The road to hell is paved with laughter

“Are you there god? It’s me.”

Clint was drenched in sweat and his feet felt like ripping off, his loose, torn shirt doing little to protect him from the UV rays of the sun. The heat that day was like no other; waves of it coming like a taunt and beating down against his skin so much that he could hear his heartbeat, but he kept walking.

“It’s a wonder…how this all started,” Clint drawled, his voice sounding foreign even to him. Scratchy and tired, begging for water. “I couldn't have imagined it as a kid. Still can’t believe it now.”

Their screams came back to him, their pleading and wailing and crying—

“Where do you get off being so godless?”

The winds hitting his face were mixed with little bits of sand and small minerals, making it all the much harder to keep his eyes open as he walked. It was a desert like no other; isolated from the rest of the world and desolate of life.

He kept walking, stepping on something that crunched beneath his worn torn boots. A scorpion, probably. Something insignificant…something that probably deserved it.

“You remember when we used to talk?” He asked, looking up at the sky for an answer. “We used to talk a whole lot…yeah. A whole lot alright. You never had anything to say to me back then either.” He stopped looking at the sky in favor of paying attention to where his foot would land, but he kept talking. “Couldn’t give a damn if I was tired…or sick or starving. Couldn’t give a rat’s ass if I was bleeding.”

“We did nothing to you! Nothing!”

“How could you be so heartless?!”

“Please just let these people go!—”

“I do wonder— He let out a cough, his throat straining to get the words out. “Would you care for them bleeding?”

Clint kept on walking, not bothering to take the mysterious crunchy thing off his boot, or even run the bottom of his shoe through the sand. He didn’t care. He needed to keep walking. Just keep walking until he reached his destination.

“You know,” he sniffed, “I would wonder what it is that I did wrong. Was I not praying enough? Was I not being kind enough? Was I just born cursed?”

A silence followed his question…and then a sound.

Clint whipped his head around in the direction he heard it and found nothing. Nothing but sand and dead trees and a town in the distance. A very quiet town.

His heartbeat picked up and his breathing became more labored. He couldn’t tell if the sweat going down his body had much to do with the heat anymore.

He didn’t bother looking around any more after the first look, not wishing to see anything that would make this already unbearable journey all the more unbearable.

Clint kept walking, the crunch all but disappeared and his will to talk a little less pronounced.

Yet, he spoke. “All of those bastards I came all this way for…they're all dead. Long dead. " His breath was still labored, his mouth parched and desperate for any other liquid that wasn't his own saliva. "Still, I couldn't leave without doing something I guess…I’m probably going to hell, aren’t I?”

A drop of sweat went into his eye and he hissed at the contact, reaching up with his dirty, soot caked hand to rub at his eye, evidently making the itch and irritation worse. “Fuck!” He shouted, tripping over his feet as he continued to walk with the itch in his eye. He then laughed, suddenly and maniacally, cackling like he thought of the funniest joke at that moment.

Clint went on like that, walking, scratching, laughing, tripping over his feet and falling in the sand—only to get back up and do it all over again.

And then he stopped. All of it. He stopped the laughing and the scratching and the tripping and the falling—and stood. He let his arm fall to his side and let the small stream of hot wind and sand hit his face and he stood. Silently. Waiting patiently for something to happen. For something to respond.

When nothing did, he kept walking. The limp in his leg is more pronounced now and his face all the more dirty. He ran his dirty fingers through his sandy hair and continued the one sided conversation, “that little girl back there. With the ponytail and the dots on her face…she looked like me. I think. I think that’s what I used to look like. Pitiful…and begging for mercy.”

He kicked a rock in his path and watched it bounce across the path before he followed it to kick it again. “Probably thinks I’m a monster. Her mother’s probably praying I go to hell after I punched that little girl.”

“I don't wanna die I don’t wanna die sir please—”

He kicked at the rock again. “Probably waiting for a response from you.”

And again. “Probably thinking she’s going to them pretty pearly gates.”

And again. “With the little garden.”

And again. “With the damned tree that got us stuck like this in the first place—”

Clint kicked at the rock again— this time much harder, hitting it against a dead tree a dozen feet ahead of him and scaring the few birds perched on its tiny branch. He looked towards the trunk of the tree where the rock landed and pulled a face.

At its roots sat the carcass of a dead snake. Its smell was poignant and glaring thanks to the heat of the desert. The snake was big, on the side of a python and it had a dull green and brown pattern coating its scales. Clint recoiled in disgust at the sight and smell, further nauseated as the birds that were previously perched on the branch, fluttered towards the snake and started picking at it.

“Well ain’t that a beautiful creation” He mutters under his breath ,“A creation of god.”

Despite his throat feeling immensely dry he spit out the scent of the dead snake in his mouth and walked on from the scene, scratching at his neck as a random itch took over the spot. He continued on talking, “she offered me a muffin when I first came into town. A nice blueberry…said she made it all herself…”

“Make it all by yourself, did you?”

“Yep! I even made the dough!”

“No help from your mama over there?”

She grinned, all of her crooked teeth on display, with the exception of her middle two teeth missing. “Nope! I made it all by myself!”

“It was a really good muffin—” he barely let out his last sentence before letting out another desperate cough. Followed by another one. He coughed for a while after that, his chest and throat burning from the force of it. He couldn't stop.

He kept walking.

The sun followed him as he walked through the desert and he walked for a long time. He had no watch, no water, no food and no means of communication. Just the hot blazing star hitting him, like it was preparing him for what was to come.

He nearly burst into laughter again at the thought of it. “If this is all hell is, then you ain't got nothing to show for god. Years of ridicule in the street and beat downs and humiliation…”

The itch in his neck came back again, this time it extended to his upper and lower back and he scratched at it with his uncomfortably stuffed nails. He scratched and scratched trying to find some release from the almost painful experience but his nails only got stuffier with the dry skin bits.

“Always laughing,” he muttered. “Always tryna get some type of entertainment out of me like you the devil they all talk…about..”

The next words he had planned to speak into the air evaporated and his feet paused their movement. In the distance, on a sand dune a few hundred feet away stood a figure. A tall man, shadowed by the sun behind him, wearing a cattleman hat and looking straight in his direction. He clenched his fists and stared back at the figure, his teeth catching on to his lips and tearing the skin…but he refused to blink.

“Who are you?” He gritted through his teeth, his body shaking. With fear or with anger he wasn’t sure, but he just kept staring at the figure. “You don’t get to do that to me. You don’t get to show up after every little thing I do wrong and then disappear.”

The wind grew fiercer, pushing at him. “You can’t make me care because I don’t! I don’t care!" His throat protested against the strain, but his screams only got louder. "They all got to grow up after ruining me! They got to make children that bake stupid muffins and I can’t! I can’t do anything ever again!”

The figure didn’t move. Didn’t show any indication that it was even alive. But Clint had enough of waiting for this mysterious foe to do something.

He barely thought of it before running towards the shadowed figure, refusing to shut his eyes or let them rest for even a second. Sand and wind flew into his eyes and his tears mixed with the residue of gun powder he rubbed on his face earlier. His vision was shifting and it was getting all the more harder to make anything out. But he saw it. A shadow at the hill and he kept running towards it.

The closer he got, the louder they got.

“Why can’t you just do what you’re told?”

His mother, ever expecting him to just lay down and take his punishments.

“Maybe hanging one of your sisters will do the trick.”

His father, always present with his tough love.

“Why bother trying, Clint? We’ll never be good enough.”

His loving, sweet, pathetic, stupid baby sister.

“You’re gonna rot by the time they find you!”

The neighborhood kids.

“Did you really think we liked you?”

Them.

“Couldn’t even get the right bottle…”

Him.

All of them. Too loud, so loud, so close to his ears and his head and his eyes were burning and his skin was flaking and his lips were bleeding—

He grabbed at the shadow…and blinked.

Nothing was there, but the sands and the wind and him.

He looked up at the sun from right above him, as if he was looking at it for an answer. An explanation.

“...all you do…is mock me.”

The silence was almost just as unbearable as the voices were.

He turned away from the sun and plopped onto the ground, staring out into the distance.

And let the tears from his eyes finally fall.

“Hey god...you’re not real, are you?” he croaks, staring at his nails that were caked in every particle he came across that day. Sand, minerals, gunpowder and fertilizer, and itching from it all.

He scratched at his hand, oddly feeling the most calm he had in a long time. Not angry, not sad, not expectant or joyful. “You can’t be real. This reverend, all mighty, all princely..all merciful being. You’re a fraud. That’s the realest you get.”

He looked up after a moment of scratching at his skin and sighed. The wind calmed, the sand that was previously hitting his face only slightly moving against the earth. It was quiet, peaceful, and completely and utterly torturous.

“Even if you were real…they’d all still die. They’d all die screaming…praying to be saved.”

The next moment, a loud and thunderous explosion went off in the distance, followed by another one and another one.

Four explosions, all within seconds of each other, and all within a small quaint, humble town, many hundreds of feet away from the dune he sat upon. He felt nothing as he saw the city crumble within minutes. Felt nothing as he thought about the little girl attaching herself to his legs, begging and pleading and sobbing.

“But where’s the fun in saving anyone?”