Read Online A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck - Free Book Online

every fifty yards that tells us it is. And I don’t
see any way around the reality of being here. We all wake up to the
same set of rules, the same consistency. Why do you doubt?”
    “I don’t really doubt – I just want to. I
think in part it’s the lack of diversity, the lack of nuance, like
the veins of a leaf, or the grains in a piece of feldspar, the lack
of variety and detail. I keep wondering about the idealist’s
perspective that our minds are sitting in a jar somewhere and all
this is just a projection of some sort. That kind of input would be
easier to maintain if you didn’t have to worry about detailing a
dragonfly’s wing.”
    “Do you believe that’s the case? That only
you are real?” Rachel asked slyly.
    I sighed, “No. Not really. I can’t take
solipsism seriously.” I smiled at her and added, “At least I know
you’re real.”
    She gave me a big smile, amused at my maudlin
pronouncement, but glanced quickly over to where Sandra had been
standing.
    Sandra was gone. I was glad. It seemed funny
that one day I would go to bed in her arms and the next not feel
anything, like a switch had gone off. But no, that wasn’t honest
either. This had been building for a long time. Our silences were
getting longer. Our arguments more frequent. How do you stay with
someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to
accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that
drove us away from one another in the end. Always.
    “People keep telling me God is good,” I said,
“that we need to pray every day for His kind mercy. But why pray?
Everything is given to us. For protection? Why? Even if we die, we
just wake up the next morning as if nothing had ever happened. Will
praying hasten the search? I’ve seen no evidence of that. Why thank
this God who has condemned us to an endless Hell? We are all slowly
going crazy. And the task? We all know it’s impossible. A book on
our life? There must be billions of such books. In what detail?
From whose perspective? A book on every second of our life would
take volumes. A book about my life from my own perspective would be
very different from that of an observer who loved me, or from one
who hated me. Which book is the right one?” I was venting, but I
could not seem to stop. So many irritations in this place, so many
endless, meaningless frustrations.
    “So I don’t want to believe,” I went on.
“During my earth life, I believed I would live with my precious
wife forever. I believed I would one day be a God. I believed in
doing good to my neighbor. I did my home teaching. I paid my
tithing. I served in my calling in church. That God made more sense
than this ever could, and yet do I wake up in the Celestial Kingdom
surrounded by my departed family and friends? No, I find myself on
a folding chair in the office of some demon sitting behind a desk
with a vision of people burning in Hell in the window behind him.
So all my beliefs disappeared then. Why should I trust things now?
Who knows, maybe in a hundred billion years I’ll find my book. I’ll
stick it in the slot and boom, I’ll find out that, no,
Zoroastrianism isn’t the truth either, but it was really the
Baptists who were right all along and this is just part of God’s
preliminary salvo into an eternity of horrors. So it’s bam, splash,
and I find myself in a sea of boiling sulfur. Or maybe this is some
strange philosopher’s Hell where we have to experience every
possible Hell that can or has ever been expressed.” I sat down,
frustrated and depressed. “So … I guess I don’t have much hope that
things are going to get better.”
    She knelt down beside me and took my hands in
hers. She didn’t say anything; there was really nothing to say, I
suppose. Tomorrow would come, we would discuss something, eat from
the kiosk, and go to sleep.
    She looked at me thoughtfully, smiling sadly
to herself. “I remember when I first got here, I was a vegetarian
deeply committed to eating