Sign Here

by Claudia Lux

Your priests and grandmas have good intentions—the ones who don’t wind up here—but their job is to keep you decent above ground, and if they said Hell was a never-ending brunch, you would be out there stealing and raping constantly.

They might sound like the same thing, but there’s a difference between finding something so entrancing that you are able to forget, for even just a minute, the ticking pressure of mortality, and feeling pleasantly surprised that the contents of your daily slop-bucket of time are less rotten than usual.

He thought he was so guarded, but he was the most open person she knew. All she had to do was watch, not listen.

She looked at Silas and saw Lily’s future. But who could blame her? Lily did the same exact thing. At sixteen, Silas Harrison had the kind of smile girls could build a future on.

Love is all-powerful, until you learn firsthand what happens when a vegetable peeler meets the far-back surface of your tongue.

To learn a new skill would require new thought. To move up would mean to move on. He took his Hell, but he wouldn’t give up his humanity.

“Look at all the fucked-up things he’s done,” I said. “We don’t make deals for souls that are already ours.”

The lake lapped quietly against the boat’s hull, the glitter of it reflected in her eyes. Or maybe the glitter in her eyes reflected in the lake. Maybe Ruth was there first, and the rest of the world was built in answer.

So, here’s the big agency secret. Ready? If you get a full set of deals from your own heirs, you get a redo on Earth.

“You know that worried feeling?” Rose responded straight into Lily’s ear—not a whisper, but not loud enough for anyone else. “That feeling in your gut all the time, no matter the quality or intention of your company, like your safety is a gift from the men around you, not a right?”

As far as I can tell from my observations, growing up seems to involve a lot of false starts, a lot of broken promises. The realization of the world as something neither for you nor against you, but rather uninterested in you entirely. No matter how special you are, how many gold stars you receive, the world itself is incapable of loving you.

When you’re a kid, you don’t care. You love what you love: your parents, your neighbor’s angry cat, your favorite TV characters and their plastic replicas on your shelf, regardless of what you get in return. But growing up seems to be a lesson in loving only those who will love you back, and forsaking the rest.

When you think of Hell as being underground, you’re being infantile. Ground implies nature, soil, photosynthesis, nutrients. The life-and-death cycle of things. Nothing where I live is sun fed. You can’t dig deep enough to reach us.

And slowly, his future grief corroded his present love like a cancer, until looking at her felt the same as losing her. So he stopped looking.

If you were lucky enough for your first fall to be in love and not loss, you might get what I’m talking about. The pure stuff, like flying before you look down. Like learning that the body you thought you had to fill all by yourself actually came with an extension; that neither worked alone, but together—bam, all of the lights come on.

After loss, love is never the same. That is not to say you won’t love another, maybe even more than ever before. But as you love them, you will mourn them. You’ll try not to, of course. Try to say, “You never know.” But you do. You know. And every inch gained in flight is an inch added to the fall.

This human love. It wasn’t that she held my heart, something taken from me. It’s that my heart was nothing if not for the container of her hand.