Little Billy woke to find himself in a cave. He lifted his head off the rough stone floor and looked around, forcing his eyes to focus on his surroundings.
The cave was small, even from Billy’s four-year-old point of view. The cave’s mouth was a tall, barred ellipse that led to a corridor. Billy couldn’t see beyond the corridor’s first twist, but its rocky walls glowed and flickered as if illuminated by flames.
A stabbing pain seared through Billy’s skull, and he suddenly remembered where he’d been five minutes ago: staring up through rows of corn, watching a combine close in on him as he lay on his back, frozen in horror.
Transfixed by this memory, Billy failed to notice when the bars at the cave’s mouth slammed open. A cheerful voice boomed, “Welcome to hell, Billy!”
The child spun—and gaped.
Before him stood a ponderous, hirsute, naked man of such immense and twisted proportions that Billy felt simultaneously queasy and hysterical. The man was hugely fat; his enormous body was covered in scarlet skin that dripped with sweat, and two very large cattle horns sprouted from either side of his head. His legs terminated in cloven hooves. He looked like a perverse, sumo version of Darth Maul. The visitor’s eyes glowed red, and evil mixed with good cheer radiated from him in a searing aura. Billy clapped his hands over his mouth to prevent himself from screaming.
But he screamed anyway: Billy’s buttock cheeks parted and let loose a piercing, girlish outcry that sounded exactly like his own voice.
“Lesson Number One, Billy! You can’t hide your thoughts from Me!” With that, the elephantine figure burst into a thunderous chuckle, infernally avuncular. Fat rippled seismically. Flames of delight burst from his nipples and singed his chest hair, then guttered out.
Without missing a beat, the horned man said, “By the way, I am Satan— your new lord and master. But you, Billy, may call Me—” he squeezed out an obscenely long, trilling, blatting fart. “Only My best friends call Me by that name!” The Devil leaned close, forcing his sulfurous miasma into Billy’s unwilling nostrils. “You are My friend, aren’t you, Billy?”
Billy’s hands were still clamped over his mouth. “No! I hate you! Go away!” his buttocks shouted defiantly.
The Lord of Dung grinned a sly grin, his lips peeling back to reveal a jumble of sharp, uneven fangs. “Billy,” he said indulgently, “if you want to talk out of your ass for all eternity, by all means keep your mouth covered or closed.”
Billy said nothing, but his hands finally fell to his sides. He eyed the Devil with a mixture of curiosity and terror. “So, I’m in hell?” he finally managed. “What did I do to get here? Only bad people go to hell!”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to BigHominid's Swollen, Dangling Modifier (& Other Awfulness) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.