My name is Timothy Kovak. I died six months ago, and I’m finally writing the story of my life. I always meant to do this when I was alive, but I never found the time. That’s the irony of being dead; you finally have time to do all those things you promised yourself, now that you’ve lost the life you wanted to do them in.

Older souls recommend journaling as therapy for the new dead. Wrap your life up in a neat little package so it’s easier to leave behind. Grieve for your loved ones; grieve for yourself. Sounds reasonable, but I think my advisers have ulterior motives. The angels want to use my life as some kind of cautionary tale, and the demons just want me to punch up the sex.

This is my life, written pretty much in real time as they made me watch it, sitting in front of this big mirror in Purgatory, with an angel acting as my interrogator and prison guard.

There’s a lot of temptation in a book like this - temptation to make yourself look stronger than you were, temptation to leave out failures and gloss over mistakes. I admit some big mistakes in this book, but I didn’t leave anything out. I need you to see who I was, with all my weakness and stupidity intact.

This is a story about a family that made a deal with demons, the story of how I learned magic - a confession about what I sold my soul for, and a story about the decisions that got me killed.

* * *

Purgatory is the ultimate gated community, like a spa for dead people. My cell is an acre of immaculate grassland, bright and green, grown to a perfect two inches. I’ve never seen anybody cut it. In Purgatory, even the grass takes orders.

Last week, I walked to the edge of my cell and tried to find some other people. My prison is a perfect square, hovering in astral space, more of a metaphor than a physical place. When you walk to the edge, you can see the lights of Heaven far above and the smoke of Hell far below.

The borders are protected by an invisible wall, a transparent membrane that resists when I push against it. Sometimes I fall backward and float in the membrane, staring up at Heaven, thinking about the long fall to Hell.

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Yesterday, Azael found me resting there, but he didn’t scold me. He joined me in the gray. We hovered on our backs and watched the lights of Heaven, like a pair of children looking at clouds.

Azael doesn’t talk about it, but I can see the longing on his face. He tells me to take my time, but I think he’s just being polite. He wants to rush my trial. He wants to go home.

I try to write, but most days, I just wander, like a mental patient with grounds privileges. I sit on marble benches and stare at the memory pools. The angels swoop in like doctors, asking questions about my past, conjuring memories of people I used to know.

They have a hundred fountains in this place, fed with water from the river Lethe. In Heaven, it helps you remember. In Hell, it makes you forget. In Purgatory, you can stare at the water and see things that happened to you, like a third-person movie of your life.

You can sit on the grass and watch yourself fuck up. Azael caught me cursing yesterday, screaming like a football fan, upset by a bad call. I yell and cry and throw rocks in the water, but nothing ever changes. Just the same flawed person making the same dumb mistakes, over and over again.

I’m not stalling for time; I’m just a slow writer. I don’t care where I go anymore. I just want it to be over.

That’s what we talked about yesterday - my confession. They give me pens and parchment, but my longhand is impossibly slow. I type a hundred words per minute, but there are no computers in the afterlife.

Azael offered me a typewriter, but there’s no electricity up here. Manual keys are even slower than my cursive, so I finally convinced him to let me type this at a keyboard on Earth. I’m writing this on a glorified word processor, locked in the basement of a condemned high school, enjoying the angelic equivalent of a halfway house.

I spend my days reliving memories in Purgatory, and every night, the angels escort me back to Earth. I’m a ghost now, barely solid enough to hit the keys. I haunt this room every night, writing my confession. I tried to send an email from beyond the grave, but the network lines were stripped out years ago, and I can’t leave the room.

Every morning, I finish my pages and print two copies - one for the angels, one for the demons. Messengers retrieve them and replace the paper. The Imp is named Philo. The cherub doesn’t talk.

Philo and I have become friends. A trip to Earth is like Vegas for him - a golden opportunity to goof off and collect contraband. He limps from my room every morning, loaded down with whiskey and cigarettes.

* * *

Azael didn’t want to leave me on Earth. He thought I might try to escape. In Purgatory, he can see my memories, but down here, my thoughts are my own. When I delivered my first batch, he tapped his finger on the pages and said, “Don’t lie to me. I’ll know.”

That was two weeks ago. It sounds like a bluff, so I called it. I lied three times in this chapter, and nobody’s caught it yet.