Help For Writers
Links For Writers
Our Current Books
Upcoming Books
Book Reviews
Humor Pages
Essays
Publicity
Permissions

I had been making such great progress I was surprised when I died again. Not only was I surprised about dying, I was surprised I could be surprised. I had never been much of a believer in God or an afterlife, but the fact that I knew I was dead confirmed that things hadn’t come to some abrupt and final end. This time there was all the standard stuff, like hovering overhead and watching the staff try to revive me with electrical jolts and chest compressions, and Janie crying at my bedside. And it wasn’t long before I started down that famous tunnel with a light at the end beckoning me to hurry.

At first there was nothing, only blank, gray walls, but as I sped toward that wonderful light, some things began to come into focus around me: long, wriggling things that reminded me of Medusa’s snake-hair. Soon, my vision cleared, and I realized those snake-like things were penises. Before long they turned into a gauntlet, slapping at my body with painful strikes and squirting until the atmosphere was so dense I couldn’t breathe. The dick gauntlet eventually gave way to a sea of breasts squeezing in around me until I felt my body being crushed. I popped through the tit attack, and finally, the scenes from my past, promised by all the near-death reports, began to fill the tunnel.

The visions started with the twins, whose evil laughter and painful ministrations were surrounded by a smothering mass of prickly white crinolines. Next came Terrie, then Mr. Willis and Harold, but these reenactments didn’t include any of the exciting and pleasurable things I remembered, only the fear and pain. Maggie, Betty, and Susan all appeared together, berating me and crying a river of tears that again filled the tunnel until I felt I would drown.

I began to wonder why, if I was already dead, I could also drown, when the tears drained off and the girls disappeared, to be replaced by thousands of clacking skeletons shooting giant pool balls that caromed around bashing me and crushing my bones to dust. I managed to squeeze through this nightmare, only to be met by a huge fist that smashed into my face causing an explosion of stars, which gave way to a hundred Carols all talking on the phone in a cacophony of gossip about me. I soon realized that on the other end of those conversations, Mom and Janet were listening, and when they abandoned the phones, dozens of open doorways appeared in which the two of them stood scolding Arlene and me as we bounced on Janet’s bed in a wild, violent parody of our encounters.

The embarrassment I felt when Arlene and I were caught overwhelmed me with regret, and I was nursing my damaged psyche when I saw in the distance a tall pole blocking my way. My nuts hit the pole in a nuclear explosion of pain, and it fell away to reveal another, which I rammed into with equal force. This was repeated until I thought I might spend eternity having my nuts ground into gonad pudding, however, the nut bashing was finally replaced by a vision of Susan being repeatedly stabbed through the shower curtain in room 32 of Jacoby’s Roadside Inn by a several clones of myself wielding sharp, pointed dildos.

I had begun to wonder if there wasn’t something to the talk about hell and its never-ending agony, but when the way cleared ahead and I again saw that tiny, inviting light in the distance, I felt a glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, as I made my way through a sea of dead black-and-white cows, I realized the light at the end of the tunnel was only a flashlight jiggling and shining from deep within a huge, pulsating vagina poised to swallow me whole. After I had been gulped down by this hungry mouth-like monster, I emerged into a bright living room, where Sally sat with her head in her hands, sobbing.

Of all the horrid parts of my journey, the vision of Sally was by far the worst. I tried to speak to her, to console her and apologize, but she seemed unaware of my presence, and I was forced to stand there and absorb her incredible grief as it filled my heart like an ocean of acid, eating away at my soul until there was nothing left but pain and regret and self-loathing.

I started to scream at God, or whomever, to let me die in peace or at least let me get on to some other nightmare, and finally, my somewhat unorthodox prayer seemed to be answered, as the living room disappeared and was replaced by a phalanx of typewriter keys that surrounded me in a jitterbug dance of word production. The words fell on me like a storm of razor blades, flaying my skin and creating a river of blood that coagulated into a huge book, whose cover displayed a dick the size of a redwood tree, surrounded by dozens of weeping girls who stared up at it with their arms outstretched, begging for something.