One was the type who braved hails of sniper fire to minister to the sick in the Sudan. These nuns risked their lives to smuggle human rights workers out of North Korea. They held hands with convicted serial killers as they were executed. They were God’s warriors of mercy. Mary Renfro was not that kind of nun. Mary Renfro was a hiding-from-the-world, please-don’t-bother-me kind of nun. She was in it for God, of course, but she was mostly in it for the stability. Nuns couldn’t be fired. Nuns couldn’t be laid off. When you joined the Church you were in it for life.

Sister Mary’s father had been killed in a freak cosplay accident when she was young. He had loved Star Wars but something had gone tragically awry with his reproduction light saber at a convention and suddenly he’d been engulfed in flames on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, Hall B. It was random, it was bizarre, it was unexpected and after that Mary Renfro had yearned for predictability. She had spent months asking grown ups what jobs were the safest and which careers were the most orderly. Finally, she drew up a list, reviewed it and made the only possible decision.

And so, when she was twelve years old, she had marched up to her mother and informed her that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had smiled, opened another bottle of Scotch and assumed that her daughter would forget all about it once she discovered boys or drugs or masturbation or all of the above. But twelve-year-old Mary Renfro walked to the local library (safest mode of transportation) and made a list of all the things she needed to do to become a nun and then, on her nineteen birthday, she did them. There was no college, no backpacking around Europe, no hitchhiking adventures in Northern California. Within six months of her high school graduation, Mary Renfro became a nun. Two weeks later her mother killed herself, but Sister Mary told herself that the two events were probably unrelated. Probably.

Being a nun was a good way to live. A precise way to live. And after the horrors of the airport, Sister Mary embraced her familiar routines like a drowning swimmer grabbing a life preserver. Every boring chore, every mundane task, every tiny ritual was a wall that she was building to protect herself from the chaos she had seen on Concourse C. But no matter how strong her wall was, there was still The Other Problem. The one that nagged at her. The one that whispered to her from the back of her mind, telling her that maybe it was already Too Late. The one that filled her every quiet moment – the one that ate at her before she fell asleep, while she sat on the toilet, while she untangled extension cords. The one that suggested she might be beyond salvation.

Sister Mary fetched the ladder from the garage and leaned it against the roof. She shook it once to make sure it was secure and then she climbed up and stepped onto the shingles. Carefully, she made her way to the short brick chimney where the DirecTV dish was attached and began looking for the problem. And there it was. Three of the brackets securing the coaxial cable had been torn out and downward pressure had caused the connector to become unseated in its receptacle.

Sister Mary did not like television, but St. Clare was the patron saint of television and she was a Poor Clare and so it made sense that they had a set. And recently they had been compelled to purchase a complete DirecTV package after Sister Helen lost the use of her legs. While laid up in bed, barely able to move, Sister Helen had grown quite addicted to the wide variety of channels and new movie selections on DirecTV and now she felt that she could never return to basic cable. Sister Mary tried to find tolerance in her heart for Sister Helen’s dependency and, as usual, after a reflective moment, she did. She re-seated the cable and then tidily installed four new brackets.

Chores completed, a day of quiet contemplation and private prayer stretched ahead of Sister Mary. Previously, she had spent her time ministering to the sick and needy until about a year ago when Sister Barbara and Sister Helen came to her and pointed out that there were fewer and fewer sick and needy people all the time in this part of Minnesota and thus they needed less and less ministering. That made sense and so Sister Mary had devoted herself to doing odd jobs around their monastery, a split-level ranch-style home located way out in one of the remote subdivisions surrounding Minnetonka. In the past year, the single-story, four-bedroom house had become the first Northwestern monastery to receive LEED certification and be designated 100% “green.” It had also received th. “Teeny Tiny Carbon Footprint” Award, the “Low Impact I Heart Trees and Badgers” Certificate and the “Stewardship of the Earth” Medal. All of these awards were actually very easy to win since the monastery only housed three nuns. The population of the order of the Poor Clares of Minnesota had declined dramatically in the past decade and these days only Sister Mary, Sister Helen and Sister Barbara were left. And the way Sister Helen’s health was going, soon it would just be Sister Mary and Sister Barbara.

“Sister Mary,” Sister Barbara called up from the front yard. “May I speak with you?”

Sister Mary descended the ladder.

“Good morning, sister,” she said.

“Have you been praying for Sister Helen again?” Sister Barbara asked.

“Why, sister?”

“Because she’s gotten worse.”

“Then I must remember her in my prayers today.”

“Stop praying for Sister Helen,” Sister Barbara hissed, dropped all pretense of civility. “You’re killing her.”

“That is not true,” Sister Mary said.

“Listen, sister,” Sister Barbara said. “You prayed for Father Malony and he passed.”

“Father Malony had just had a triple bypass.”

“You prayed for my mother and she passed.”

“She was eighty-six years old and protesting the use of land mines in Cambodia. It was hardly an unexpected accident.”

“You prayed for Sister Pat and Sister Colleen and they both passed.”

“They died in a car accident.”

“They were having lunch at Wendy’s and a car drove through the front window.”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

“What about when you worked at Shadow Grove? Was that an accident, too?”

Sister Mary couldn’t speak. She’d heard what had been whispered about her during those dreadful six months at Shadow Grove Retirement Village. The orderlies had renamed it “Shallow Grave” after thirteen of the fifteen residents passed away during the brief time she spent doing prayer visitations there. If there had been a local paper it would have had a field day reporting o. “The Nun with the Death Touch Prayers.” As it was, Big Bob’s Pre-Owned Vehicles had run a full-page ad in the local PennySaver demanding the removal of Sister Mary from Shadow Grove. Big Bob’s mother, Little Tina, lived in Shadow Grove and he didn’t want his mama to die at the hands of the poisoned nun.

It was after Big Bob’s ad, but before Little Tina passed away from a rare tropical lung fungus, that Sister Helen and Sister Barbara had staged their intervention. Sister Mary had taken the news of her prayer ban stoically, and to their faces she had agreed that what they were saying made sense. But after they had left she curled up on her quilt and cried for hours. Sister Mary had never believed that people could be so cruel, especially other Poor Clares, but here she was, judged a killer by her own order, and all she had done was pray for others as Poor Clares were ordered to do by God. After that, she lost herself in an endless list of odd jobs and chores around the monastery, making repairs, earning environmental accolades and spending her time in quiet contemplation. But she had secretly felt like she was walking around with a scarlet PN (fo. “Poisoned Nun”) hanging around her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she said, bludgeoned into submission by the mere mention of Shadow Grove.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sister Barbara said. “Just stop praying for Sister Helen.”

“Yes, sister,” Sister Mary said. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t enjoy the rest of her morning.

“I have been on the telephone with Sister Susan. She met you at one of your construction conferences. You are going to go to Minneapolis to meet with her.”

“I don’t want to go to Minneapolis.”

“Remember your oath of obedience. You are called to Minneapolis, and you will go. Pack your bags, because after today you’re going to be their problem, not ours.”

“I’m being expelled?”

“That’s up to them. Did you repair the garage door?”

“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Mary said suddenly, and she started for the front porch. Sister Barbara blocked her way.

“You still have chores to finish before you leave,” Sister Barbara said. “The garage door keeps sticking and the mailbox needs a new door.”

“I have to talk to Sister Helen,” Sister Mary said again.

“You have to finish your chores and go to Minneapolis.”

“But I’m pregnant,” Sister Mary said, and she pushed past the stunned Sister Barbara, and ran into the house.