SMALL WORLD

"Bob!  Is that you?"

"Holy hell!  Bill!  I didn't recognize you with that rat cage on your face!  What've you been up to?"

"Oh, the usual.  Torture day in and out.  You?"

"The same.  At least I don't have rats gnawing my face off, though."

"Yeah, it sucks, but what're you going to do?  This is Hell, after all.  Speaking of which, I thought you were acquitted of those charges."

"I was, but it seems the decisions of a court of law have no bearing in the afterlife.  It's more of a do-the-crime-do-the-time kind of thing around here."

"Gee, that's too bad.  I always thought you were a dead ringer for the other place."

"Win some, lose some, I guess.  Probably should have bought into that whole Bible deal.  I hear those morons'll forgive anything, so long as you ask for it.  I tried thinking of an act in which you can break all Ten Commandments.  Get this:  you could have sex with your neighbor's wife in front of your parents on the Sabbath while taking the name of the Lord in vain, then kill the gal, steal your neighbor's plasma screen TV, shout, 'Hail Satan,' worship a statue of Ronald McDonald, tell the cops your mom did everything, and all you have to do is apologize to God, and you're good to go.  Sounds pretty damned easy to me."

"I don't even think there's even a catch, but whatever.  You know, I think I did all those things you just said, but not all at once."

"Me, too.  Say, remember the time we raped that little boy, cut off his peter, and made his dad eat it?"

"Didn't you have the syph back then?"

"Oh yeah."

"Heh.  Those were the days.  Doing the mom with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire was also fun.  Wasn't Mario with us that day?"

"Yep."

"I've been in Hell for months and haven't seen him.  You?"

"Nah.  Thing is, just before they gave him the lethal injection, he confessed his sins and asked for forgiveness.  He's in Heaven now."

"After all the things he did?  No way."

"Yes way."

"But he kept a harem of kidnapped children in his barn.  Raped 'em all and killed the ones that didn't please him enough.  He made coats out of their flesh, furniture out of their bones, and drank their blood.  He bronzed their genitals and kept 'em on a knick-knack shelf."

"I know."

"He used to dig up fresh corpses, violate them, carve up their bodies, and leave them on the doorsteps of their loved ones."

"He sure knew how to have a good time."

"He cored out the buttholes of a hundred orphans, just so he'd always have something to hump in his pocket."

"That's Mario, all right."

"He burned down a home for retarded children because he liked the funny way they screamed."

"He was a card."

"And all he had to do was ask for forgiveness?  And God let him into Heaven?"

"It was that easy."

"And we're stuck here?  Forever?"

"You bet.  Speaking of which, I have to get going.  I have an appointment to keep.  I'm having my guts ripped out through my asshole while stiletto heels poke out my eyes, and some midget's going to give me a bunch of papercuts on my johnson.  They're going to roll me in salt after that.  What's on your plate?"

"Well, there's the whole hungry rats thing.  I think they're going to sew may ass shut and feed me Taco Bell while making me watch Jay Leno for hours on end."

"Damn, that's harsh.  I don't know if I could stand Leno for that long."

"Well, I'll see you later, Bill."

"Take it easy, Bob."