IN THE NEW LIFE COMES MANY LESSONS

One can learn alot by listening to the people that come into a tobacco shop. in the last 150 or so days Janice Pettibon has learned enough such that she could defend a Ph.D dissertation in "What the Afterlife entails." She has l;earned efficiencies that make the City of Rham a pleasant place to live. Many humans would call it the Las Vegas of Hell at it upper reaches where SanJean's™ Casino Hotel dominates the illuminated ruddy sky. Regular citizens with little to do with the gambling and high end prostitution that the high rollers enjoy would see the lower arrondissments much more like Los Angeles in the Post World War 2 era. It is in this region where Janice Pettibon dead only six months, swiftly learned the lessons of what being dead and in Hell means.









As much as she enjoyed her two bedroom apartment, Talshon Akmaniam's Smokeshop had become her home. The tired looking Ethiopian man had been in this business since he and his brother had died in the war against Mussolini in 1935. "I was gassed, so was my brother. I fell here to Hell and was happy to breathe again. There is nothing eklse to tell," Talshon said on the fourth day in the shop with Janice when she felt comfortable to ask questions.

By the start of Colnu, the last month in the Hellac calendar, Janice was ready to plunge into her cashier/assistant duties as a career. She made suggestions and Akmaniam nodded puffing on a cigarette rolled from a square of yesterday's Rham Frightener-Splatter and a mixture of night grown Turkish and Bulgarian black that was farmed on the property of Lord Just Mandier himself. Soon she had noticed the shop next door shuttered and dark but very roomy and wondered to Talshon if he would be interested in opening a cafe that served tea and coffee and homemade sandwiches.





This made the Ethiopian put down his paper and take a long drag off his half done hand rolled smoke on that steamy Friday morning. "I could do with a nice cup of tea," was his only reaction. Taking this as the assent that it was, Janice went to the growler which she was still quite afraid of, and pushed on the small animal's belly the numbers that corresponded with "611" information in Hell.

Within that next hour, on the morning of 3 Colnu, she had found out that the building was for sale and had developed a plan to transform it into a place she and her boss could be proud of. In the coming days I will tell you of the comfort Janice Pettibon has found amongst the chaos and the love she has found in the midst of Eternal Death.



Kenton Hill, Order of the Quartz Heart (Eng.)
Santayana Chair of Torture History
at the Universijte Di Dis
Chief Historian,
Office of the Torturer General
100 Colnu 1 AS