Purgatory's Angels

A small room in a derelict inn. Pretty typical of its sort: cheap and effective. Unlike me now. Maybe it’s better that way. At least I know God has a sense of humor. A darkly twisted one at that. Who gives life to madmen and life to memories? All we’re gonna do is remember the bad and…

Forget me.

Maybe I should have had more friends. One's to warn me that it's unnatural for a man in this setting not to reek. He didn’t smell like anything. He was fancy. He was clean. I got cocky.

Just take his hand and lead the way so this dance of indelicate transaction can run its course.

It all happened so quickly, and yet… I wanted to encourage myself to die faster. Sure, there was fear, sadness, pain, but what I remember most was the practicality of it: Die.

Now I lie on the bed, butchered.

He tells me they will never find him. More girls will die in the name of his insatiable curiosity, thus solidifying his prominent role in history.

Our names will be forgotten, left to rot on the tips of lying tongues too wrapped around their obsession with all things devastating and macabre. Too distracted with the details of victims' bodies to remember their lives.

Anyway, I've got a choice now. Reaper wants me for his "Guardian Angels." An army of souls bound together by their unfinished business.

Is it really all that innocent?

Are we?

Does one choose heaven because they lived so righteously well and don’t have to fear the karmic cycle of rebirth?

Maybe I can torture the man who tortured me in life from death. As death. After all, what do I have to lose…

Besides the memory of us, that is.

I’m in.