4 A Bit Judgmental

Lily

Lily waited for Siedah at the pillars framing the massive hallway, gazing at some of the souls who sat waiting. An elderly man sat quietly on a park bench, a peaceful smile on his weathered face, hands clasped in his lap. His file—thicker than Lily’s—rested beside him, but he just calmly watched the souls at the line of desks as if they were pigeons at the park. He must have caught her staring because he met her eyes with a smile and a nod before going back to watching the souls.

“He’s waiting.” Siedah’s voice drew her attention to where the other woman stood at her side.

Lily was unsurprised to find that she towered over the other woman. At six feet tall, and with a fondness for high heels, she’d seldom had to look up at someone.

“He’s not ready to be judged yet?” Lily asked.

“Yes and no. He’s received his file, and he’s selected his method of Judgment, but he’s waiting for his wife.” Siedah smiled. “It was their third lifetime together. Their stories are beautiful ones. Powerful. Sometimes heartbreaking.”

“Three lifetimes?” Lily’s silent chest ached, as if her useless heart still had the capacity to break.

“I know. We’re all very fond of him. He’s very sweet. Would you like to talk to him?”

Three lifetimes together. What would that kind of love and devotion even look like? Feel like? No one had ever wanted her like that, and certainly not in her last lifetime. Her romantic life had been a short string of hookups, unrequited crushes, and politely declining offers from people she just hadn’t clicked with. Before that…all she had were dim flickers of memory from old lifetimes.

An arranged marriage to a man she didn’t love, but who had been decent enough. He’d loved someone else. The blacksmith’s daughter maybe? But her husband had never strayed physically or beaten her. She didn’t think he’d mourned her when she’d been falsely accused of being a witch and burned at the stake. Had he ever married the woman he actually wanted, or had his first wife’s alleged witch-ness ruined his chances?

In another lifetime, she vaguely remembered being hungry and wondering if she really had feelings for the young man with the chestnut cart, or if she’d just wanted the food he sold.

The memories from her most recent life flared hot and bright. Most prominently, a drunken moment of honesty from some frat guy at a party in college. You’re good enough for a quick hookup, but not worth the effort of dating, you know? You’re hot but a lot. He’d been so pleased with his inadvertent rhyme that he’d taught it to others, and “hot but a lot” had followed her for months.

She’d known it was a horseshit sentiment from the moment it was said, but for the rest of her life, in weak moments, there had been an insidious little voice in her mind that had whispered that maybe he had been right. Maybe she was too much. Too sharp, too sarcastic, too independent, took things too seriously, had feelings that were too big. She’d worked so damn hard to grow, to overcome her traumas, to smooth the roughest of her edges and dull the worst of her sharp tongue. It had never seemed to make a difference in the ways she’d wanted it to.

Three lifetimes .

Her longest “relationship” had been a month-long friends-with-benefits situation with a woman from her Rhetorical Criticism class that she’d never seen again.

“No,” she choked, then cleared her throat. “No, thank you.”

Siedah gestured to the hallway without a hint of pity or judgment. Lily fell into step beside her, adjusting her stride to match the shorter woman’s as they left the cavernous main room behind. Souls walked with them, heading to various doors, arches, and gates set into walls that shifted and moved like pastel clouds under glass. A few souls walked against the flow of people, nodding a greeting to Siedah as they passed.

“Coworkers?” Lily asked.

“Some of them, others work elsewhere and are just running errands. All souls pass through the Front Desk, so if there is a paperwork issue with a soul, we tend to deal with it.”

“Someone missed a golden opportunity to call it the Front Death-k,” Lily mused, watching a soul peer up at a pearlescent arch before walking into the golden mist inside it.

Siedah laughed. “I’ll add it to the name suggestions in the breakroom. People will love it.”

Before either of them could say anything else, a set of elevator doors dinged open. A being walked out with an armful of stapled papers, looking harried. Towering over everyone in the hallway, Lily included, they appeared to be female, with fine features, an aquiline nose, and a body built along powerful, athletic lines. Smooth, navy-blue skin was offset by a dark-gray shirt, black jerkin, and leggings, all decorated with intricate embroidery along the hems and tucked into immaculately buffed, calf-high boots. A pair of spiraling black horns near her temples gleamed in the shifting golden light, their bases hidden in the being’s straight, blue-black hair.

“Moura,” Siedah said, surprise coloring her tone. “Everything alright?”

The being—Moura, apparently—stopped mid-stride with an exasperated sigh.

“No. Fucking souls. They’ve been judged by the system of their choosing . Sent to Hell by that system. And yet, they still have the mortal audacity to complain and blame us, whose only job at the gate is to guide them to where they need to go.” She scoffed. “This morning, we had a group of them claim that we managed to steal them and drag them down there. Drag them! As if they don’t take the stairs themselves . The more they complained, the longer they held up the whole process, the busier we got, and then this happened.” Moura hefted the armful of paperwork. “Souls who actually needed guidance didn’t get it, and now we have to go find them and figure out where they’re supposed to be.”

A long, tapered tail the same color as Moura’s skin lashed behind her, reminding Lily of an annoyed cat. She found herself nodding along in sympathy. After spending her whole working life in some form of customer service, she could relate all too well to the miserable frustration of trying to deal with people who had seemingly little common sense and more than their fair share of audacity. She hadn’t expected to relate so well to what she suspected was a demon, but the Afterlife seemed to be full of surprises.

Moura adjusted the stack of paperwork on her arm. “These are the reports for the ones that I could track down today, but I just know some poor soul is sitting down there—probably on Level Nine knowing our luck—throwing off someone else’s paperwork. Universe help them if they are on Level Nine. He hates it when—”

The elevator dinged again, and an equally tall, but slightly younger-looking demon stepped out, holding yet more paperwork. His cherry-red skin and bull-like horns fit the traditional idea of a demon, but between his short white hair and the gray T-shirt he wore under his jerkin, he looked far more…human. His handsome, sculpted features were almost too sculpted, but a quick grimace animated his otherwise imperious face.

“A few more, Captain,” he said apologetically.

Siedah hummed, glancing back towards the Front Desk. “Marcus should be getting back from his break right about now. He loves fussing over these kinds of problems, and I’ll lend a hand when I’m done here.”

Both demons turned their eyes, green for her and gold for him, onto Lily. The instinctive flash of intimidation faded as she took a moment to really look at them. For all their height and horns and fangs, which she’d seen peeking through their lips as they spoke, they were just like her. How many times had she and her coworkers bitched about ridiculous customers and even more ridiculous requests and demands? How many times had she grimaced the exact same way over the prospect of more paperwork? Customer service was a bonding experience. She got it.

She offered a wave, immediately feeling like an idiot, but committing to it anyway. You can get away with a lot of things if you do them with confidence.

“If I knew the solution to dealing with idiots, I’d share it with you. Sadly, I just had to vent to friends and soothe myself with wine or chocolate. It didn’t solve the problem, but it sure made me feel better.”

Moura’s face brightened into a grin, and a passing soul flinched and took several running steps away. Lily grinned back.

The red demon chuckled. “It’s nice to remember not all souls are complete fuckwits.”

“Eh.” Lily shook her hand back and forth. “You caught me on a good day.”

The demons laughed outright, and even Siedah gave a little chuckle. The irreverent banter and vague camaraderie with other service workers was as familiar as breathing.

As their laughter eased, Moura’s eyes gentled as she looked at Lily. “Are you heading for Judgment?”

Throat tight, Lily nodded, trying for a what-can-I-say smile.

Moura clapped her lightly on her shoulder with a large hand. The unexpected heat and familiarity of her touch made Lily blink.

“If you make it through on the decent side, come have that glass of wine with us. We can swap stories.” Her hand dropped away, and her smile dimmed. “And if you do end up on the other side, well, do us a favor and don’t make a fuss.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Lily smiled, though her voice sounded strange to her own ears.

With friendly nods and farewells, the two demons strode away, tails flicking absently as they spoke to each other. A male soul walking towards them practically leaped to the side to get out of their way, pressing himself flat to the wall.

Siedah’s smile was kind as she turned to Lily. “Thank you for being so nice to them. The demons get a bad rap from mortals, and sometimes the uninitiated souls they encounter can be…”

“Judgmental?” Lily supplied wryly.

“Quite. They’re different, but they’re a lovely people. They usually avoid the Entrance Hall to keep from, uh, causing a scene.”

Lily glanced in the direction they’d walked, watching their horns moving into the distance. The souls parted around them like a school of fish avoiding a shark.

If I’d known demons looked like that, I wouldn’t have had such an irrational fear of letting my foot hang over the edge of the bed. Hell, I might’ve done it on purpose.

Lily mused over the thought, curious. Hopefully, having a high sex drive wasn’t a bad thing when it came to the Universe’s idea of right and wrong, though she couldn’t fathom why it might be.

So, she’d read some particularly filthy monster romances in the name of— Fuck! Her reading history! Oh fuck , her search history! She’d had the presence of mind to throw away her collection of vibrators and toys before she’d gotten really sick, not wanting to traumatize her family any more than she already had. But oh, oh no , her little library of monster and kinky romance novels…Shit, her mom absolutely would have seen those—

A soft hand on her arm snapped her attention back to the present.

“It’s okay, really.” Siedah’s face was kind. “Judgment isn’t that bad; the Universe has a sense of humor.”

For a brief, horrifying moment, Lily wondered if Siedah was some kind of Afterlife mind reader.

“Even if I’m wrong and you don’t get your Paradise, if you choose to go to Hell, I promise you that the demons are just. They can be terrifying, but they are not needlessly cruel. Hell is a place of justice and, for those who are willing, growth.”

It seemed that the years of practice keeping her face neutral, even while reading toe-curling smut in public, had paid off. Siedah had mistaken her nerves for something more benign.

Lily dipped her head in acknowledgment and murmured a thank-you, following quietly when Siedah kept walking.

A man stepped out of an elevator with a cell phone that Lily didn’t recognize pressed to his ear. “…of course I’d be interested in running a new D&D campaign, but if the Monkey King is involved, I want nothing to do with it. Having Loki as a rogue in that one campaign was enough trickster god experience for one eternity…”

Lily twisted and walked backwards for a few steps to watch him hustle towards the Front Desk, still talking into his phone. They have D&D here? She turned back around, watching souls line up and go through various arches and doors that all opened into different swirling mists. A few souls sat petulantly against the walls, and couple in the middle of the floor, like toddlers protesting nap time.

“What happens with them?” she asked, nodding to a particularly huffy-looking woman.

“They sit there until they get bored enough to go through with Judgment. They can always go to the Void, of course, but otherwise, unjudged souls cannot leave the Front Desk or the Entrance Hall until they go through some form of Judgment.”

“Seems like a waste of eternity,” Lily murmured mostly to herself as they passed the woman.

Siedah stopped in front of an arch set into the swirling wall. The stone was smooth and undecorated, unlike most of the arches they’d passed, but danced with a vibrant rainbow of color. Through the arch itself, nothing was visible but a solid gray haze. The noise and bustle of the hallway around them faded, Lily’s attention pinpointed on the arch.

What a simple thing. What a simple culmination of life and death and experience and loss. Decades of being and all the lifetimes before that, all to stand before an arch filled with gray. The file in her hand suddenly seemed heavy. She knew what was in it, in her. The moments of kindness and cruelty. The mistakes, the triumphs, the sheer dumb luck, the motivations behind actions.

What if—

She shut the thought down hard before it had a chance to fully form. The Universe wouldn’t care that she’d never been wanted like that, loved like that. Romantic love, or the lack of it, didn’t make a person better or worse at their core. She was to be judged. Her life, her actions. She wasn’t unlovable. She’d loved her family and friends with her whole heart, and they had loved her, each in their own way.

She’d known love, and she’d known herself.

Tearing her eyes away from the arch, she looked at Siedah. Her smile was gentle, eyes bright and understanding against the soft pink of her hijab. She offered Lily one slim hand. Lily gripped it, probably too hard, but Siedah simply squeezed back.

Lily sucked in a deep breath and stared into the gray. It didn’t move. Gave nothing away. Might as well have been a solid wall.

But there was something on the other side of that gray. She knew it. What it was, she didn’t have the faintest idea, but it called her. Beckoned and dared her to come see, to open a book with no description and a blank cover and see where the story would take her.

Hand slipping from Siedah’s, she stepped forward into the gray.

* * *

Running through the yard as a child, long auburn hair bright in the sun, a fistful of daisies clutched in one pudgy little hand.

The kitchen light turning on as her parents caught her in the act of climbing down from the counter with the bag of chocolate chips.

Calling the girl she hated for stealing her colored pencils a “butthead,” the foulest word in her vocabulary, and getting a letter sent home to her parents. The spanking afterwards.

Curling against her dad’s side while he read to her at bedtime, his voice pitching lower for Gandalf’s dialogue.

Stealing wine from her parents as a teenager.

The endless refrain of “going to Hell, going to Hell, going to Hell” screaming though her mind whenever she did something her youth pastor had strictly told them not to do, but especially when she showed skin below her collarbones and especially—especially—when she’d made out with the cute skater boy behind the track shed.

Saying “fuck” for the first time, and liking how it felt.

Making her mom cry during a fight.

Reading a book out loud to the kids she babysat and doing funny voices to make them giggle.

Taking a blade to her skin when the guilt and pain had been too much to keep in her head.

Being the getaway driver for a friend escaping an abusive boyfriend.

Wearing a string bikini in public for the first time and being so scared that she would instantly trapdoor to Hell that she’d thrown up in the bathroom.

Her first tattoo, and the singing relief of feeling a piece of her click into place.

Searing jealousy that the bitchy, hyper-religious girl from youth group had gotten married before she did.

Flirting with a woman at a party for the first time and loving it, but waking up in a cold sweat that night, terrified that she’d secured her place among the damned.

Quietly crawling into her mom’s lap—despite being twenty-seven and nearly a foot taller than her mother—when that same bitchy girl had had her first baby and she’d felt so lonely and hopeless that she’d just needed to be held.

Hating herself for the building resentment of celebrating all her friends for their weddings, babies, and homes, and never being the one who was celebrated. Knowing it was stupid, feeling hollow inside anyway.

The savage glee of verbally sparring with her friend’s aunt, Linda. Being outlandish to prove a point and make Linda’s lesbian daughter feel a little less alone.

Watching her mom’s heart shatter in the kitchen when she’d revealed her diagnosis.

Hours of Mario Kart with her brothers when the cancer had begun to take its toll, wishing she could watch them grow as men, grow old and poke fun at each other as only siblings could, knowing she was ripping their hearts out with her decision.

Hours and a lifetime spent working on herself, fighting to be better, failing sometimes, her sharp tongue slicing like a knife, even as her brain begged her to shut up.

Trying to live. Trying to die, once. Trying to be kinder. Trying to be worse. Trying to make an impact. Trying to not make things worse. Trying to love better. Trying to heal.

Trying.