"How much?" he
asked at last.
"Two cents" came the reply.
"Two cents? Are you
kidding me? It's gotta be worth much more than that. C'mon!" he bellowed,
indignantly.
"That's the going rate for a soul these days" Nick said,
dismissively. "You think you'll get more upstairs? He pays nothing... figures
they all belong to Him anyway."
"But two cents, man. That ain't worth
spit." He began to wonder if he'd made a mistake getting involved in this
deal.
"Take it or leave it" came the reply. "Now, I'm busy... either sign
or stop wasting my time. There's plenty more fish in the sea you know." He stood
up as if to leave, fully aware of the effect it would have. He'd done it too
many times before.
Lee panicked. This might be the only chance he'd ever
get... the only chance for getting his name in lights short of changing his name
to 'Exit'. The only chance of attracting women (men, even... he'd always wanted to
try), the high-life he'd always craved, back from he was a little boy that
nobody liked because he stank of pee and looked at other boys' 'bits' in the
toilet. His one and only chance of escaping the obscurity which defined his
life, slaving away in his little basement room night after night, in that
drug-induced haze which freed him from his inhibitions and allowed his
imagination free-rein. A twisted, sick and perverted imagination, true, but it
was his ticket out. Or so he thought.
He seized the paper in front of
him greedily, and scrawled his signature in the space provided.
"We're
done" said Nick, as he headed for the door. "I'll be in touch."
His
laughter as he ascended the stairs from the little basement apartment stayed
with Lee for the rest of his days. It haunted his dreams and allowed him no peace
for the remainder of his empty, miserable, wasted life.
And short, too.
And short, too.
The Devil punishing sinners makes no sense when you think about it. Surely it would be logical for Satan to reward sin - rather than being a pit of eternal torment and damnation, hell should be a paradise of vice which would encourage human beings to live thoroughly despicable lives knowing they'd be rewarded in hell forevermore.
ReplyDeleteWell, if the Devil DID punish sin, CJ, it WOULD make a sort of sense. You see, the Devil is the Prince of lies, and his promises are all false. Therefore, he tricks you into selling your soul for the thing you most desire, only for you to find that very thing is ultimately the cause of great unhappiness and, eventually, your downfall. As for Heaven and Hell though, it's our own choices which decide which one we end up in, so if we end up in Hell then we've punished ourselves. If you believe in those particular concepts of Heaven and Hell that is. Outside Jerusalem was a place called Gehenna where the dead were cremated, and quite literally it was a lake of burning fire. When the Biblical writers were trying to describe Hell, they used imagery with which their readers would have been familiar in order to impart an idea of just how awful Hell would be. It was figurative language in other words. So scholars believe anyway.
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