by James Wymore
You can access your life ballad by picking up any stone tablet in any classroom. Your ballad will automatically appear in English. You may use other phantom applications to learn Avestan, learn about reading music, study Zoroastrian scripture, read children’s stories, or play games.
Good luck!
Of all the bizarre things about the message before me, the fact that eight rules appeared when the instructions requested we follow six caused the hairs to bristle on the back of my neck. I read the instructions again and stared at the list in utter bewilderment. Had the all-mighty Lord of Car Dealers (which is what I thought every time the word “Mazda” came into my head) actually made an error? How was I supposed to obey instructions that didn’t add up?
There wasn’t any chance of my breaking rule number one, as I had already made up my mind that the goat lady and this Hell would not make me cry. Rules two and three were so far beyond my present comprehension of life in Hell they didn’t faze me.
The mystery of rule five bothered me more than any other. I assumed it was there to tell boys not to be mean to girls. Did it mean girls should be extra nice to other girls too? Or was it saying girls didn’t have to worry about being nice to anyone? It seemed unfair not to include instruction on how to treat the boys, as flattered as I was to feel somewhat rare and special. Or else extra stupid and careless about dying young and going to Hell early.
What about singing happy songs? We did have to sing our life’s ballad to get out of this place, didn’t we? Unless that meant our life’s ballad would be sad. Maybe it was supposed to be unbearably off-key. No, that couldn’t be it—the whiteboard said we had to sing the song in tune.
When I was mortal, singing had always made me happy inside in ways that nothing else did. I tested my vocal chords with a soft hum. “Heeeello,” I sang to the whiteboard. Then I realized I had made no attempted to speak since the goat lady snapped her fingers and transported me here. So, Betlize didn’t bind my tongue for eternity.
My voice was clear and surprisingly controllable in ways that had never clicked for me before. But when I tried to hum something familiar—Disney classics, church songs, Mama’s lullabies from when I was really little and she used to rock me to sleep for an afternoon nap—my throat pinched and chills swept through my body.
The harder I pushed, the more frozen and sickly I felt inside, like I brushed some forbidden barrier and was about to walk off a cliff, or steal. The paralysis, which came from my mind and not some obvious physical restriction, startled me so much that I clamped my mouth shut and turned away from the whiteboard, crossing my arms. Maybe the demon had put some kind of a curse on my tongue after all.
The sixth instruction listed no consequences or reasons to obey it. I turned slowly to the whiteboard and studied it once more. What would happen if I erased the message? In experiment, I drew close and smudged off the tiniest piece of an a-letter’s tail. Nothing happened. The strong smell of the dry-erase ink conjured a sense of impermanence and changeability to its message.
Could I write on the board, too? No consequences were listed for doing that either. I spun around and searched the room for a marker. I found sharpened Number 2 pencils and stacks of white loose-leaf paper in baskets on top of the tablet cases. But there were no markers, and few crannies to hide them.
Panic and loneliness crawled up inside my chest like a frightened creature lived there. Memories of my short life on Earth flashed before my eyes in detail vivid and painful on a variety of levels. Moments of guilt, embarrassment, and mortification chased deep sorrows that bonding time full of laughter and fun with my family was over forever. I wanted to scream. I rubbed my eyes, wondering suddenly where the other children might be. There were other children here, weren’t there? Or was that just one more of the Great Whiteboard’s riddles?
As though in response to my anxious thoughts, another child whizzed past the room, wailing and slapping their feet. The classroom had no door, I realized, only an empty frame that opened onto a hallway. A weird mixture of relief and giddiness washed through me. I wasn’t alone.
I rushed out of the room and saw a boy my age speeding down a wide, blue-marbled corridor that appeared to have no end. Other children emerged from classrooms all around me. We took shy stock of each other. A tense chatter broke out.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I spun round. Another girl. She was tall and a little bit stocky, with dark hair that hung past her shoulders, deep brown skin like mine, and dewy black eyes.
“Hi,” she said in a quiet tone. She smiled like the gesture was effortless. “My name is Lina. I mean, my name is Carolina, but I go by… I mean I went by… you can call me Lina for short.” She extended her hand for me to shake.
I didn’t like girls who were a lot bigger than me, and she intimidated me just a little despite her warm greetings. I shook her hand anyway. “I’m Justina,” I said. I needed to make friends if I didn’t want to go crazy in this place, and she probably felt the same way.
“Did you wake up in one of the classrooms?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.” She looked down at her bare feet, which I noticed were at least two sizes bigger than my own. Talking must not have been as easy for her as it looked.
“Was there a big whiteboard in your room?”
“You mean one with eight dry-erase commandments on it that only tells us to follow six?”
She looked up and frowned at me. “Is that what they’re called? The Dry-Erase Commandments?”
I shrugged. “That’s what I call them because I think they’re stupid rules that don’t make sense. Which six of the eight rules are we supposed to follow? Or are we supposed to follow all eight? Are we supposed to be nice to the boys too? It doesn’t tell us that either. See? The instructions have holes in them.”
“Did yours talk about working together to get out of… you know… where we are, and talk in another place about focusing on ourselves and no one else? I don’t really understand what that means.”
I thought for a moment. The whiteboard’s message appeared in my mind word-for-word in perfect clarity. “You mean the rule where it talks about ‘working together in harmony,’ and the other rule telling us to stay focused on our own tasks and not to worry about everyone else? You’re right. It sounds like another hole in the rules. I think the mighty Lord of Car Dealers is crazy and put holes in on purpose to freak us out.”
Lina furrowed a pair of bushy brows that suited her round face. Her mouth opened as though to ask a question, then she closed it again and glared at me. Her cheeks turned red. I assume this meant she figured out my reference to “Mazda,” and decided it was a bad joke she didn’t want to laugh at. Her embarrassment irritated me. At the same time, I was pleased. At least she was smart enough to get my reference without having to ask me what I’d meant.
Two more girls waved as they ran down the hallway toward us. One girl with ebony skin like the boy who sat next to me in the demon’s office pushed into me with instant affection as she slowed. I couldn’t help but smile as I fell into a silly little embrace with the newcomer. We unwound, and she leaned her arm on my shoulder to catch her breath.
“Hey… chicas !” she panted. “We girls should stick together.” She was tall and rail thin. Not as tall as Lina, though. “I’m Ester,” she said. She gestured to the other girl. “And this is Marissa. We just met.”
The other girl was shorter than me with an olive complexion and long, feathery eyelashes. “I can say my own name,” she said in a nasal, high-pitched voice. She jabbed a thumb at her chest. “I’m Marissa.”
I winced and hoped she pinched her own voice that way out of habit, rather than some weird physical trait that had followed her into Hell. She would have to sing her ballad in tune somehow. Then again, maybe that was yet another hole in the instructions—not everyone in Hell could actually learn to sing new songs in tune. Maybe no one could. I shuddered. But as soon as I tried to believe it was possible we might never leave,
a strange certainty solidified in my chest, like a stone, that we all would leave eventually, every single one of us.
I introduced myself, and Ester let go of me to pull Lina into a hug when she extended her hand and offered her name. We discovered that all four of us came from Latin-American homes, and we all knew little to no Spanish. I noticed the two new girls had found something to tie back their hair. Ester’s was frizzy and poofed out behind her head. Marissa’s larger curls hung down and brushed the back of her neck like my hair did.
“Nice hairbands,” I said. “Where did you—?”
“Have you looked at the tablets yet?” Marissa interrupted with all the zeal of someone who had just received a fancy new electronic device for her birthday and had to show it off or the world would die. Literally. She held out the one in her arms. “When I hold it, this thing shows the file for my song. See, look.” She held out the tablet for us to see. A handful of application icons floated on the smooth surface of the iPad-sized stone in gold and white hues.
There were more than just a couple reading apps about music and Zoro-whatever… Zoroastrianism. Strange… I knew the name of the One True Religion by heart now, like I knew daylight and stag beetles, even though I didn’t want to remember it. There was a whole library of children’s stories, fables, even history. I spotted the game library app and was curious what games it held. Would the gaming graphics all be that weird gold-tone of the other phantom apps?
Marissa showed us an app named “Marissa Gonzales’s Ballad.”
“When Ester holds it, it shows the file for her ballad.” Marissa pushed the tablet into Ester’s arms. The stone went blank. New folders appeared. Where Marissa Gonzales’s Ballad once graced the screen, the application file now read “Ester Noble’s Ballad.”
I reached for the tablet, and Ester jerked it out of my reach. “Wait, don’t grab it.”
“I just wanted to see,” I said. “I wasn’t going to take it from you.”
“If two people touch it at the same time, it turns off,” said Marissa.
“One person has to hold the tablet at a time in order for it to turn on,” Ester confirmed.
“Oh.” I folded my arms and slid back just a step.
“There are some cool games on here too,” said Marissa.
“Have you figured out where the one application is that we’re supposed to use to translate our songs?” asked Lina.
“The one on Avestan? Yeah, it’s on the first screen.” Ester exited out of the library collection to show us.
“Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to figure out how to use all the applications we need to get our ‘tasks’ done before playing any games,” I agreed. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. I want to know what happened to my brother.”
Marissa whined, “Your brother? But I thought we didn’t have families anymore.”
Anger flared inside me. I clenched my fists. “I have a brother named Mark. A bear attacked us while we were camping with our mom and dad during summer vacation, and I have to find out if he’s still alive or if he’s stuck here in Hell somewhere.”
A quiet swept over not only our group, but beyond into the hallway packed with boys. I guess no one else was ready to talk about how they died.
A new voice asked, “Do you think other people we know who died might be in here somewhere?”
I turned to see the tall boy from the goat lady’s office. She had bound his tongue for saying he didn’t think it was fair we had to come to Hell when we didn’t know the truth. His presence here startled me. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I had ever met outside of this… school, or whatever it was.
Hope welled inside me for a moment, thinking I might find my brother here if he was dead. But the whiteboard said this Hell was based on a folktale. There were no grown-ups here, living or dead. They had to be somewhere else then. It struck me like the undeniable stone of reality in my heart about escaping Hell someday that there were many, many more Hells than just this one.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” I snapped. “We’re not going to find anyone we know in here, and you know it. We’re not going to find out what happened to anyone until we get out.”
“But we know each other.”
Gasps and murmurs rippled out around us.
“I didn’t know you before I died,” I sneered.
“But you were in the demon’s—”
“It’s just another hole in the stupid rules to freak us out!”
“We have to follow the rules to get out,” said Lina.
I spun on her. “I thought you agreed with me that the rules didn’t make any sense.”
“No,” said Lina. “All I said was that I didn’t understand them. I wanted to know if you’d figured out anything.”
“I think I’m hungry,” said Ester, changing the subject. “What about you guys?”
Marissa whined, “I’m starving. Let’s find a cafeteria.”
My stomach growled at the mention of food. Why did we still have to eat? We were dead! That was stupid too. Everything about this place was stupid. “Fine,” I growled just to be louder than my stomach. “Let’s get food.”
I read The Armadillo’s Song on the tablet Marissa had brought while we waited in a long cafeteria line to get our food. The story was about an armadillo that wanted to sing but couldn’t. All the other animals made fun of him, until one day an old man told him he knew a way to make the armadillo sing—and be famous among all the animals—if he really wanted it. The armadillo really wanted it, so the old man killed him and made a flute from his shell. All the animals loved the music the old man played on the armadillo-shell flute, and the moral of the story was that devoted artists often sacrifice their lives for their art. I had no idea how our Hell was supposed to be based on this story. We weren’t armadillos in Hell, and as far as I knew, no one had been turned into one. As for the story itself, I thought it a cautionary tale about being careful what you sacrificed for something else.
After Lina read the story, she said she thought it was about sacrificing all our passions and desires to be one with God’s will. “The old man is Lord Mazda,” she said. “We are the armadillos who wish to sing our life’s ballad so we can get out of Hell.”
“If Lord Mazda is the old man, he’s a total jerk,” I said.
Ester rounded on me. Her hands clenched into fists. “The only person who’s a jerk around here is you.”
I furrowed my brow in confusion. “How am I being a jerk?”
“Can’t you say anything nice?” Marissa added in her awful nasal whine, clutching the tablet to her chest once more. Apparently, I was the only one who thought complaining about Hell, and the Lord of Car Dealerships, and whatever else was universally acceptable. “Every time Lina tries to say something positive, you have to comment on how stupid you think everything is.”
“That’s because everything is stupid here,” I said.
“That’s all right,” said Lina. “With an attitude like that, she’ll probably be the last person to get out of here.”
Some of the boys in line around us ooed . The unwelcome contribution from others outside our little group conversation irritated me.
Ester folded her arms and added, “Yeah, I guess she doesn’t really want to know what happened to her brother that badly. Maybe she’ll never find out.”
“Shut up!”
“You shut up,” said Ester.
“You know it’s true,” said Marissa. “If you don’t do what the whiteboards say, you’ll be stuck here forever and you’ll never know what happened to your brother.”
“I never said I didn’t want to follow the rules. All I said is the rules don’t make sense.”
“You don’t seem to care about following the rules much, considering how stupid you think they are,” said Ester.
“I’ll bet that’s how she died in the first place,” Marissa taunted. “She probably broke the rules or ignored a hazard sign or something.”
“I saved my brother from a rabid bear, you buttheads!”
“If you saved him, how come you think he’s here in Hell?” said Ester.
“You must not care much about your brother either, since you’ve decided you’ll never see him again,” said Lina.
I shoved her. Ester and Marissa shoved back, and I landed hard on my butt on the marble floor.
“You can go to the back of the line after all the stinky bad boys who died in gang fights,” said Ester. “And find someone else to sit with who doesn’t care about anyone but themselves and how stupid everyone else is—just like you.”
I got up and dusted off the seat of my pearly white jumpsuit. “Fine,” I growled. “Have fun being played by God, you stupid armadillos.” The crowd ooed again. The other girls didn’t laugh, though, as I stomped away to find the back of the line.
The stupid tall boy who recognized me from the demon’s office tried to wave me into line in front of him. I glared at him briefly and stormed past. When I reached the end of the line and turned around, I jolted. The boy had followed me. He laughed nervously at my reaction.
“Go away,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re stupid and I’m mean.”
The boy’s ridiculous grin withered and he cleared his throat. “Were you mean before you got here?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think so.”
“Why are you mean now?”
“Because everyone here thinks I’m mean.”
“I don’t think you’re mean.”
I ground my teeth as my eyes flickered away from his. “You’re still stupid.”
He shrugged.
I turned away from him and he got in line behind me. He said nothing, did nothing but stand there in silence as the endless line marched slowly onward. It irritated me. Everything irritated me. “I don’t think it’s even possible to make an armadillo’s shell into a flute,” I said.
“Why would you want to make an armadillo shell into a flute?” the boy asked.
“I don’t want to. It’s from The Armadillo’s Song, part of the story our Hell is based on. Haven’t you read it yet?”