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The darkness consumes me; I suspect I have contracted black lung by this point from breathing in the stagnant onyx. From what I can see, I can see nothing. No lines or defining angles to regulate the limits of the room, if it is even a room at all. There’s no sense of time in the dark matter I am concealed in either, yet, my mind has determined it has been years.

But, it cannot logically be years, I assure myself. There is no way I’ve managed to live without the mercy of water touching the charred patches of my throat for a year. Yet, I’ve cannot find a doubt. So, once again, I tug against the slick metal chains caressing the fiery rawness of my wrists.

This seeping black is forever, each cubic inch of whatever we’re in is caked with harrowing shade. Silence is the loudest call this beast emits. How my captor has endured this torture along with me is beyond understanding. “You should really stop doing that,” my fear and solace announced.

That was the only time I knew I was not dead, when the man spoke. However, he didn’t let me leave; he kept me here even though he suffered as well. “I can’t, I really need light,” I begged. My own voice trembled back to me off of a surface. I don’t hypothesize and call this surface a wall, I cannot view it, and this hard surface could be a car for all I know.

“We walk by faith and not by sight,” the voice echoed back to me in perfect resonation, keeping an even, nearly fatherly, pitch with me.

Dwindling patience caused my already inflamed irises to burn once more with the pending streams of salty water threatening to flood. I’d cried for hours, or however long it really was, I did not know the time. “Do anything you want to me, I just can’t stand this silence,” I sputtered incoherently, shaking the cool bonds against the ‘wall.’ Each rap of a fist against the ‘wall’ resulted in the most hellacious wind chime ever mastered. Alas, sound began to fill the space.

“Why would I do that?” He answered with intonations of innocence thickly rolling off of his tongue.

“Help me!” My chest concaved and rose again with frightening force, giving one last shake to the bondage I was entangled in. That’s when the woodwind tears joined the hellacious wind chimes to mother the ultimate orchestra of terror. “Kill me!” I screamed desperately, tremors itching themselves under my skin, aftershocks to the thrashing against the assumed wall.

“You’re already dead,” the voice revealed in attempts to stabilize an extremely neurotic version of a girl that was me, one that felt strangely natural. But apparently, I’m dead, so I suppose I’m a tad bit late to try to ‘find myself.’

So, it was true, I did go to hell. Apparently, hell isn’t as hot as the Bible depicted. All of the sinners are in for a disappointment; I frowned, realizing this was no joking matter. “Isn’t death supposed to be peaceful?” I rebutted, my thought becoming an instant stream.

The man chuckled, something I found slightly inappropriate. But, then again, I never took the time to read up on etiquette in the underworld during High School. “You humans are so funny.”

A brief (but to how brief that was, I do not know) pause endured between us. The voice I was now beginning to strangely trust began to fill the space once more, “When you die, you come to this room. You stay in this room until someone utters your name for the last time,” the man muttered with a certain sadness in his tone. He pitied me.

Sighing, my hands shifted around the chain for a final time. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes I had pried wide open for the era that had passed before me in the nothingness. Immediately, I was ridden with curiosities from the human inside of me that refused to die. “What about famous people?” I queried, an eyebrow rising up in wonder, not that the man could see it.

“Well, criminals sit and rot, like Hitler. But then, sometimes, good people get hung up in this in between place. Poor George Washington,” the voice exhaled.

I nodded my head in a bizarre understanding, grasping the world below me for the first time. “They have a good attitude though, a good Guardian. And the Grievers serve justice to the people like Hitler.”

“What are Grievers and Guardians?”

The voice snickered, “I forgot, you’re new to this whole death thing. Grievers are actual physical embodiments of emotions that compel people to speak, that’s why Judas, Hitler, and Genghis Han all are relative names and spoken nearly daily. It’s why the world focuses on the negative,” he explained thoroughly with extreme patience and poise.

I stiffened, hoping the Grievers didn’t take a negative favor towards me. “And the Guardians?” I dared to move my mouth, my jaw sinking due to the weight of the bone increasing by the untraceable time inevitably ticking by.

“I’m your Guardian Angel, I’ve been with you since you were conceived, and I’m here with you in the process of death,” He calmly said, though I imagined a reluctant warm smile on my angel’s face.

Then, it hits me with stark realization—this is the first time in all these years he gets to meet me, communicate with me, it must be the highlight of his life to be doing this. Yet, in the same moment, I’m suffering. My body broken against the ties of memories people cannot sever and let go. “That’s right, sleep,” The cozy resonance wrapped my in its beautiful grace, stroking every essence of my non-being.

“So, we live with the need to be important and known by everyone, but in the end…” I trailed off, yawning, beginning to feel the effects of a deep slumber creeping on me as I tried to fight each second.

“Basically,” he answered, a large ravine of a crack forming in the angel’s vocal production.

Just like that, she was gone.

Crumbling as if he was a rejected piece of paper, the angel’s forehead brushed against his knees as he sobbed intensely. That was the final time he’d ever have the privilege to hear the girl speak.