by Mary Elizabeth Raines, © 2023
After she took what would be her last breath, she decided to stop breathing. There was a great satisfaction in that—in choosing to end those final frantic gasps for air that really weren’t working. Yes, a little bit of a physical struggle followed, the cells of her body protesting, but it wasn’t that bad. And then she died.
It had been, she concluded, a fine life.
What happened next was not what she expected.
She found herself alone, facing a high wall made of dull and slightly mildewed concrete blocks—and they weren’t the pleasantly morose, romantic sorts of blocks like those you’d find in a Louisiana cemetery. Instead, they were completely boring. No matter in which direction she turned, all that stood before her was the wall. Other than that, she couldn’t make out where she was because a thick gray fog surrounded her—and once again, it was fog without drama. It wasn’t mystical, like the London fog in a Sherlock Holmes story, nor was it the kind of soupy-salty oceanic fog that makes you want to snuggle up in a comforter, sip something warm from a mug, and open up a good book. This fog was so boring and bland that it didn’t even drip with despair. It had no personality whatsoever.
Wherever she was, it was horribly noisy, too. There was an irritatingly loud and irregular background sound that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was a little bit like the start-and-stop noise of her neighbor using his weed whacker for hours on end that used to drive her crazy.
She felt itchy and uncomfortably hot. This further annoyed her, but oddly, when she checked to see if she still had a body, it didn’t seem to be there. Despite this, her senses were intact and she was keenly aware of her surroundings. Since these surroundings were unpleasant, this was not necessarily a plus.
When she was alive, she had watched a lot of people describe their near-death experiences on YouTube, and because of what they’d shared, she had been expecting that she would feel a huge relief after the ordeal of dying. Released from the bondage of their earthly bodies, many near-death experiencers related that they felt a sense of freedom. And peace. And boundless love. Exhilaration, even! These were the promised goodies. But what she was experiencing was not even close to that. Instead, she just felt depressed, and even that wasn’t the sentimentally syrupy self-indulgent kind of misery that can be weirdly comforting. No, hers was simply a dull, nauseating hopelessness.
She wondered what she could do. It then came to her that in one of those near-death encounters she’d listened to, they said that if you were in trouble in the afterlife all you needed to do was to ask for help. She decided to give it a try.
“Help,” she said. She waited a few seconds. “Help. Anyone there?”
Even though she was only giving lip service to this request and not asking with any particular commitment, to her amazement she suddenly felt a wise presence standing next to her. There was no blaze of light, and certainly no rustle of angel wings, but there was…someone. She couldn’t see this being, but it felt kind of male.
They began to converse, and this was the only aspect of her experience thus far that resembled what she’d learned from the near-death YouTubes, for neither she nor the presence actually spoke out loud. Instead, they could sense one another’s thoughts telepathically.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Just think of me as a guide,” he responded. “Why did you ask for help?”
“I don’t know where I am. I’m confused,” she said.
“Goes with the turf,” he sighed.
“The turf? What do you mean? Where am I?”
There was a pause. “I can’t put this any other way, and I only speak truth, so I’ll have to be blunt. You, my Precious One, are in hell. You died. This is your own personal corner of hell.”
If she’d had an actual voice, she would have been shrieking. She couldn’t have been more astounded than if she’d been hit by a bolt of lightening. “Hell? This is hell? I’m in hell? You’re saying I died and I went to hell!?”
“Yes. That about sums it up.”
“But…but…hell?” she sputtered. “How could that be? I don’t even believe in hell!”
While there was no thought-form response, it seemed to her as though the guide was shrugging.
“It’s not fair,” she continued with a great deal of vehemence. “I was a good person and I lived a good life.”
“You did?”
Pondering this, she realized with a measure of embarrassment that she had never done anything particularly heroic, nor had she committed any spectacularly notable deeds. On the other hand, she had never done anything especially evil either. She should not be in hell.
She proceeded to let this guide know that. “Yes. A good life,” she said. “Well, pretty good, anyway. Like how I always voted for the nice candidates, you know, not the mean, greedy, corrupt ones. That was good of me, right? Oh, and how about this? You know that time I took care of my neighbor’s cats when she went on vacation? I didn’t snoop around her house, not once.” As an afterthought she added, “And I was always honest.”
The guide didn’t say anything, but she sensed him challenging this.
“And I visited my grandmother every week in the nursing home,” she continued defensively.
He spoke up about this one. “Really? You visited her every week?”
“So, okay, almost every week,” she said with a little chagrin.
“Almost every week?”
“Well, I mean I tried to visit almost every week. At least I thought about visiting. But give me a break. It was smelly in there.”
“You didn’t like the smell?”
“Good grief, no!” The nursing home had smelled dismal. The overly warm air in the U-shaped building stank of a distinctly unpleasant combination of long-lingering scents dominated by the strong stink of stale urine. As she remembered that unseemly fragrance, suddenly the air around her changed. It began to smell exactly like the nursing home.
“Who did that?” she said to the guide suspiciously, wrinkling her non-existent nose. “Did you do that?”
“Not me so much as you. Everyone’s hell is unique. It takes a while to get the mix of misery just right. Your memory spiced it up a little bit, that’s all.”
“I need to sit down,” she said.
“How are you going to do that without a body?”
“Now you’re being rude. I called for help. You’re not being at all helpful.”
“On the contrary,” he replied. “Demons are rude. I’m not a demon. I’m a guide. I have no choice but to speak the truth, so I am simply being realistic.” He gave her a moment to take that in. “You called for help, and I am here to help. Go ahead, please. Ask me whatever you want.”
She stopped to think for a moment, remembering several stories of people who had been granted wishes, but who totally screwed up their chances by asking the wrong question or by being misunderstood.
Reading her mind, he said, “I’m not a genie in a lamp, and I don’t grant wishes. You won’t mess this up by asking for the wrong thing or by me mishearing you." With a chuckle he added, “No matter what you say, you’re not going to get a ten-inch pianist.” (He was referring to an old dirty joke that used to be told on Earth about a guy whose wish was heard incorrectly by a genie. Think about it.) “So feel free. Ask away.”
She retorted with some vehemence, “Isn’t my question obvious? Why am I in hell?! I do not understand why I am in hell. It’s not fair. Like I said, I was a good person! I really was!”
“You’re ranting now,” he said, interrupting her. “I realize that you’re hoping to change your status by pleading your case with me, but it doesn’t work like that. I can’t wave a magic wand and zap you out of hell. What I can do is tell you the truth and help you troubleshoot.”
“I’m ranting because being here doesn’t make sense,” she cried out with frustration. “I already told you: I was a Very Good Person!”
“So you said. Let me try to explain. Yes, we will acknowledge that you were mildly good in your own way, although certainly not to the degree that you think you were. Even so, what put you in hell—what you did wrong—had little to do with neglecting your grandmother so much. Or, speaking of honesty, of that time you cheated on your taxes. Because, FYI, we know all about how you wrote off that trip to the Carolinas as a business expense, when it was, in fact, purely a vacation.”
She squirmed, or would have if she could have, and then said, “But if those things aren’t the reason I’m in hell, then why are you even bothering to tell me?”
“I’m pointing out some elements of your life that could stand improvement and that may have escaped your attention.”
“Let’s try this again: why am I in hell?”
“All right, then. Straight to the point. It’s because of that invention of yours.”
“Invention? What invention?”
“The fruit and vegetable stickers you invented. You were the very first one who came up with the idea of making those little adhesive labels with bar codes on them and fastening them onto every piece of fruit and every single vegetable sold in grocery stores.”
She was aghast. “And that’s why I’m in hell?”
“Yes.”
“That is so unfair! You’re right; I thought it up, but did I ever profit from it? No! Not one dime! They stole it from me. I never even got credit for coming up with the idea!”
“Nonetheless, it was your idea. You were the first to think of it.”
“And you’re saying that’s the reason I’m in hell?”
“Yes.”
“How could that be? This is screwy. I don’t understand,” she cried.
“It seems that you have no clue as to how much unhappiness your invention caused.”
“What unhappiness? It was a great idea,” she protested. “Everyone said so! The bar codes let people know if their produce was organic or conventionally grown! It showed country of origin! And it saved so much time for the cashiers at grocery stores! All they had to do was to scan the produce and the price would pop right up on their cash registers. They didn’t have to bother with memorizing stuff any longer. Those stickers were a wonderful thing!”
She still couldn’t see the guide, but she got the impression that he was shaking his head sadly.
“Sorry, but you didn’t help at all. Quite the opposite. You see, your invention took away something quite valuable from those clerks.”
“You’re kidding! What?”
“Back in the old days, grocery store cashiers had to memorize not only every kind of fruit and vegetable the store sold, but also their prices. They took great pride in those skills.”
“I still don’t understand. What did I personally do that was so awful?”
“You took it all away with those labels. You dumbed down the entire job. Instead of the rich stimulation cashiers used to get, their brains turned into robotic puddles. Nowadays all they are required to do is to scan mindlessly. And worse, self-service machines are increasingly taking away their jobs. It’s all because of you. You see, in the early days before your invention we considered being a grocery store cashier a high calling indeed. You had to have a great memory, and you needed to be both fast and courteous. In fact, many celestial beings who reincarnated to be of service to humanity chose that as a career path. We have quite a lot of grocery store cashiers on the Other Side.”
He indicated the Other Side of the wall. She got a quick glimpse of a ray of indescribably beautiful luminous light, accompanied by the enticing smells of strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate. It created an immense yearning within her, but the vision disappeared as quickly as as it came.
“That’s heaven over there?” she said. “Just over the wall? Smelling like strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate?”
“Yup,” said the guide.
“Heaven smells like strawberries, lilacs, and chocolate?”
“Yours does.”
She mused on this for a moment, and then pulled herself back as the nursing-home scent began to take over again. “And hell smells like nursing-home pee?”
“Yours does.”
“But it isn’t fair! How could I have possibly known that inventing the stickers to put on fruit and vegetables would be bad for the grocery-store cashiers?”
The guide sighed. “It’s not just that. Let me give you a Life Review to show you more of the trouble that your invention generated.”
[Note: When people die, they are given a Life Review where they are shown the impacts that their lives have had on other people, both the good and the bad. And they don’t just see the results. They feel it all, too.]
She was suddenly slammed with many thousands of little scenes, kind of like videos, which featured people of all ages, sizes, races, religions, IQs, and personality types. These people had one thing in common. At some point in their lives, each one of them had been miserably tormented by the bar-code stickers on produce.
The most common scenes were of hosts and hostesses trying to arrange beautiful bowls of fruit who wound up foiled and frustrated by the ugly stickers that were too firmly attached to their fruit to remove. Her soul picked up each ounce of frustration that they felt.
In another example, one which made her cringe with disappointment, she observed an impoverished old lady on a fixed income who had decided to indulge herself by spending her last dollars on an expensive, blushing pear that would be ripe in about four days...except that when the woman pulled off the sticker, she also pulled off a big chunk of skin and pear flesh, guaranteeing that the pear would begin to brown and rot before it had the chance to grow ripe.
She experienced the profound embarrassment of a fifteen-year-old boy in his school cafeteria who was having lunch with a girl he was trying to impress. He suddenly realized that, along with the apple he’d bit into, he was chewing on the little label. His face turned red. The girl began to mock him.
Over and over she experienced firsthand the distress and frustration and annoyance of the thousands upon thousands of people who had ruined everything from tomatoes to nectarines by pulling off the stickers, or who had found little bar codes floating in their soup, or who'd discovered stickers stuck on their shoes, or who had felt sickened after seeing the awful little labels leering up at them from their otherwise organic compost bins. On and on it went.
There were many such scenes, each one centering around the labels she had invented, and each one negative. Granted, the bad feelings were pretty mild and faded away quickly, but because of the sheer numbers of incidents, the resultant unhappinesses had coalesced into a big huge mess, kind of like an enormous ball of twine, but uglier. And stickier. A sticky sticker mess. And she was to blame.
“Okay, I get it. People were frustrated,” she said. “But it’s not like I built condos that collapsed, or bribed senators, or shot anybody, or polluted the water. No one ever got sick or died from my invention. It’s unfair that I was sent to hell for it.”
“Nobody got sick that you know of,” chided the guide. “Most of those labels are made of micro-plastics. Eating a piece of plastic wrap probably won’t kill you immediately either, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. As for your being sent to hell, you have to realize that it’s in large part because an enormous number of people have cursed you, and continue to do so. Every single one of our thoughts are actually prayers, you see, even the ones that we haven’t designated as such. More folks than you would ever want to know have grumbled that they wish there would be a corner in hell reserved for whomever invented these stickers. That’s you. This is your corner.”
She whimpered.
“And yes, while the unhappiness you created was admittedly low level, there have been and continue to be so many negative experiences that the sheer numbers have created an enormous collective cry of anguish. As a matter of fact, other than a few big shots who have profited from them, we couldn’t find a record of a single individual who has ever expressed pleasure or gratitude for these labels you invented.”
“But I honestly thought I was helping! My intent was noble! That’s got to count for something! Up until I got the idea for the stickers, cashiers had been mis-pricing produce. A lot of money was lost.”
The guide seemed to shake his head. “As I said. The bottom line is that your invention served only to help a handful of rich people get richer, with the sad byproducts of diminishing the roles of cashiers, and generating enormous frustration within the general public. This is not something that gets a gold star from You-Know-Who.”
She frowned. She was feeling more miserable by the moment. To make things worse, the weed-whacking sound was now mixed with an overlay of loud, vibrating thumps, not unlike the thuds that used to drive her crazy that emanated from the subwoofers in the cars of teenagers who used to drive through her neighborhood. She winced.
“So I’m stuck here in misery for eternity? Is there any way out?”
“I was hoping you would ask that! You know, I’m not allowed to volunteer information. I have to wait until you ask for help,” said the guide benignly.
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently.
“And you might want to take a long, hard look at your impatience, by the way” he scolded. “That’s not helping your case.”
She sank dejectedly.
“But in answer to your question: it’s not easy, but there’s always a way out,” he said, softening.
For the first time, she felt a glimmer of hope. It was accompanied by an uplifting sound like someone playing a glissando on a xylophone.
“You guys are good with the sound effects,” she said.
“Thank you. I thought it would be a nice touch,” replied the guide. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that he was beaming a little bit at the compliment.
Just then she got a swift, blurry glimpse of other nearby corners of hell similar to hers with tormented people trapped in them. The sight went away as swiftly as it had come.
“Sorry,” said the guide. “The glissando slid open a bit of a window there. My mistake.”
“So it’s not just me? There are others here who’ve been put in their own private corner of hell?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied.
“Does everybody who is sent to hell get a corner?”
“No, not at all. They’re reserved especially for those who’ve had thousands upon thousands of people specifically wishing that they would be sent to a special corner in hell. As happened with you.”
“What evil did those people do–the ones I just now saw?”
“They’re the ones who kept making the seats on airplanes smaller and smaller.”
She shuddered for a moment. Then she said, “So how do I get out of here?”
“The best way would be to have those whom you have wronged forgive you.”
“But my life review showed that there were thousands of people who were irritated or frustrated by my invention.”
“Yes, more than a million actually,” he said. “And continuing.”
“Do they all need to forgive me for inventing the stickers before I can get out of here?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any chance of that happening?”
“Not a chance in hell–so to speak.” The guide chuckled at that little play on words, and then grew serious. “If it were to occur at all, it would take millennia.”
She slumped.
“You see, mankind would have to evolve to an unheard-of level of goodness before people could even understand, much less embrace, the concept of forgiveness,” he said. “And when they reach that level, they’ll be busy forgiving the obvious crimes done to them: the things like murders and infidelity and robberies. After millennia, I doubt if anyone, even the grocery-store clerks who’ve lost their jobs, will remember their irritation with fruit and vegetable bar-code labels long enough to forgive you.”
“So if I have to rely upon forgiveness, I’m pretty much doomed to stay here in hell forever?” she said.
“Yes, I’m sorry to say. That’s the picture.”
She suddenly understood the Biblical descriptions of hell as being a place where people gnash their teeth. If she still had teeth, she would be gnashing them.
“Please, is there any other way out of this place?” she begged.
“There is,” he said. “Provided you ask for help.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” she snapped.
He shook his head. “There’s that impatience I was talking about.”
She winced. “Sorry. But what else would you suggest?”
He did the spiritual equivalent of taking in a long breath. “Your best bet would be to return to earth. To be reborn.”
“Are you kidding me? Return?” she said with surprise. “That’s reincarnation. I don’t believe in reincarnation.”
“You didn’t believe in hell, either.”
“So you’re saying that reincarnation is true, then?”
“Let’s just say that it’s complicated, and it’s not quite what people think,” he said. “Nevertheless, apart from forgiveness, being reborn looks like it’s going to be your best opportunity to escape.”
“Well, if it’s a choice between standing here for eternity smelling stale pee and staring at this concrete wall, okay, I definitely choose being reincarnated,” she said.
“Hold on. Not that simple. If you want to escape being sent back here again, in your next life you will be required to balance out all the negativity that you created.”
“How can I do that?”
He thought for a moment. “Here’s one plan: we could send you back as an infant who chokes to death on sticker. That might pay off the karma.”
“That’s horrible! And how could that even happen, to choke to death on a tiny little label?”
“It would take some doing,” he agreed. “Maybe we should choose something else to balance out the evil you’ve created.
“Are any other options?”
He thought for a moment. “Possibly. But only if you are willing to go back and in some way make up for the suffering that you have caused. It would have to be your sole life’s mission.”
“If I agree to be reborn, will I remember this conversation and what my mission is supposed to be?”
He shook his head. Or its auric equivalent. “No.”
“Then how would I even know what it is that I am supposed to do? Would you program me ahead of time?"
“No. If I instilled in you the knowledge of precisely how to find redemption, the game would be up. You’re going to have to figure this one out for yourself.”
“I’m confused. How can I make up for the harm you say I caused if I can’t even remember what my life’s mission is?”
“Easy-peasy. Here’s the way it works: with your permission, we would send you lots and lots of life experiences to point you in the right direction and give you the chance to balance out your karma. All humans have free will, of course, so we can’t guarantee that you will accept your life mission, but it should wind up being pretty obvious.”
“Sounds like an impossibly long shot,” she said.
“Oh, don’t worry. You would get plenty of nudges.”
“You think that I should go back, then?”
“Yes, that’s my recommendation.” A new thought hit him and he brightened. “And if you agree, we could even arrange it so that you go back as a crazy person! Crazy people can effect enormous change. In fact, most of the big shifts that have happened to humanity have occurred as the result of a crazy person.”
“I guess I could do crazy,” she said dubiously. “It sounds better than being a baby who chokes to death.”
“In that case, and again with your permission, we will program you to have lots and lots of miserable experiences with the stickers on produce. That’s how karma works. You’ll ruin countless pears. You’ll be embarrassed in school lunchrooms. You’ll be unable to decorate with bowls of fruit. You will suffer enormous sticker karma.”
She sighed. “I can’t stand looking at this wall one more moment. Bring it on.”
People snickered about the crazy lady who marched back and forth all day long in front of Safeway carrying a picket sign and loudly protesting the little bar-code labels that were still being pasted onto fruit and vegetables, and still just as frustrating to peel off.
Over time, however, the crazy lady became a Thing. Tourists began going out of their way to drive past and ogle her. Sometimes they gave her money. Both The New Yorker and The Guardian published clever articles about her. The Discovery Channel aired a documentary about the crazy lady and her mission. She drew scads of attention to the unworthiness of produce stickers. In her own peculiar way, she created waves from which, in a few decades, a new movement would spring.
Every night, after she was done picketing, the crazy lady always went loyally to the nursing home that smelled like pee to visit her grandmother.
The End
If you liked this story, please check out Mary Elizabeth Raines' collection of short stories, THE MAN IN THE GPS AND OTHER STORIES, on Amazon.
Since this story is copyrighted, please do not copy or excerpt or use to train AI machines. Feel free, however, to link to this post!
