I can’t say I’m all that surprised I ended up in Hell after I died, but things are really starting to look up.
I admit that I had to fight through some pretty formidable foes with nothing more than a slingshot and a pocketful of brimstones to get past the first half of the swamp that makes up the Fifth Circle of Hell. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Peabody (a battle-axe of a woman who killed herself in the teacher’s lounge with a pencil compass to the jugular after her stash of child pornography came to light) put up a wicked fight with nothing more than a ruler and a Ticonderoga #2. But now that I’m at the back-half of the swamp, I see bullfrogs everywhere.
From the first time my dad took me when I was nine, I loved to hunt bullfrogs in the sulfur-stained waterhole he called Dead Man’s Pond just below the slag pile of the abandoned Scratch Back Mine across the road from the house where I grew up. Even though my dad’s go-to teaching tool usually was a heavy, leather razor strop he inherited from his father, he did teach me about other things throughout my life that didn’t come with bruises. Like how to hunt bullfrogs.
My dad taught me how to make every shot count with a slingshot he fashioned from an oak branch and an old innertube. He taught me how the jagged lumps of coal leftover from when the mine shut down were the best ammunition for killing bullfrogs. We’d spend hours during summer nights picking them off the rotting Jack Pine stumps that circled the pond like some hillbilly Stonehenge. The year I turned thirteen, my dad promoted me to a three-pronged gig he jerry-rigged out of an old potato hook and showed me how a flashlight’s beam could paralyze bullfrogs so I could spear them every time.
Looking back on my life now, I suppose I could’ve taught my own sons a thing or two about gigging bullfrogs rather than teaching them lessons about the hardships of life with my belt, but I never much cared for a family of my own. Life was always better for me without the millstones of children—or wives. All three of my exes thought so too, and never really wanted me around them or my kids because of what they called my “anger issues.”
I guess that’s why I ended where I am now. But I always thought Hell was supposed to be punishment for worldly transgressions. Drifting on a small raft with bullfrogs all around, though, sure feels like a reward to me. The only difference here is that instead of sitting on stumps, the bullfrogs sit on top of the heads of all the sullen folk who have sunken too deep into swamp muck to work their way out. If I had a gig with me now, I know I could haul in enough bullfrogs to cover my raft. But then again, I wouldn’t want to risk accidentally stabbing some poor bastard’s skull.
So, I pull out my trusty slingshot and start knocking off one bullfrog after another with my leftover brimstones. The splat of rubbery bodies hitting the thick, scummy surface brings a smile to my face and the face of whatever head that’s been freed of its slimy companion. When I plunk one especially large and loud bullfrog off a very wizened old man’s head, I hear a faint, gurgling “Thank you,” and think, “It feels good to be appreciated.”
But just as I’m beginning to imagine that I could happily spend the rest of eternity here, the slingshot in my hand bursts into flames and transforms into a wickedly sharp and overly long three-pronged gig. It’s then that I notice how every head I had liberated from its burden moments ago is now crowned with two new bullfrogs that I just don’t have the will to ignore.
