hell
JOE AGUILAR
Grandma was right, I went to hell for all the bad things I did. Hell is much like life before except my nose is constantly bleeding. I wake up with a bleeding nose, eat a waffle while my nose is bleeding, and drink a cup of coffee, trying not to drip any blood in the liquid. I go out for a run with a scarf tied tight around my face. I spend the afternoon struggling to milk a dry old cow that has human blood in its udder. Mosquitos stab my neck. Right before sleep, I drink a tall glass of human blood to fill my body back up for the next day. It’s not a pleasant existence, but it could be worse. I could be burning in a lake of fire. I could still be living with Grandma.
Grandma was right, I went to hell for all the bad things I did. Hell is much like life before except my nose is constantly bleeding. I wake up with a bleeding nose, eat a waffle while my nose is bleeding, and drink a cup of coffee, trying not to drip any blood in the liquid. I go out for a run with a scarf tied tight around my face. I spend the afternoon struggling to milk a dry old cow that has human blood in its udder. Mosquitos stab my neck. Right before sleep, I drink a tall glass of human blood to fill my body back up for the next day. It’s not a pleasant existence, but it could be worse. I could be burning in a lake of fire. I could still be living with Grandma.
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JOE AGUILAR' s fiction is in Conjunctions, Sleepingfish, and Threepenny Review. He co-edits WPI’s new literary magazine hex (https://hexliterary.com).
/// What it means to be Kaleidoscoped: To break open gorgeously. /// Childhood churchgoing gave me a deep fear of hell, which here I’ve combined with the terrible nosebleeds I used to get as a side effect of Accutane I took as a teenager. Both early traumas—of body and mind—haunt this story. I would also like to clarify that the grandmother in this short is fictional: I adore my real-life grandmother, who has brought me nothing but comfort and joy (love you Grandma Julie!). |