Satirical commentary by Drew Curtis, Odd News

In 2019, Charlotte Holmes briefly died of a cardiac event so violent it registered on the Richter scale. Her blood pressure had reached numbers last seen inside a nuclear reactor, and after flatlining for eleven minutes, she experienced the afterlife — or what passes for it these days.

The afterlife in glorious technicolor… (simonalvinge/depositphotos)

She expected clouds. Choirs. Possibly a golden retriever voiced by Morgan Freeman.

Instead, she found a DMV built by Kafka.

No line. No greeters. Just a cracked bell labeled “Ring for eternity” and a sticky note that read “Back in 5,000.” The silence was the kind that makes you check your phone out of habit, then remember you’re no longer alive. Somewhere, faintly, a chime echoed like a microwave going off in an empty apartment. It felt… judgy.

Eventually, Charlotte wandered into a meadow and encountered a man feeding a squirrel that was either holy or just aggressively photogenic. He introduced himself as Jean-Paul, said he’d arrived in 1980, and had gotten into Heaven on a technicality involving irony and strong cheekbones. “Hell is other people,” he whispered, pulling a small trophy out of his robe. It said Nailed It.

Later, Charlotte finally found Jesus sitting on a bench by a still lake, wearing a hoodie, Adidas slides, and the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s been moderating Reddit for eternity. He looked like Jeff Goldblum if Jeff Goldblum had just been ghosted by a Buddhist monastery.

Jesus, he's a handsome man. (Gage Skidmore/wikimedia)

“You’re early,” he said, patting the bench. “Also, thanks for not bringing a guitar.”

Jesus explained that Heaven still technically exists, but no one meets the entry criteria anymore. “It’s not that we raised the bar,” he said, feeding a flamingo made of purest holy light. “Y’all just limboed directly into full-blown existential garbage fire.” He gestured at Jean-Paul. “That guy got in on a literary reference. You? You watched six seasons of Riverdale. Which wasn’t enough, by the way.”

Heaven, as it turns out, is optimized for infinite stillness, perfect peace, and zero push notifications. Which, Jesus noted, is “a hard sell for modern humans, who now define ‘transcendence’ as a YouTube short where a raccoon plays the drums.”

But when Charlotte asked about Hell, that’s when things got weird.

“Oh. Yeah. So, Hell shut down,” Jesus said. “Closed shop in 2019. Couldn’t compete. We had fire, torment, and eternal Nickelback. But then Earth went and invented things like dating apps, pumpkin spice NFTs, HOAs, and ChatGPT-generated divorce papers. Hell was totally outclassed. One demon rage-quit after watching a guy send his mom a deepfake of her own funeral with dubstep behind it.”

Welcome to Hell on Earth, pop: 8,237,778,076. (Feverpitch/depositphotos)

“Humanity built a better Hell than Hell could ever be. So now we just let you run it. Outsourcing, baby. Low overhead, high torment. Not that I’m into that kind of thing, but apparently it’s unavoidable. I did what I could to no avail. Now, evangelicals are saying I’m too woke. Hell went under because they couldn’t compete with you lot.”

Charlotte took this in silently as Jean-Paul wrestled with a sentient gust of wind and lost.

“So what happens to me?” she asked.

“Well,” Jesus said, brushing glowing crouton dust off his hoodie, “you didn’t technically get into Heaven. But you’re not going to Hell either. That’s gone. So we’re sending you… to the other place.”

“You mean Earth?”

Jesus nodded solemnly. “No refunds.”

Charlotte blinked. Behind her, Jean-Paul gave a long, existential sigh.

“Hell,” he muttered, “was other people. But then humanity took it to a whole other level. They invented the comments section..”