Here saw I people, more than elsewhere, many,
On one side and the other, with great howls,
Rolling weights forward by main force of chest.
They clashed together, and then at that point
Each one turned backward, rolling retrograde,
Crying, “Why keepest?” and, “Why squanderest thou?”
Thus they returned along the lurid circle
On either hand unto the opposite point,
Shouting their shameful metre evermore.
I now know Hell.
It is not going to Walmart.
It is checking out at Walmart.
The store is Purgatory
– but after one navigates disoriented faces, bodies adrift, blue vests and ruses of price points
The checkout lanes are the Circles of Hell itself.
Then each, when he arrived there, wheeled about
Through his half-circle to another joust;
And I, who had my heart pierced as it were,
Exclaimed: “My Master, now declare to me
What people these are, and if all were clerks,
These shaven crowns upon the left of us.”
And he to me: “All of them were asquint
In intellect in the first life, so much
That there with measure they no spending made.
I literally spent over 30 minutes behind one family who apparently doesn’t know how to use food stamps, or whatever food stamps are now called. They kept trying to buy things that weren’t covered and eventually a manager had to be brought over.
I had unloaded most my cart and was stuck on all sides
– there were more souls behind me as well. Arriving one after another, forming a sequence. On line. In queue. Dancing the roundelay.
Clearly enough their voices bark it forth,
Whene’er they reach the two points of the circle,
Where sunders them the opposite defect.
Clerks those were who no hairy covering
Have on the head, and Popes and Cardinals,
In whom doth Avarice practise its excess.”
Forever shall they come to these two buttings;
These from the sepulchre shall rise again
With the fist closed, and these with tresses shorn.
I stared into the abyss and he stared back
– charging a dime for “paper or plastic.”
—daniel paschal
Flommist Daniel Paschal is an avid gamer and a dedicated filmmaker. He will always be a die-hard Lovecraft fan. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Copyright © 2016 Daniel Paschal. Included: Sections of Dante’s Inferno, Canto VII. Foto by mehallo.
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