Toothbrush Hell

by Iain Lowson

So, anyway, I died. Well, I dreamed I did. While I was brushing my teeth.

 Sorry; I didn’t die while I was brushing my teeth. I dreamed while I was brushing my teeth. My dentist wouldn’t be pleased but, well, he wasn’t there.

 I went to Hell. I know it was Hell because it involved queuing. The queue wound up the inside wall of a rock vault; a giant cylinder of dark orange stone. Above was a faint glow of healthy-looking light. Way above. Below… Well, look, it was Hell. You figure it out. The words ‘red’ and ‘flickering’ featured heavily.

 The queue seemed to be entirely men. We were shuffling slowly up an incline. Slowly, not even taking steps. Shuffling. It was claustrophobic. Dust, created by billions of shuffling feet wearing away the rock, coated everything, so everyone was the same colour. The colour of the rock.
Weirdly, everyone was being terribly courteous. This was clearly a Hell for the British. No-one pushed past, though there was space to do so. No-one spoke either. We just smiled in an embarrassed way if we happened to catch anyone’s eye, rolled our eyes a bit, then looked down to the dusty ground.

 I looked to my left, at the bare wall. I started to see suggestions of shapes in the dusty surface. The shuffling was slow and monotonous. I reached out to the wall and scratched at it. Picked it. A bit of rock came away. An idea came to me. I picked and scratched some more.

 The guys next to me saw what I was doing. Tentatively, they reached out to the rock face. In a slow ripple effect, the shuffling stopped and the quiet scratching began. Rock dust fell about us in ever thicker clouds. In the end, we could barely even see the rock in front of us. Then, slowly, a ripple of silence moved up and down the queue as we all finished.

 I’d scratched in a happy smiling face in as perfect a circle as I could manage. I was proud of that. I looked to my right. The guy next to me was looking proud too. He turned and resumed shuffling. I looked at the cock and balls he’d scratched into the wall.

 I looked left. The guy behind me was waiting dully to resume shuffling, not looking at me in case I might think he was pressuring me to move. That would be rude. He’d scratched and picked a cock and balls into the wall too.

 I looked around. The walls of Hell were decorated with a frieze of crudely carved male genitalia, broken only by my little smiling face.

 Who knew it was possible to feel so self-conscious in Hell?