Hell is Smother People

Look. I really don’t know of any other way to say this, but I’m tired.

Like the kind of tired where you feel like you might vomit.

The kind of tired where you can’t fall asleep because relaxing takes too much effort.

The kind of tired when you laugh at American Humane Society commercials.

The kind of tired where you suddenly find yourself in a giddy rush unloading the dishwasher and you don’t know why you are doing it because half the dishes are clean and half the dishes are dirty and you know that it was you that somehow mixed them together, but you look for someone to blame anyway, only to stare up at the kitchen window and see your maniacal reflection and come face to face with the truth: you are so tired that you have suddenly found yourself in a giddy rush unloading the dishwasher and you don’t know why you are doing it.

When I died, the time came for me to decide whether to stay tethered to the last place I called home or take my chances on a game of afterlife Plinko hosted by Bob Barker, I chose to stay.

I knew Bob Barker knew what I had done. That I had watched that ad — you know, the one with Sarah McLaughlin — and I laughed, and I knew that I could never convince the live studio audience that I wasn’t a heartless bastard. I was.

Now, I’m stuck here at home — my home — 24 hours a day, seven days an eternity, and they never, ever leave.

They are here at seven in the morning. They are here at noon. They are here at midnight.

They are here for first breakfast, second breakfast, elevenises, and all the other meals in between and afterward. They just won’t go away.

And I’m tired.

I go to the pantry to escape and Daddy Doofus shows up to grab a bag of Andy Capp Hot Fries, screams, and drops his 20-ounce $8 bottle of Rogue Dead Guy Ale, and I’m looking at it like he just committed a war crime.

Or I go to the linen closet and here comes Mommy Moron with a laundry basket full of newly washed beach towels they haven’t used in a year, won’t be using this year, and which were washed for no reason other than she was bored and terrified and looking for something to take her mind off of everything, and then she sees me and it’s all screams and shivers and shotgun shells and the hole in the wall won’t be fixed for another month or two when Mommy Moron and Doofus Dad finally feel comfortable enough to have a stranger enter their home. Who knows? It could be the month after that.

And don’t even get me started about the twins and their twin beds. There is no rest under there. And the closest is worse. Half-eaten donuts, a box with a dehydrated frog and a moldy ham sandwich, and a jar of that was once filled with butterflies but is now nothing more than a black goo. And the puppets. Don’t even get me started on the puppets.

I’m tired. So. Very. Tired.

And I can’t help but feel like I took Bob Barker up on that game of Plinko and the cats and dogs cheered when that final chip fell.