Trouble, Toil, and Tranquility

“It was a dark and stormy night–”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Kay!”

Kaylani shoved up off the pink shag rug and wagged her finger in Hana’s face. “You absolutely cannot start a story like that. It’s–Sofia, what’s something worse than cliché?”

Sofia flipped idly to the next page of whatever man-bludgeoningly thick tome she was reading. “Hackneyed.” 

“What does that even mean?” Hana groaned, flopping back onto Kay’s bed. The blankets felt softer than she remembered, more vibrant, too. Actually, Kaylani’s whole bedroom was more vivid, more perfect.

When she and Kay were young, dumb middle schoolers with more ambition than skill to back it up, they’d attempted to hang wallpaper up behind the bed. It was a twelve-year-old girl’s dream: flowering ivy crawling upward over a blushing pastel sky. Ideally, the vines would have lined up. In reality, the wallpaper panels were layered at odd angles and torn in a few places. 

Now, though, it didn’t look as dog-crap as she remembered.  

Kaylani tapped wildly on her phone. “Hackneyed: ‘lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite.’”

“You know I’m not creative! You want a bedtime story, have Sofia tell it.”

Sofia turned another page. “No thanks.” Kaylani gently plucked the book out of her hands. “Hey!”

“Don’t worry,” she said, tucking a bookmark inside. “I’m only confiscating it for now. It’s been ages since we’ve all been together. Let’s live in the moment, shall we?”

Hana grabbed the book and tossed it on the nightstand. “I mean, it’s not really any different from the old days. Remember our lunches senior year?”

Kay laughed. “We fought so hard to claim one of the outside tables and Sof spent every day sitting right on the other side of the window so she could read.”

“It was always too bright outside,” Sofia grumbled. 

“Well, if no one is going to tell me a story, someone’s gotta give me something to work with. Come on, ladies! What’s the goss? Any boys? Any girl? Any love interests of the non-binary variety?”

Hana stretched out along the blankets, nuzzling into the pillows. “I don’t have time for that sort of thing. I work pretty much nonstop.”

“That’s the perfect occasion for an illicit office romance!”

Sofia hummed. “That is a solid trope.”

Hana blinked dully. “My coworkers are literal demons.”

 “Fine, fine! Sof, how about you?”

She eyed her book. “I’ve been a bit preoccupied.”

“You can’t depend solely on fictional love! One of these days you have to put yourself out there.” 

“I like fictional romance. It’s safe and I don’t have to interact with anyone.” Sofia crawled across the floor before plopping on the heating duct and sprawling over it like a lizard. “What about you, Kay? If you’re talking crap you must be better off?”

Kaylani cleared her throat. “Well…” 

A pillow swung down from the bed and smacked her across the head. 

“Oh, you’re on!” Kay grabbed the throw pillow she’d been lounging on and thwacked Hana with it. Another went flying across the room and hit Sofia, launching a full on pillow war. 

The door slammed open. The girls dropped their plush weaponry. In the threshold was Kaylani’s little brother, a baseball bat clenched in quivering hands. His eyes met his sister’s. 

“Kay?” He whispered. 

She smiled. “Hey, Jer.”

He stumbled back. The bat slipped through his fingers, hitting the carpet with a dull thud. “We buried you.”  

She stood, taking a step toward him. Jerome inched back. 

“That you did. It was a beautiful service. I especially loved the lilies.”

“I’m dreaming. This is a dream.”

“Aww, I’m in your dreams? That’s cute.”

His face shuttered. “You died.” Jerome finally seemed to notice Hana and Sofia deeper in the room. “You all died. Two years ago,” he hissed. 

Hana sighed, coming up behind Kay. “I’m–”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Jerome snarled.

“Jer–”

“No, Kay. She killed you!”

Kaylani grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him into the bedroom. 

“How can you touch me?”

She shrugged. “Halloween rules. Thin veil, spiritual vacation, blah blah blah.”

“Clearly you paid as much attention in your after-life education as you did in high school,” Sofia muttered. Kay thwacked her in the arm. 

“Look, Jer, don’t blame Hana for what happened.”

“But–”

“Kay,” Hana said, “it’s fine.”

“It could have just as easily been any of us, Han. We were all drunk. We all got in the car. You were just the one behind the wheel.”

“But it was me.” Hana laid a hand on her shoulder. “The accident was my fault. I own that. If he wants to hate me for it, we can’t blame him.”

“I gave you all the shots,” Kaylani insisted.

Sofia rounded her other side and dropped her head onto Hana’s shoulder. “And I handed you my keys.”

“Then I crashed us into a pole. None of us can change that.”

Jerome let out a long, shaky breath. He picked up one of the downed pillows before squeezing it hard into his chest and tucking his face into the edge. 

 “I’ve spent years hating you,” he said into the memory foam. “I’m terrified of what it would mean to forgive you. I think, if I do that, I won’t be able to feel anything at all.”

Hana walked toward him slowly, giving Jerome time to move. He stayed, though he clung to the pillow like a shield. 

“I get it. That sorrow guts you so deep you don’t think you’ll ever get out and numbs you so bad you don’t even care if you do.”

Jerome bit his cheek. “You felt that, too?”

She hummed. “For a little while. For me, that hole was filled with guilt. I was stuck at the bottom for a long time, deciding if I even deserved to try and escape it.”

“What happened?”

Hana snorted. “I was very aggressively forced to get over it. Apparently, depressed souls put a damper on company culture.” 

“Hana’s boss is the devil,” Kaylani added with a smile. 

“He is not. He’s like my boss… six times removed.”

Jerome stared. “Huh?”

“Oh! She’s in Hell.”

Hana grimaced. “We don’t really call it that.”

“Yeah, but he’s not going to know what Trouble means.”

Sofia sighed. “That’s why we explain.” She turned to Jerome. “Look, it’s pretty simple. When you die, there’s Trouble, Toil, and Tranquility. Most people would think of it as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Hana’s in Trouble.” 

Jerome inched away from her, eyeing her warily. “So… are you, like, a demon?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.” Hana let out a long sigh. “The media portrayal of us is really disparaging. It’s not fire and brimstone, well, not all of it. Think of Trouble more as… a company in the service industry. You’ve got the employees, which is me, and then the customers. Except, the customers are evil souls being tortured even as they beg for it all to stop.”

“Hana got Best Torturer last month!”

Despite Kaylani’s peppy delivery, Jerome looked a little green. “You torture people?”

“Kay, you are not helping.” Hana ran a hand down her face. “Okay, imagine the worst guy you can think of. Now, that guy dies. It’s my job to torture him for a long, long time. This is his penance for all the evil he’s done. The act of torturing is my penance. There are souls like me, ones who committed grave sins without meaning to. We still have to pay, but there’s a set limit on it. Once I’ve squared up, I have the chance to move to Toil.”  

Sofia raised a hand. “That’s where I am, by the way.”

“What’s it like there?” Jerome asked, seemingly eager to talk about literally anything else. 

She shrugged. “Cold. Damp. Not really damp, just inconveniently damp. Like if you put one too many towels in the drier. The people are kind of annoying.”

“Why?”

Sofia crossed the room, tugging the comforter off the bed and wrapping herself in it. “There are three main reasons you end up in Toil. One is an excess of lesser sins, like lying, vanity, being too snappy at people, that sort of thing. So, those people are already super fun. The second reason is a damaged soul.”

“How are souls damaged?”

Sofia waved a hand. Well, she tried to. Her refusal to let go of the floral comforter made the motion more like a dramatic swipe of a vampire cape.

 “It depends. Some of it is deep loss or trauma that a person wasn’t able to work through in life. We get a lot of troubled souls: the depressed, the lonely. They have to find healing in Toil. That’s why it’s called that, being there is work. Then, there’s the third reason…”

Kaylani elbowed her in the ribs. “Go on, Sof. Tell him why you’re stuck in Toil.”

“Stop smiling, Kay!”

Hana smiled. “It is sort of funny, Sof.”

Sofia huffed. “The third reason is unresolved business. Mine is–”

“The Thorn Maze of the King’s Grove Heart,” Kaylani blurted out. 

Jerome raised an unimpressed brow. “That cheesy fantasy book series?”

“The cheesiness is what makes it so amazing! It’s stuffed with all the most common tropes, but it’s done so well—”

Kay covered Sofia’s mouth. “She’ll go on forever if you let her. Basically, she’s stuck until the last book is released.” 

Sofia freed herself and grabbed Jerome by the shoulders. “So if you could politely urge Felicity Yara to finish the series, that would be great.”

Jerome blinked. “... I’ll get right on that.”

Kaylani shoved Sofia off to the side. “Jer, Jer! I’m in Tranquility! Isn’t that great.”

“You?” He squinted. 

Sofia snorted. “Yeah we were all surprised. Ow! Stop hitting me!”

“Stop deserving it.” Kaylani sniffed. “Anyway, miniskirts don’t preclude me from going to Tranquility.”

“‘Preclude,’ maybe you are learning. OW!”

Kay shook out her reddening hand. “Things are pretty sweet up there. It’s always the perfect temperature for how I’m feeling. The food is amazing. There’s no drama at all.”

“Sounds kind of boring.”

Her shoulders sank. “It’s so boooringggg. I mean, seeing Nana is great–she says hi–but everyone with any beef is kept apart. None of my friends are there yet. I’m already finished streaming every Born-In-Another-World anime series. What else is there?!” 

“You wanna come torture some souls?

“Or send encouraging messages to Felicity Yara?”

Kay playfully shoved them both away by their faces. 

“You could look out for me,” Jerome said in a small voice. 

Kaylani smiled softly at him and pulled him into a hug. “You should get to bed. It’s almost midnight.”

He clenched at her shirt. “I don’t want to go.”

“You can’t stay. You’ve got a life to live, and you better live a damn good one.”

Hana sent him a small smile. “For all our sakes.”

Hesitantly, Jerome nodded. Kay led him to her door. He turned, took in the sight he never knew to miss: Kaylani, Sofia, and Hana together in her girly bedroom. 

“Goodbye, Jer. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Kaylani smiled a final time, then gently pushed him out of the room. The door clicked shut.

Jerome stood outside for probably three minutes, ears straining, but he couldn’t hear anything from the other side. Tentatively, he opened the door one more time, but the room was as he remembered it. The once-pink carpet was replaced by faux-hardwood. The walls were painted a sage green. The bed had a plaid comforter and a few blue pillows propped against the gray headboard. Every trace of Kay was ripped up and tossed out, as though that would force her memory away, too. 

For a moment, he thought maybe it really was all one elaborate, desperate dream, that something in him truly shattered when his sister died that fall night. Then, he spotted his baseball bat propped up perfectly in the corner of the room.