HELL'S JANITOR

“Clean-up in the waiting room!” a crisp voice barked over the loudspeaker.

For God’s sake. I’d been on break for less than ten minutes. Huddled behind the back door trying to avoid the wind so I could light a cigarette. I briefly considered retribution. The jerks didn’t know the federal wage regulations like I did.

On the other hand, those laws existed on earth, in a place called the United States. Not that they paid much attention either. After twenty years, I still forgot I was in Hell. Sometimes there didn’t seem to be much difference between the two places.

Sighing, I stubbed out my cigarette on the brick wall. I’d just managed to light the damn thing, too. It figured. I was a hapless sort while alive, so why should the underworld be any different?

“Convict 4694! Get in here right away!” The voice sounded even more officious.

I hated being referred to as a convict, but there was no getting around the reality of it. At least I had a possibility of parole, the chance to earn a desk job in a room with a fan. But my review was at least 100 years away.

Meanwhile, I did a lot of mopping. It seemed like someone was always upchucking or spilling coffee in the waiting room. Nice of Hell’s minions to offer free coffee to the newly deceased, even if it was 7-11 swill with packaged creamer. The bitter combo was rough on your intestines if you were lactose intolerant. But, hey—you’re in Hell, so what did you expect?

I marched into the waiting room, and my manager grimaced. He’d been a petty supervisor when he was alive and was even worse now that he was a corpse. The guy had been born with a haughty but insipid expression, and he’d died with it, too. Then he carried it beyond the grave. Most of his ilk did.

“What do you need me to do, Henry?” I asked in a tone of feigned eagerness.

Without a word, he pointed at the filthy linoleum floor. I allowed my eyes to travel downward towards the mess, steeling myself for a worst-case scenario. Hell had attracted a lot of pukers lately. I hoped it would only be coffee this time.

The surface of the floor appeared completely barren, except for its usual coating of grime. Ingrained dirt had been there for so long that management long since stopped expecting its eradication. Otherwise, nothing was amiss.

“What are you looking at?” Henry barked. “I don’t pay you to stand around.” Henry was parroting verbiage he’d used when he was alive. The poor sap often forgot he was in Hell, where all work existed on a mandatory, but unpaid basis. He just liked to think of himself as a person who could withhold disbursement if unsatisfied.

I tilted my head and squinted. “Where is it?” My voice sounded timid and distant.

My manager’s face contorted. Then his eyes became huge, like he couldn’t believe my idiocy. “Don’t play stupid with me, 4694. I haven’t got time for this crap.”

Of course, the two of us had all the time in the world, because we were in Hell. Now wasn’t the time to point that out, however. I’d been flippant with Henry only once before, and that irreverence earned me thirty days in solitary. I might have enjoyed my time alone, except the temperature in my windowless enclosure was hotter than Hell.

If I wanted to avoid a similar fate, I needed to think fast. “Can you please point it out to me? I’m having a little trouble with my eyes today.”

For the first time that morning, I took note of the new arrivals. The crowd looked particularly tough. A group of teenagers crowded the plastic chairs, lounging insolently with their legs in the aisle. In the center sat a middle-aged woman, clutching her purse. At the far end, an angry old man in a ripped tee-shirt sported a three-day-beard growth. Or perhaps a six-month growth. It was hard to tell with the dead.

The elderly man opened his mouth first. “It’s right there, all over the floor. Can’t you see it? We’ve had to look at that mess for hours.”

Despite the heat, a cold sweat trickled down my forehead and splashed onto my nose. “Um—why didn’t you call me sooner?”

The whole setup seemed improbable. I had only been on my break for seven minutes, tops. Before that, I was stuck in Hell’s cavernous hallway, scrubbing its soot-covered walls with Lysol. The waiting room was right next door, and I could hear everything that went on in there.

The line of teenagers guffawed. “He must be blind,” a young man said. He was short and pasty-faced, with blackheads on his nose. God knows what he’d done to land himself in Hell. “I don’t think he can smell, either.”

The middle-aged woman wheeled around in her seat and glared at the speaker. “Look, I’m a jerk, or I wouldn’t be here,” she snapped. “But you ought to be ashamed of yourself, making fun of a guy who is working his ass off to keep this place clean.”

She turned to me. “I was a compulsive liar when I was alive, so I wasn’t going to admit that I dropped a bottle of perfume. But I’m in Hell now, so I might as well tell the truth.” She gestured towards the floor. “Sorry, there’s a lot of broken glass.”

I squinted hard at the linoleum but could see nothing. I did, however, detect a faint floral scent. It smelled as though someone had sprayed the room with a chemical-laden air freshener, but, afterwards, most of the odor had dissipated.

The elderly man claimed he’d been staring at the mess for hours, so that part made sense. Still, it didn’t jibe with the fact that I’d been within a few feet of the room only fifteen minutes beforehand.

Dazed, I stepped into the center of the floor—purposefully, as if I knew what I needed to do. I grasped the mop in both hands for a moment. Then I began to swipe it back and forth, using deft, practiced strokes. I’d cleaned that surface for twenty years already. There was no reason to be afraid of it.

As the mop swirled across the linoleum, everything began to spin. The room rotated like a carousel, with increasing speed, as though someone had flipped a switch and turned on the walls. I gaped in amazement as the teenagers, old man, and middle-aged woman whizzed past in a blurry arc, reappeared, and vanished again.

Despite the lightning-fast gyrations, I didn’t feel dizzy. I was the one solid, immovable object in the room. If I kept my feet planted, I wouldn’t fall over. I spread my legs wider and gripped the mop with both sweaty hands. Amazingly, my body remained upright with little difficulty.

At least no one would expect me to clean the goddamned floor anymore. They were too busy trying not to fall off their chairs. I dropped the accursed mop with a thud. It skittered across the floor, spun in a circle, and finally came to rest against one of the teenager’s legs. The same guy who had taunted me only a few minutes earlier.

“Ugh!” he yelled in disgust.

I sneered. “Taste the lash of my whip, you little creep. It’s your turn now. Better get used to it.”

Once the words were out of my mouth, my body began to elevate. I floated towards the ceiling as if I had been filled with helium. As I rose, the room slowed its rotation. I gazed down at the bodies in the waiting room. Every face wore an expression of shock. Their tilted heads appeared comical, eyes wide, mouths agape. One of the teenagers extended a grubby hand in my direction.

In the center stood my manager. Henry’s bewildered expression turned to fury when he saw that I had drifted out of reach. “You come back here right now!” His usually authoritative voice sounded thin and hollow, like he was yelling through a tube.

I lifted my arms towards the ceiling. Perhaps I could flatten myself against its surface, like a giant fly. Then maybe I could crawl into a far corner, where Henry couldn’t reach me.

Despite my predicament, I felt an odd sense of peace. After the two decades I’d endured as Hell’s janitor, I welcomed any change of pace. An involuntary laugh escaped from my throat. The crowd just looked so silly down there on the floor, trying its utmost to get me to re-join them. And Henry was the stupidest of all, waving his fist to defy gravity.

The ceiling appeared porous. Instead of cement, its material was light, diaphanous. In fact, if I extended a forefinger, I could part it like a curtain.

I touched the cloth with one hand, and it gave way instantly. Like an escaping balloon, my body floated out of the room and away from Hell. The ceiling closed again, and the waiting room faded from view.

I marveled at my sudden weightlessness, the ease of my passage through space. Someone had just granted me a get-out-of-Hell-free card. But who? It was best not to ask too many questions.

The sky opened wider, and I drifted into a series of clouds. One followed another, with increasing density, until I could no longer see. I began to feel anxious. When would my journey end? Would I be stuck in the clouds for eternity? What if it started to rain?

Just as I began to panic, the clouds parted. To my astonishment, I was only a few feet from solid ground. The surrounding landscape looked somehow familiar. A dense grove of palm trees extended in three directions. Gleaming waves stretched towards the far horizon.

I lowered my legs and descended towards the earth. My feet thudded against damp sand, and I gasped involuntarily. How could I possibly have landed on a beach? I hadn’t seen one in twenty years, ever since I drowned one afternoon in a riptide.

When alive, I was a strong, confident swimmer. It was the only thing I could do without effort. But one terrible afternoon, I encountered an undertow. Gravity pulled me under, and I lost consciousness. My final memory before my arrival in Hell. The next thing I saw was Henry’s face.

I didn’t believe in second chances, but someone—or something—had offered me one anyway. Not just a second chance, but a hammock. The same hammock I’d enjoyed before I decided to take that ill-fated swim. It waited for me in the sand, as if I’d only gone for a brief dip and then returned, unscathed, for a rest.

I sniffed the air and caught a faint whiff of orchids. They smelled like the spilled perfume in Hell’s waiting room. In this setting, however, the scent seemed pleasant. I glanced around, trying to determine its source.

A tall pot of flowers rested beside my hammock. The blossoms looked fresh, like they had just been picked. On a nearby table stood a glass of lemonade. I’d ordered a beverage before my swim, but never had the chance to drink it.

Until now. I raised the container to my lips and took a sip. It was still cold. My hammock swayed gently in the afternoon breeze. I wondered, for a moment, how I’d gotten so lucky. Perhaps it was because I hadn’t stuck around to clean up after the middle-aged woman. I couldn’t even see her mess, despite all my efforts. Anyway, it was somebody else’s problem now. I’d done my time in Hell.

In the meantime, I intended to lie in the sun and take a nap. I had a lot of catching up to do.

by Leah Mueller

Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Bisbee, Arizona. Her most recent books, "Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices" (Czykmate Press), "Death and Heartbreak" (Weasel Press), and "Cocktails at Denny's" (Alien Buddha) were released in 2019. Leah’s work appears in Midway Journal, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Miracle Monocle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. Her essay "Firebrand, The Radical Life and Times of Annie Besant" appears in the book, "Fierce, Essays By and About Dauntless Women" which placed first in the non-fiction division of the 2019 Publisher's Weekly Booklife contest. Check out her website at www.leahmueller.org