Dear Andrew,

How kind of the kids in your class to reach out to other kids like me, living in far Kingdoms under a foreign sun. I would indeed enjoy being your pen pal.

Life in Heaven sounds dreamy. Let me tell you a little about things here. It's probably not so different as you might imagine. We have many of the same toys and games as you. No, it isn't all pits of fire. You should know that textbooks never tell you the whole story. I understand that it's not all drifting clouds and infinite celestial machinery up there, either. Certainly, occasional quakes herald the sundering of the earth, opening sulfurous vents from which belch wet tongues of fire. Hordes of shrieking dead are driven into them like cattle for the final, awful annihilation. But it's a rare enough occurrence that when we see it we stop to rubberneck.

Like you, I am twelve. I've doubtless been in Hell far longer than that, at least a few years but possibly several centuries. We do not use calendars here. Perhaps it's that way for you, as well. Oddly, I find your writing to be as immature and naive as I imagine you were in life; whereas my imprisonment has afforded me the opportunity to expand my experience and understanding of the world significantly. Of course, your handlers have every reason to keep you simple, with the docility of those with weak attention spans. Try asking your teacher if you can send me a little care package: a few comic books, or a cream for boils. Listen carefully to the response. Even if they allow you to follow through on your errand of mercy, your parcel will never make it out through the postal authorities. Offering comfort to the condemned runs contrary to the spirit and letter of your Covenant. Souls like me could have availed ourselves of beneficence when we had free will, but now it is too late. Business is business, and we're nothing more than former customers who are pissed off about the consumer care policy, having seen our warranty on grace expire before we bothered to use it.

Like you, I am a ward of the state, a foster child. When I arrived, I had every reason to believe my miserable parents would soon be joining me here. What a delightfully spiteful reunion that would have been! Strangely, I have yet to see them. Perhaps after my departure -- even because of it -- they underwent a change of lifestyle or morality that has allowed them to avoid my fate. They could have written to tell me how things turned out, but I should know better than to expect too much.

So I live in the care of two demon parents, who feed, clothe, and shelter me, as well as make sure I get enough sleep to prepare me for the next day's intolerable torture. I am told to call them Father and Mother. On the days I wake to find myself transformed into a mewling infant, my arms and legs rubbery and foreshortened, my head grossly swollen and packed with unformed cotton, Mother presses me to her desiccated breasts and begs me to suck the streams of papery dust issuing from her. Every now and then, Father and I gather up our fishing rods and go to the empty edge of the trout pond, where he asks me increasingly furious questions about whether I've ever had sex with a girl, and then drowns me with his bare hands. I look up through the window of the water's surface at his face, contorted through a skein of waves, and try to guess his emotions. I think Father and Mother enjoy their jobs being my parents, but sometimes I detect a sliver of sorrow peeking from behind the vicious mask they are obliged to wear. Self pity, I suppose.

Father and Mother recently decided that I should see a Therapist. Lately I have been acting out in school, failing to participate with adequate vigor in the torture of my fellow classmates. I admit that this was a departure from my usual attitude. One of the few pleasures offered in the monotonous agony of Hell is the chance to play an occasional role in the nightmare of a fellow condemned child. You seldom get the big parts -- the executioner, the person delivering the shock -- but you sometimes get to be nearby when the nastiness goes down. Some souls enjoy these moments because of the sensation of relief that one has been spared, however briefly, from such a fate. I like them because they suggest that, deep down, the Lord of this Kingdom accepts and likes us for what we are. I was a mean kid, as sure as you were a bright, perky, moral little asslick with about as much personality as a hymnal. Why would I be allowed to indulge the bully in me from time to time if the folks who run this show didn't think that was okay?

In Life, the kid who sits two rows over from me in school became a big delinquent after his parents died in a car wreck. He stabbed two guys before he met someone with a longer knife. Now every day his parents kiss him good-bye as he heads off to school, and at two o'clock the news comes over the loudspeaker that his parents have died. He has no long-term memory -- every day it hits him again like it was the first time, and he just bawls in his seat. The rest of us know it's coming, so we're all ready. He asks if he can be excused and our demon teacher tells him to sit there and finish his work. We all throw shit at him when the teacher isn't looking and pretend to sneeze but really yell out "orphan!" into our cupped hands for a couple minutes until the demon tells us to knock it off.

The trouble is, I just haven't been taking part in his daily punishment lately. It's not that I don't enjoy it, but it just got boring. All the other kids seem as into it as ever. Lately they've been passing him little notes in the minutes before the loudspeaker breaks the news. A couple minutes before two, the first note from one classmate: "Violets are blue." Then, thirty seconds later, from another pal: "Roses are red." Some time later: "Sorry to hear..." from another hand. And at the crucial moment that the news is delivered: "Your parents are dead!" It requires planning and coordination, but the effect is stunning: the wildcard emotions of grief, astonishment, perplexity, and hurt are truly something to behold. But I simply haven't been interested. How many times can you bear witness to suffering before it ceases to be meaningful?

Off to the Therapist's office I go. On a couch in the waiting room, Father and Mother clench me between their bodies like nesting birds. I am so careful to avoid the eyes of the two other kids in the room that I don't even know if they're male or female. Hell teaches you a lot about keeping to yourself. Noticing something is usually a preface to it acting upon you in some painful or humiliating way. I imagine Heaven to be a place for the expansively extroverted. Nothing can touch you, hurt you, embarrass you, or force you. So you keep reaching out and out in search of a wall, a restraint, anything with texture. All of you are like car salesmen encountering the richest customer you've ever known. The talk just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

The Therapist calls my name. I follow the voice, eyes-down, through a doorway and into a bright room. There's an oriental rug beneath me, a pattern in blues that I suppose is meant to soothe me. I suspect that some ornate torture awaits, and I'm resigned to pain. This might be one of those situations, quite common in Hell, when one is allowed to cultivate a meager portion of hope that everything will be all right, only to see it annihilated in some grisly, searing fashion.

"Please, have a seat," a pleasant woman's voice intones. Clearly I am meant to trust her. I don't even begin to imagine what sickening plans she holds for me. The demon monitors of my inner fears will doubtless process this information and use it to construct a more effective punishment than they might have devised on their own. (Do your minders have access to your dreams, as mine do to my fears? I would like to think so.)

I allow my eyes to follow the voice. It is a woman -- or appears to be -- and she is motioning me to a stuffed chair. She sits down in another similar seat across a small table. There is a window behind her, and a daytime skyline. I oblige and fall into the seat. There is little I can do, of course, but wait for what will be done to me. Resistance or acceptance are equally useless.

We begin. Through a series of simple questions, she gradually induces me to tell her about my life in Hell. I describe Mother and Father, my home, the bus ride through the simmering wasteland to my school. It is the first time I have spoken this much in recent memory. The Therapist never mentions or questions my experiences in my former Life, and I obey this unspoken rule by confining my story to my afterlife in the Inferno.

I am telling the Therapist about some of the punishments I've undergone recently in school when I am struck by two entirely disparate emotions: one is enjoyment , and the other is fear. I am liking the experience of talking about my afterlife to the Therapist, who now sits and politely nods, allowing me to tell the story as I please. And I know, at that moment, that they have managed to give me something to lose again. Regret is the currency of Hell.

I stop speaking. Why make it worse by going on?

The Therapist waits for a few seconds, looking attentively to see if I'm done. Then she leans forward. Her voice is very soft, secretive. "Tell me," she says, "do you ever regret what you did that earned you your place in Hell?"

It takes me a moment to realize that she has asked me about my Life. Then, a rush of unassembled images: my mother spraying me with a hose as I laughed in my kiddy pool, my shame when my father came to pick me up after I was caught shoplifting for the first time, a book about China that I hid in the school library so I could always find it and look at the pictures, climbing a ladder into an apple tree and being afraid to come down.

I am surprised by the force of the tears. "Every day," I sob.

"Okay," she says quietly. "Okay." She gets up and puts a hand on my shoulder. "We'll talk more about this next week. Take a second and let me know when you're ready to go."

Shit, here it comes. I get rid of the messy tears and screw myself back together. How is this going to go down? "I'm ready," I say in an even voice.

"All right." She walks over to the door, opens it, and steps back.

When I walk through the door, a number of things surprisingly do not happen. My bones do not all break at once. I do not find the exit barricaded with festering bodies that I must move out of the way with my bare hands. There is no seething plague of ants roiling towards my legs.

There are just Mother and Father, looking both interested and a little worried. "How was it?" Mother asks.

I instinctively go eyes-down, shutting off. Fine, I tell them, and allow myself to be taken away.

If you want to know one similarity between our countries, it is that hope is as meaningless to you as it is to me. As for one difference: I know it, and you do not.

Signed,

Kelvin