“We the Us,” Short Story, Juli Mostillo.

After The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale

Welcome... to Salem Massachusetts. Home of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst minutemen and minutewomen... and the Salem witch trials. But we don’t mention that too loudly. Pay no mind to the spirits; they very seldom do harm. Mostly they just wonder and scream and knock over objects here and there. DON’T STARE AT THEM. They aren’t spectacles, and they hate onlookers. It reminds them of their time of the trials, or so we think. We really never know what the spirits are thinking. All we know is that their souls remained on Earth even after their bodies were far decomposed. Curious as it is, only the souls of the trials’ victims still remain. We each have our own conspiracies about why no other souls of past Salem dwellers persist, but none can ever be sure, and it’s not like we can ask them. Half a nano-second of almost eye-contact and our ears start to bleed from screeches that would make a saint swear. Even if we could get a coherent answer from the spirits, no one would dare to verbalize even an ounce of skepticism about the church’s doctrine. The church says the spirits are God’s creations. The church says there is no Devil because everything is God. The church says never fear; no one can harm us because everything is God, and God would never harm us. The church says the reason the spirits are damned to wonder about Earth is because they did not believe the church’s doctrines when they were alive. The church says there is no Hell, only Heaven, and everyone goes to Heaven accept those who do not believe in the church’s doctrines, and since we all believe, we should never worry about having the same fate as the spirits. We think it’s a crock of shit, but we also don’t want to be publicly hanged, so we go to Sunday service like good church goers and never denounce the doctrines or publicly state any other opinions that we definitely don’t have. Understand? Good.

Between us, we know there’s a Hell; we’ve seen it. We see it in the sun. We see it in our kitchen knives. We see it in our children’s bleeding gums. We see it at the ass crack of dawn every morning. We feel Hell’s existence when we get too close to one of the spirits...and we took a trip one time. All of us. Satan came to us in dead of night and whispered to each of us while we laid stiff in our beds, eyes glued shut. He asked us if we wanted to see Hell. We guess the church’s dismissal of him made him ill, forcing him to announce his presence. Prince of Vanity himself, how is he to thrive without constant worship? How are we to worship without knowledge of him. Between us, we wouldn’t have worshiped anyway. Of course, we all said ‘yes’. We wanted to see for ourselves the place that doesn’t exist. And our tour guide? Who better than King Darkness himself.

One by one we all piled in his carboatsubmarine that morphed shape and function depending on the environment. It started as a car that drove us right into the Atlantic Ocean. Just when we were sure we would sink, the carboatsubmarine began floating effortlessly over the rough waves. The Devil drove forcefully, with a purpose, as if we were on a time limit. He sat tilted faintly to one side or the other as if he couldn’t get comfortable sitting down. We sat silently and stared at one another thinking what possession came upon us that we would willingly follow the Devil straight to Hell, well, straight to a car ride to a boat ride to a submarine ride then to Hell. The ride lasted for what felt like half an eternity; however, silent rides always feel the longest. When we reached the very bottom of the ocean floor, it instinctively cracked open wide enough to let the submarine through. The submarine squeezed right through, and we appeared on the other side of the splitting as the carboatsubmarine morphed back into a boat. The Devil docked the boat, and we aided ourselves onto the scalding sand. The air was thick and steamy; it felt like breathing sensuality and suffocation. It felt like being choked during sex. Hell was exciting and unnerving and... hellish. The Devil marched away shamelessly, expecting us to follow him; we struggled to gather ourselves from the boat and followed him just the same. We caught up with him rather quickly as he walked with a slight limp, and he began his scripted speech to get us acquainted with Hell. Gesturing towards his right, he explained what he called “the wall of clergymen,” and it was exactly that—a series of hundreds of naked clergymen nailed to a cement wall by their hands and feet. The clergymen’s voices were horse from eons of screeching. Ants and roaches crawled across the wall and the clergymen, infesting their souls’ open wounds. Satan had them strung up like trophies. On display like his prize possessions, men who should be residing in the largest mansions in Heaven instead here strung up shamefully like Christmas lights. We watched him admire his prizes. Watching him stand there, we realized in this moment how uncomfortable and crooked he stood. Maybe the years had started to wear on him. We continued.

Around the left corner were swarms of fallen angels flying in a circle around a large fire, chanting. They flew so fast it took a keen eye to differentiate the actual sight from a tornado of flames and feathers. Still, we continued. A little farther on the right was the place for children. Children? Yes, the bad ones, if that is so; if it is possible for a child to be inherently bad. The children were punished all the same. Laced with skin legions. Scarred with cigarette burns. These kids’ souls were used as ash trays. Souls as they were and yet their eyes were still soulless. Maybe they did deserve this punishment, but what could a child do to deserve to be burned to the bone with tar. As if he could read our minds, Satan answered our burning question, saying that these were not children, these were mistakes. Humans born without a conscience; mortals with no morals as it were. Walking room to room through Hell raises a question: Does anyone really deserve punishment such as this? Even the air is suffering—thick, sticky, erotic, but altogether way too hot.

We thought to ourselves, why a tour through Hell and not through Heaven. If God loved us so, why is it not Him giving us a guide to what Heaven could be like. It could be that because we ever so blindly praise God, he has no need to prove his sovereignty to us. And yet, here is the Devil practically begging to wow us with his residence. Slurping up every intoxicating drop of out naïve attention. We pay him attention the way we pay street performers; give us a tour of your place, give us amusement, and maybe we will give you the scraps of our ephemeral focus. When it comes to followers, God works hard, but the Devil works harder. But maybe it’s that God does not appreciate us; certainly not as much as the Devil does. We suppose if a person amounts to a larger percentage of a following, he or she would matter more to the leader. Maybe that’s it. Maybe God has so many followers, he could stand to lose a few. This small percentage of us is just a speck of dirt in a forest. No wonder he doesn’t take any personal interest in us.

We continued the tour. We saw several other rooms, not that we could possibly remember them all. Especially not in this heat. It is the type of heat that makes vision blurry and heads spin. We could only really be half-conscious in this type of heat. Consecutively, we can remember bits and pieces of chains and cat-whipped skin. We remember upside down crosses and trails of blood. We remember knives and nails and gnashing of teeth. We remember nails and hair follicles being pulled from their beds. We remember exhilaration and fear. We remember Satan’s asymmetrical stance and wicked smile. But most of all, we remember the answer to the question we never knew we had: Where did the souls of the culprits who accused innocent people of witchcraft go? Of course, we had wondered, but our curiosity had been all but dismissed by the vigor of the church.

At the end of our tour, Satan abruptly stopped, turned toward us, and told us he had one more sight to show us. Suddenly, he turned away from us, dropped his drawers, bent over at the waist, and released his flatulence of culprit souls. The spirits came out like the foam of a shaken soft drink: explosively. The spirits flooded the room with malicious laughs and satisfied sighs. Satan let us know that they hadn’t stretched their legs in millennia, and from the looks of Satan, he hadn’t gotten to stretch his legs for as long as the spirit had been lodged in his anus. He stood up completely straight since the first time we had met him, and he walked with grace rather than hobbling from place to place. Once the spirits settled down, they began interacting with us, and for the first time in our lives, we got to ask the questions we had buried so far in our subconscious we forgot we had them. Through extensive conversations, we learned that after death, those who had ever accused or persecuted the innocent victims of the Salem witch trials were bound to eternal prison inside the intestines of the Devil himself. From what we heard, the Devil’s insides are hotter than Hell... literally. We had never been more enlightened. Every question we had, we asked overtly, and every question we asked was answered. No hush, hush. No shrill shrieking. No threats to our lives for being curious. It was a revelation—open conversation. We were told different stories of the spirits’ anecdotal experiences with the trials. Why they did it. If they felt guilty. If they felt their punishment was fair. Of course, we learned a few other things we could have lived without, like what happened when the Devil eats jalapenos or Taco Bell. After the conversations died down and we all seemed content with our answers, Satan departed from his bottoms once more, stretched a little, and then performed a nice 90-degree bend at the waist. Suddenly, the swarm of spirits got sucked right back to their eternal damnation.

After the tour’s conclusion, we took our carboatsubmarine back to Salem, Massachusetts. The ride was difficult; how could we return to our lives with our newfound knowledge? How could we sit through church services now that our suspicions are confirmed? Upon return, not knowing what else to do after such an eventful night, we all dispersed and took advantage of the last few hours of darkness we had to rest. When we woke up the next morning, we attended church as usual, maybe a little groggier, and with bags under our eyes so robust we could sling them over our shoulders, but we made it through service, nonetheless. We listened to the preachings without any interruption, and we haven’t spoken of our experience in Hell since, but we know the truth. There is a hell. There is a devil. And the screaming spirits are victims and remain victims as they are forced to wonder the town of their misfortune constantly reminded of their traumas. Never can their souls retire to Heaven, and never can our minds return to ignorance. We deserved that tour; we deserve honesty. We deserve to let our inquisitive minds frolic. Because now we know—and you do too—that ignorance is NOT bliss.

Juli Mostillo is a writer based out of Alabama. A graduate of JSU where she majored in psychology and minored in creative writing, she is now a graduate student at University of Alabama. She is a co-founding editor of the literary magazine— Fuckus: a fucking ruckus.