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A warm glow rests across Vivian Sangria’s face. A page turns in their lap, the book participating with a similar glow radiating from the oversized fireplace. They looked over at Ainsley Ginger– ow, sorry, Colonel Ainsley Ginger–impossibly comfortable and snoring loudly in a warm armchair. Jessie Hazel sat next to them, reliving a book from his young adulthood. He looked up at the grand murals and paintings above them, thankful that this purgatory isn’t like the classical depictions shown above their heads.
They all heard a loud thud, followed by a slew of expletives wheezed out. Well, Hazel thought, Purgatory can only be peaceful for so long. Sangria and Hazel strained around to see the new person behind their luxurious armchairs; Ginger’s snoring lessened suddenly from a persistent drone to deep breathing.
“Of course someone drops in and he doesn’t even wake up,” Sangria mumbled to Hazel, who stifled a laugh in response. “Are you alright?” There was a groan in response, followed by a few words too slurred for the others to understand. Hazel’s brows furrowed.
“Did you hear what he said?”
“No?”
“Well, I know you couldn’t understand him,” Hazel said matter-of-factly, “Did it sound like English to you?” Hazel asked. Sangria’s face fell as she heard the syllables coming from a very nauseous Demyan Midnight. They heard a strangely wet smack as Midnight put his arm down to stabilize himself.
“What the fuck–” Sangria said as she finally got up out of her chair to face Midnight, Hazel followed suit.
The new member of Purgatory was unimaginably soaked and looked as if a drowned rat was an underwhelming man. Midnight attempted to wipe away the hair plastered to his forehead and ended up just smearing and matting it more. The wound on his head had darkened, but occasionally a burgundy smear would trickle down his neck, loosened from the inexplicable wetness that stuck to him. The ringing pain from his head injury was the least of his problems now, as transitioning into the spiritual realm washed him with the worst nausea he had ever experienced (and he was numb to hangover-caused symptoms by this point).
“Where the fuck am I?” Midnight sputtered, looking up at the blurred figures of Sangria and Hazel.
“What did he say?” Sangria asked Hazel. Hazel looked like he was fighting a massive headache himself; he was attempting to pull any knowledge of his limited Russian out of his head after all these years.
“Where–he asked where he was!” Hazel was momentarily excited from remembering a single interrogative word, but his face fell after realizing now he had to explain purgatory in a toddler’s broken vocabulary. “Oh god, where do I even begin?”
Ginger languidly stretched, finally awoken due to Hazel’s excited chattering and Midnight’s unsettling sloshing. One of Ginger’s eyes opened and locked onto Midnight. He froze mid-stretch, his eyes scanning Midnight and darting to Hazel and Sangria occasionally.
“Why is he wet?” Ginger asked, reanimating himself and adjusting back into his chair, analyzing the situation in front of him.
“We don’t know, he speaks Russian,” Sangria responded.
“Oh, that’ll be fun.” Ginger got up and went to make himself tea, somehow. Midnight’s nausea had finally subsided enough to talk without feeling like he was about to throw up.
“English–you people speak English? Fuck, I don’t remember much,” Midnight had shakily seated himself in an armchair behind him, the armrests darkening from the water sloughing off of him. Sangria cringed for the chair’s sake.
“Do you speak English?” Hazel asked slowly. Midnight processed for a moment. Speak… Speak. English…English–these bastards are asking if I speak English. They’re not even trying to speak Russian.
“Go fu–” Midnight spewed several regional expletives.
“I don’t think he does,” Hazel observantly said to Sangria.
“I speak English–little.” Midnight gestured to accentuate his point in not knowing much. “You speak Russian?” he asked, his eyebrows raised doubtfully.
“Uh– yes, a little. How are–you? My…name is Jessie Hazel,” he responded. Midnight’s expression fell even further.
“Your Russian–shit,” Midnight stated, never wanting Hazel to speak again. “ don’t like how your face looks. It’s unsettling.”
“I understood him! At least the first part!” Sangria turned to Hazel, whose expression had gone sour from Midnight’s English remark, and made plenty of assumptions about what he had said in Russian after.
“It’s not like your English is any better, prick,” Hazel responded indignantly. Midnight only got more agitated, his nose flaring at the idea that this American bastard was any better than he was. Midnight reared up for another set of insults before Sangria put herself between the two battling toddlers.
“Boys,” her tone transcended language. Stop yelling or I’ll give you something to yell about. “I’ll be right back. In the meantime, play nice.” Sangria walked toward the towering book cases, and disappeared in the darkness. Hazel and Midnight didn’t say a word, but their expressions and irate glances toward each other told enough. They were each about to mutter some insult under their breath when Sangria came back holding two large hardcover books.
“One for you—” She hefted an English–to–Russian dictionary on Hazel’s lap. “—and one for you,” and put a Russian–to–English dictionary on the slightly damp arm of Midnight’s chair. He went to put it in his lap as well but Sangria grabbed the book from him and put it back on the chair.
“You’re wet,” she pinched at the fabric of the soggy suit sleeve and rubbed her fingers together. “The book doesn’t like getting wet.” She pointed back at the book. He nodded like he understood, but she could see in his eyes he had no idea what she was trying to convey. He kept the book on the chair, so Sangria was content.
Both Hazel and Midnight furiously flipped through their dictionaries, dead set on getting in the first word (the first word for them being asshole, but they soon realized that dictionaries typically don’t have expletives in them).
Sangria took a step back and folded her arms in front of her, waiting for the show. Ginger had come back from wherever he went, eating something crumbly and pastry-like.
“What are they doing?” Ginger mumbled through his biscuit.
“They’re arguing,” Sangria said, satisfied. Ginger looked confused, but not confused enough to care. He stood there, silently dropping ghost-crumbs on the carpet, waiting for whatever Sangria was waiting for.
All of purgatory was silent, save for the furious turning of pages.
Midnight flipped to the opening gambit: “Ffffascist!”
Hazel’s expression molded into different shapes of indignation; first surprised, then shocked, then fully offended. There were several seconds of strained silence as Hazel went through all of these emotions. Sangria and Ginger held their breath to suppress their laughter, straining to not break while glancing at each other.
“How dare you call me that,” Hazel wheezed, the insult apparently taking all the breath out of him. “You—You—” Hazel flipped through his dictionary furiously. “You—idiot—” He translated and flipped back through the book, while Midnight’s face also contorted into one of vexation while Hazel stuttered. “Idiot pig.”
The encounter repeated itself, one would go through several moments of increasing aggravation after a remark until they found the right words to stab back. Sangria took some pleasure in watching them fight like adults going through their terrible twos, letting them argue for a while before finally interrupting and getting back to business.
She shooed away Hazel, who was smoking from the ears, and she sat in his place. She adjusted herself and balanced the dictionary and a notepad on the armrests of the chair. She wrote something on the notepad after flipping through the dictionary a few times.
“My name is V i v i a n S a n g r i a and I am from the United Kingdom. How are you?” She wrote, then handed the notepad and a pen to Midnight for him to read and respond. He looked up at Sangria after reading and huffed. He scribbled something below Sangria’s line and handed it back to them.
“Where am I?” Hazel and Ginger looked over Sangria to see what Midnight had written. They looked at each other with an unspoken sense of dread.
“Hell,” Ginger said flatly.
“Technically, it’s purgatory,” Sangria responded. Hazel leaned over to the dictionary, flipped to the word ‘purgatory’, and spun it around for Midnight to see. Midnight shook his head and tapped his previous question on the notepad. Sangria turned their dictionary back around and wrote more on the notepad.
“We are in a library in purgatory. He thinks it’s hell,” Sangria gave Midnight the notepad and pointed at Ginger in reference to the second statement. Midnight knitted his eyebrows more in anger than confusion.
“Purgatory is not real,” he wrote.
“You are dead, we are dead.” Sangria responded after collaborating on word choice with Hazel and Ginger for a moment.
“You are liar,” Midnight wrote quickly, his face getting red.
“I don’t think he believes us,” Ginger said after Midnight underlined his last statement.
“No shit,” Sangria rolled her eyes. She stood up and started pointing at the paintings above them to Midnight. The paintings were classical, fire-spikes-up-your-asshole depictions of purgatory, and were strangely comforting considering that they were in a library and not getting speared or hanged or crucified.
They could’ve certainly been in a worse purgatory. Ginger should have been in a worse purgatory.
Midnight went back to the notepad and wrote “This is not real. Is it a dream?” The others leaned over the notepad to read it, then looked at each other uneasily. After a moment of thought Sangria took the notepad and simply wrote “Yes."
“Whatever to keep him manageable, I guess. He’ll figure it out eventually,” she said, taking a deep, resigned breath. She saw the look of anguish on his face and decided he needed some time alone. She got up from her chair and left Midnight while she mulled the situation over with Hazel and Ginger.
Midnight was not pleased with the situation being a dream, and was certainly not pleased with it being purgatory. Being a staunch atheist (which was one of many reasons the others back home didn’t like him), he didn’t believe that there was any form of afterlife, let alone the Christian depiction of purgatory. Fortunately this one didn’t include hellfire or spikes in unfavorable places, but it had Americans, which to him was close enough.
He also thought the perpetual sogginess was simply adding insult to injury. He didn't have an above-average distaste for being wet, but it still wasn’t pleasant. He tried to shake his hands to flick some of the water off, successfully splattering the armrest of the chair, but it didn’t seem to help. He got up and walked to the massive fireplace to see if that would help, but it just made his drenched clothes warm instead. When he gave up on drying via the fireplace, he walked back to the chair he had occupied. He quickly realized that he would rather be warm and wet than very cold and wet, the contrast from being just at the fireplace compelled him to push his chair right up to the flames.
Sangria had witnessed Midnight’s desperation for heat from the private distance away; watching him impetuously heave at the bulky armchair gave her a new sense of sympathy. She had the other two men move another chair close to Midnight’s, and she sat down and tried to communicate with him again.
She painstakingly word-by-word explained to Midnight the norms of purgatory with a new sense of optimism. She quickly realized, however, why Midnight was murdered, and began to empathize with his murderer, but kept her opinions to herself. He was a genuinely awful person to be around, but he was simultaneously intriguing to her purely because of how everything he was or did was so foreign to them.
At one point she attempted to give him a handkerchief to keep up with his condition, but it became fully soaked and stained with blood from his head. She then set up a rotating system of handkerchiefs, letting some dry while others were in use. He begrudgingly appreciated her efforts to keep him comfortable; voicing his appreciation had never been a common occurrence.
So they went through the laborious task of communicating via dictionary, with Midnight bitterly learning rudimentary English so that their exchanges could go smoother (he never corrected his accent, despite Hazel’s attempts).
The bickering and childish insults, however, continued into eternity.