What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [73]
Satan lay slumped in an awkward heap by the side of a ripe-smelling dumpster, his pinstriped suit dusty and in tatters. One arm of the jacket had disappeared entirely, and the underlying, blood-stained shirtsleeve looked as if it had had a run in with an automatic-juicer-and-julienne-fry-o-matic from some late-night infomercial. His fancy shoes were gone, and his socks were nowhere to be found. Despite the state of his apparel, however, Satan appeared to be whole and completely unscathed. A little dead looking, maybe, but there was no blood actually on his body – coagulated or otherwise – and nothing really to indicate that he had, in fact, been wearing the clothes when they had been so thoroughly abused.
An odiferous man in a faded blue, floral bathrobe and bunny slippers shuffled up. In his hand he held an oversized placard that read, “Repent! The End Is Nigh!” He noticed the pile of distinguished-yet-disheveled gentleman next to the dumpster and scooted over to have a look.
“Hey,” he said.
Satan continued to look dead. The man laid his sign aside and, kneeling down, jiggled Satan’s collar. Satisfied that Satan was not actually dead, the man rose. One of the members of the order of rodentia ventured out to investigate, thinking (or smelling) the man to be one of their brethren, but the man cleared his throat, and the rat scurried off.
“Wake up,” said the man, nudging Satan with the cute, bunny-nosed end of his footwear. Satan stirred, but then was still again. “You need to wake up,” said the man. “It’s almost three o’clock. Naptime is at an end.” He stepped back, took a deep breath, and reared up to deliver a good, swift kick to Satan’s backside. But Satan groaned, and the man un-cocked his lethal slipper.
Satan’s eyes flicked open and darted around, taking in his surroundings, while his body remained motionless, and stuck in its awkward position. Finally his eyes alighted on the oddly-colored, rodent slippers in front of him, and made their way slowly up to the Rasputinesque countenance of the man in the floral robe. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I,” the man stepped forward with a dramatic sweep of his arm, “am Eli.” He stood as erect as his aged and weather-beaten body would allow, and placed his right hand over his breast. He made his eyes all squinty and pointed what he thought probably looked like a good, steely gaze off into the unknown distance. After allowing the profundity of the moment to steep adequately, he turned back and beamed at Satan.
Satan eyed Eli suspiciously. The man had all kinds of odd symbols scrawled on his arms and legs. They might have been tattoos except for the fact that they looked less like the work of a trained tattoo artist than that of an inebriated weirdo with a predilection for wandering around the city in a bathrobe. He decided that the man was probably just a harmless idiot, and moved on to more pressing matters. “Okay, then. Excellent. Now, who am I?”
Eli did not hesitate even an instant before answering. “You sir,” he said, “are the man I found lying beside this dumpster.” He pointed a grimy, blackened finger at the spot where he’d found the Devil and, in fact, where the Devil still lay.
“Very good,” said Satan, nodding, feeling that this was indeed a good answer. Progress. He took a deep breath. The fickle breeze was back, and for a moment the rank smell of the garbage was gone, replaced by the scent of chlorine from the nearby fountain. It soothed him, but then he remembered where he was, which was next to a stinky dumpster, apparently behind a building somewhere. His eyes darted some more. The rest of his body continued not to move. He looked up at Eli. “How did I get here?” he asked.
“That, I am afraid, I do not know.” Eli looked at the ground and shook his head sadly.
“Hmmm...”
The breeze came back again. This time it brought a sheet of newspaper advertising some specials at a nearby drugstore. They watched the paper flap back