“So let’s go through this one more time.”
[Or we could not, seeing as we’ve already done that a bajillion times.]
“I’m nervous.”
[Yeah, I’m totally getting that from how calm you look.]
“Anyway, appointments are at the front of the ledger.”
[You know you don’t have to talk aloud for me to hear you, right?]
“And appointments are normally only set with people on the brink of going to heaven or hell.”
[That old lady on the bench is looking really concerned. Might call the nice men with the jacket to take you away.]
Angel glanced down, and Lew wasn’t wrong. She was sitting in a tree, kicking her dangling legs back and forth, and the sixty-something-year-old lady on the bench ten feet or so below her was goggling at her. It probably didn’t help that Angel was in Lew’s body but wearing her own clothes. His had been dirty, after all, and her Mama had always told her that wearing a clean set of clothes was an essential start to a good day.
“My job,” she continued, seemingly unconcerned with the incredulous expression on the old lady’s face as she stared up, basically straight into Angel’s skirt, “is to give ‘em the old push into H, E, double hockey sticks.”
[You literally just said ‘hell’ a goddamn minute ago. You’re a demon—swearing is practically part of the job description!]
“Since this is my first job, I’ve been given an easy assignment—somebody I normally wouldn’t need to corrupt ‘cause they’re already super duper evil.”
[Also, don’t think I don’t remember last night and the unholy words that came out of that mouth. I don’t even think I’ve sworn that hard for that long, and unlike you, I was born a demon!]
Angel flipped open the Ledger and squinted at the name in bold at the top of the page. “Earl V. Lewis,” she murmured as she read the listing. “Serial killer with four deaths to his name, set to die right around here in just shy of ten minutes.” She snapped the book shut. “Seems straightforward.”
[In case you were still wondering if I hate the compulsion to be helpful to you that Repugna built into the ritual: 1000% Yes.]
“I wasn’t, and that isn’t how percentages work.”
[Old lady’s totes calling the fuzz, btfw.]
“Btfw?”
[By the fucking way. What, you trying to tell me hummies don’t use abbreviations?]
“Nwtdjnto.”
[Uh… Gesundheit?]
“No, we totally do, just not that one.”
[Fucking what—?]
Angel pushed off the tree branch and landed in a seated position on the bench next to the old lady, who screamed at the sudden jump and the even more sudden proximity between them. It reminded her of a monkey trying to convey to its fellow monkeys that it had dropped its banana.
“Hello, my name’s Angel,” she kindly informed her, as the lady clutched at her chest and stared wide-eyed. “What’s your name? Also, do you happen to like bananas?”
[I swear to Lucifer, it’s like you're perpetually high. Or you were dropped on your head as a kid. Either or explains your behavior to a ‘T.’]
“N-No,” the lady stuttered, her expression like marble, twitching and shifting. After all, as anybody who has dropped a bag of marbles before can attest, the damn things shift, slide, and get everywhere! “Are you… all right?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Everyone says I act weirdly.”
[You’re so goddamn oblivious it’s pathetic.]
“No, you… You fell at least fifteen feet directly onto a bench!”
“I am…” Angel hummed for a moment in consideration. “87.5% sure that was only ten feet.”
[Meanwhile, I’m 100% sure you’re fucking crazy.]
“That is how percentages work, Lew.”
The lady scooched a bit further away on the bench, all but pressing herself against the arm rail. “My name isn’t Lou, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, no,” Angel said as she flipped open her Ledger to the back and began searching the index. “Lew is the demon in my head. He doesn’t have a firm understanding of how math works.”
The old lady pushed herself up onto wobbly legs and cane without her gaze leaving Angel. “I… see. Well, I’ll leave you… two alone then...”
[Please don’t leave! I need the validation of somebody else experiencing the shit this crazy bitch spews outta her mouth on the regular!]
“You never did tell me your name, ma’am. And ain’tcha gonna wait for your banana?”
The lady blinked in confusion, unconsciously stopping just as she was about to leave. “My what now?”
[No, no, no—don’t encourage her!]
“Your banana,” Angel repeated herself as she tapped her finger against the page with a triumphant look and flipped forward in the ever expanding book, her eyes fixated on the little numbers in the corner of each page whizzing by.
“I don’t… What on earth do you mean?”
[Listen lady, I haven’t even known this lunatic a full day yet, and I can already tell ya it’s not going to make more sense if you ask.]
“She can’t even hear you, so be quiet in there, Lew,” Angel said, rapping her knuckles against the side of her head. “Now where was I?”
[I’d tell you, but noooo, you want me to ‘be quiet’ in here. Conflicting orders make the ritual counteract itself, ha!]
“Please,” the old lady pleaded, taking any unsteady step backwards. “I was just waiting to meet with my daughter and grandson to enjoy the day in the park together. I’ll leave you be, I swear it!”
Angel was starting to get concerned. The lady’s wobbly legs were looking extraordinarily wobbly indeed. She hadn’t seen such wobbliness since the day her rescue dog, Ol’ Three Legs, died, and he could have won a trophy for wobbliness if such a thing existed.
[I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this point, but somehow, against all odds, I did not expect that. Brava.]
The sound of approaching sirens reached Angel’s ears, which left her nonplussed, but she couldn’t spare the mental effort to puzzle out the reason behind them, since she was too stretched thin as it was with her on-going one-and-a-half conversations. Lew was more talking at her than with her, which as everyone is aware, means the conversation only counts half when an official tally of on-going conversations is conducted. This is all to say that she took note of the sound of sirens, had a passing thought regarding whether she ought to be concerned about them, ran a tally of her on-going conversations using the aforementioned rules of engagement, found that tally out-weighed the her mental fortitude, and summarily ignored the sirens as too much bother to… well, bother with for the moment.
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“You look like you oughta sit back down, ma’am,” Angel said, focusing on her main conversation. “You’re shakier than an earthquake having a seizure.”
“No, no! I’m fine. Honestly! I was just leaving…”
“Right, your kid and her squirt! Damn near forgot about them,” Angel said with a laugh. “Well here, let me just help ya walk on over there. It’s the least I can— Oh shoot! I plum forgot all about your banana! One sec.”
She turned her attention back to the still open Ledger on her lap and muttered, “Now let’s see… Zim zam, sphalooshie heng…”
[I’d ask if you were even trying to pronounce that correctly, but I think we all know the answer.]
“… akahkah-kalah!” she finished as she held up the palm of her hand, where a banana promptly twisted into existence.
The lady’s jaw dropped open, her eyes wide as saucers. That was not surprising though, seeing as she had just witnessed a banana appear in the palm of Angel’s hand. What was surprising—though certainly not more so than the banana’s spontaneous surge into existence, which, were said food item to ever happen upon the law of conservation of mass or some other important science law of its ilk whilst traveling down the road, would happily punch it in its non-existent lawnads—a man fell out of the bush across the pathway at the precise instant a middle-aged woman and a preteen boy rounded the bend, both of whom froze once they laid eyes upon the general hullabaloo of the situation revolving around the park bench beneath the tree across the path from a bush with a man jutting out of it.
“Oh hello there,” Angel greeted everyone, oblivious to the shock now permeating the immediate vicinity. Making the deduction that the younger woman and child were the people the old lady had been going to see—a deduction that, as it happened, was 98.9+1.1% correct—Angel decided she no longer needed to walk the old lady with her wobbly legs after all and instead directed her attention to the man in the bush. “Excuse me, Mr. Man-in-a-Bush? What were you doing in that bush?”
[Says the lady who was sitting in a tree.]
“The air felt nice on my legs,” Angel huffed out defensively with her hands on her hips.
[Which is exactly what you said when you pulled on one of your skirts earlier but skipped the underwear.]
“It’s not my fault your cock wouldn’t fit! It’s not like I packed for my hike expecting to possess a male demon for the next several centuries!”
The old woman’s daughter planted her hands over the ears of her child, her wide as saucers eyes snapping back and forth between Angel and the bush-man so rapidly they would have gotten whiplash if eyes could have so gotten.
“What the fuck are you?!” the man screamed at Angel, pulling a gun out of his jacket and waving it around. The sirens had gotten quite close by that time, but Angel’s attention was already far too occupied with her conversation tally, which had stretched beyond capacity courtesy of the appearance of the man from the bush. The sirens and the police running towards the area would just have to wait!
“I’m a demon,” Angel answered, not considering it may not be in her best interest to announce such. “I’m here to corrupt a Mr. Earl V. Lewis,” she further answered, once again not considering it may not be in her best interest to announce such. “Or rather, that’s what would normally happen, as I understand it. See, I’m new at the job, and my boss Repugna gave me an easy case to help me warm up. Apparently Mr. Earl V. Lewis is very much so set to go to hell even without my interference on account of being a serial killer who’s killed four people already,” she even further answered, once again not—Well, you get the picture at this point.
“How the fuck did you know that?!” the man yelled at her, spit flying from his mouth as he waved his gun menacingly at Angel. The old lady’s daughter screamed and clutched her kid to her chest, and the old lady herself fell to the ground, having lost her balance.
[So I’m pretty sure that’s the serial killer guy. Just saying.]
“Oh no!” Angel said, ignoring Lew in favor of worrying over the old lady having fallen and possibly broken something. She moved to help the old lady up while saying, “This is why you need to eat your bananas, ma’am. They’ll help you keep your blood pressure—”
“Police! Step away from the little old lady!”
Now at this point, fair reader, you might be wondering what the answer would be, were one to perform a tally of Angel’s then on-going conversations. After all, it doesn’t take a human possessing a demon to see the arithmetic has gotten quite dicey. First, there was the conversation with the old lady, which Angel had moments earlier reignited vis-à-vis sharing facts about how bananas and the potassium contained therein affect blood pressure. Second, there was the conversation with Lew, which despite the earlier note that Lew was more talking at Angel than with her had, by such time, nevertheless become a full-blown conversation as a consequence of Angel’s defensive response regarding her lack of underwear. Third, there was the conversation with the man who fell out of the bush across the path from the bench under the tree, which had yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion regarding why, precisely, he had been in said bush. Fourth, there was the quarter conversation with the old lady’s daughter, for as everyone is aware, screaming in someone’s vicinity is at an affront worthy of at minimum a quarter of a conversation when one tallies personal, on-going conversations. Finally, there was the policeman yelling and bringing sirens into the background mix, and that was truly the cherry atop Angel’s very, very full conversation tally.
In conclusion, Angel’s conversation tally had not just reached maximum capacity, it had not just stretched beyond that capacity, it had very well blown that capacity straight to H, E, double hockey sticks. Accordingly, Angel in her fluster stumbled back away from the old lady, as the policeman had so directly requested, and quite inadvertently threw her banana in the air.
Angel did not know much about the aerodynamics of bananas tossed mid-stumble backwards—though she imagined there would be corresponding scientific literature abound, should she have been so inclined to search for and read such—but she suspected based on what evidence she collected herself in that moment mid-stumble that the banana she had tossed was due to smack the man from the bush in the face. She was therefore understandably quite pleased when this prediction turned out to be correct, though she was likewise less pleased that she entirely failed to predict the subsequent chain of events.
The banana hit the man from the bush in the face, as mentioned above, which prompted his gun arm to swing wildly as he pulled the trigger. Whether ‘twas on purpose or by accident would go unknown, however, for when the bullet from that man’s gun plowed through the preteen’s head and splattered his still mid-development brains all over the grass of the park, this apparently did not sit right by the policeman, who as the reader may recall, had his own fancy gun. The distribution of preteen boy brain across the vicinity having thus concluded, the policeman decided the man from the bush should not have all the fun alone and shot his own gun, releasing a bullet that proceeded to mirror the actions of the previous bullet with an uncanniness, so long as one substituted the brains of a man from a bush for the brains of a preteen boy.
Though this sequence of action packed gun-slinging did reduce Angel’s conversation tally to more acceptable levels, she felt her Ledger vibrate, indicating her job there was done—and should you, the reader, try to assert this fact about Ledgers was not brought up prior to this sentence, understand that the facts notwithstanding, you will be summarily ignored by the narrator. Her job done—her Ledger having vibrated and what all—Angel shrugged and drew a portal in the air, which she promptly hopped through, leaving the old lady to catch up with her daughter in the wake of their progeny’s sudden and violent death.
[So… that’s a thing that just happened,] Lew said to her as she popped out the other side.
“I’ll say,” Angel replied. “I’ve heard of banana peels causing wanton destruction, typically in the form of tripping people, but it seems whole bananas are even more dangerous!”
[You… I… You know what? Forget it. Let’s just— Wait a sec, how the fuck did you screw that up?!]
“Whaddya mean?”
[Look at the ledger!]
Angel glanced down at it and saw white smoke spewing out of the pages. “What does that mean?”
[Weren’t you listening? I just got done saying you must’ve failed the job somehow!]
“Oh,” Angel noted with a pout. “I thought it was supposed to be an easy job, not all bananas and guns.”
[It was an easy job! Guy was a serial killer, that’s totally a clean-cut case. Send ‘em to hell, wham bam, thank ya ma’am! Open that shit up—I’ve gotta know how in the nine circles you fucked up this badly.]
Angel opened the ledger to the completed appointments section and read aloud, “Earl V. Lewis: Having killed a serial killer before he could grow up and kill ten young women, at least one of whom would have gone on to become a scientist and cure cancer, it has been determined the positive outcomes outweigh the negative outcomes of E.V.L.’s actions. Therefore let it be known to all and sundry that E.V.L. is hereby admitted into heaven.”
The two of them sat there in silence for a moment as they processed how completely and entirely unlikely that was. Angel tried to run the numbers, but despite her prodigious skill with percentages as seen above, she drew a blank.
[So you’re off to a good start, huh?]
She considered that for a moment then replied, “I caused good things to happen, so I suppose I am, yes.”
[That’s not what I meant, and you know it.]
Angel shrugged. She would just have to try better with the next job.