The Pleasures of Hell

Chapter 01.001

~~The Pleasures of Hell~~

~~Day 1~~

~~Mia~~

Dying sucked. She hadn't expected it to, but there it was. All the old movies made it seem like a quick and borderline painless process. New movies, not so much, but she didn't like new movies.

She stared down at her body, her open eyes, and her open mouth leaking milk and cereal on the small, round, black table that'd cost a whole fifty cents. It teetered when she ate. It wasn't teetering anymore.

Right next to her was David, her brother. Same state, head on the table, or rather, kinda on the table. Poor guy's face was straight down in his bowl of cereal, milk splashed everywhere. No bubbles.

"Whoa," David said. She almost jumped. He was standing next to her, staring down at his body with the same frozen fascination and confusion she was.

Her twin brother David had shortish red hair, with soft green eyes and a clean-shaven face showing his freckles; not that the guy could grow a beard if he tried. He stared at her for a few more seconds before looking back down at his body sitting on the lawn chair they'd confiscated from a nearby garbage pile, for their equally shitty dorm.

Mia came up behind her body, and stared down at her dead expression. Same sort of face as her brother, freckles, pale skin, soft eyes, vibrant green, and long and mostly straight red hair that reached the center of her back. A small woman, maybe five feet tall on a good day. She never minded being short, unlike her bro, but right now it made the horror scene in front of her even more sickening. She was just a... a small thing, sitting there, dead, with eyes wide open.

David reached down for his body's shoulders, gasped, and yanked his hand back. His fingers had passed through his body, like a—

"Ghost," Mia said. "We're... ghosts."

"Oh shit." David gulped, eyes locked on his body, then hers, before looking at her her, ghost her. "You're naked."

She blinked at him, looked down at herself, and then at him.

"So are you. We're ghosts. I... guess clothes don't come with you when you die." Which probably threw a lot of old beliefs to the curb.

"Fuck me," he said. "That... that... really fucking sucked."

"I know, right?" She threw up her hands and gestured to their corpses, before stomping around their dorm. Apparently ghosts could stomp. "That hurt! I just, started fucking choking on nothing, and everything hurt, and my insides felt like they were on fire!"

"Heart attack?"

"We both died of a heart attack? At the same time? We're way too young, anyway." Not even twenty, yet.

David shrugged. "Well it's not like we were poisoned. You started eating ten minutes before I did. And who the fuck would poison us?"

She stared at her body a little more, her little white t-shirt and her shitty boxers, and the cheap cereal that'd probably doomed her to dying of cancer eventually anyway. After a couple more seconds of cold silence, she threw up her hands again, screamed, and marched into their tiny living room, attached to the tiny kitchen. The dorm had concrete walls, so it wasn't like anyone would hear her if she screamed herself hoarse.

It wasn't like anyone would hear her no matter what, anymore.

She looked at the torn-up loveseat, the only seat in the small living room. She looked at the TV collecting dust. She looked at the exercise equipment she shared with her brother, gymnastic rings and resistance bands and kettlebells. She tried picking one up, and sure enough, her hand passed through it.