In my defense, it happened so quickly that there wasn’t really anything I could do. The total contribution of my survival instinct was a feeble grasp for the shower caddy on the way down. They found me naked, soapy, murdered by the porcelain edge of the toilet bowl I’d hit my head on. The mirror was steamed up, and my last thought, as I lay there immobile, listening to the shower still running, was that I had once believed ten dollars was too much to pay for a non-skid bath tub liner.

And a part of me still believes that.

Yet, when I awoke in hell, in the single moment of clarity I had between the time the harvester fiend sensed my presence and the time she deposited me into a mucous pouch for her brood, Bed, Bath & Beyond’s outrageous markup suddenly seemed trivial. Given the chance, I decided, I would do things differently.

“Like what?” said a voice.

At first I thought it was one of the countless other souls that were folded next to mine, but they were all merely screaming incoherently.

If a bird flew from one end of the universe to the other, picked up a speck of dirt in its claws, flew to the other end of the universe, dropped it on the ground, and repeated the trip until all of those specks of dirt added up to a mountain, that would be the smallest discrete unit of time in hell. It takes many, many of those to, for instance, boil an egg. Obviously, they don’t let us boil eggs in hell, unless we are the eggs, or the eggs are maggots and we have to eat them, et cetera. That was just an example. My point is that measuring time in hell is difficult, but by any definition, it didn’t take me long to answer: barely an eon of unending torment later, I snapped back:

“For one thing, I would have bought, and used, a non-skid bath mat. Forget the cost.”

Suddenly I was back in my bathroom, under the hot water faucet. And the water wasn’t lava, or snake venom, et cetera. It was my regular old shower, and I was my regular, old, undigested self again. I wiggled my toes and felt the rubber scrunching beneath them. I shifted my weight and did not budge an inch. Worth every penny.

I looked at the shower caddy with disdain. “You weren’t there when I needed you,” I said, “and I won’t forget that.”

Immediately after showering, I went downstairs and began the first draft of what was to become this essay. Halfway through it, my house mate Russell woke up and came out to use the bathroom.
“Be careful in there,” I said.

He asked what I meant by that, and I told him what had happened. He threw his arms up in disgust.
“Why are you down here making a blog entry?” He said.

I asked what he meant, and he told me that if the existence of hell had been proven to me, that that also meant that my atheism had been disproven beyond question, and that no one in history had ever been given both a second chance to redeem themselves and such direct, almost blunt-ended verification of the existence of a merciful God as I just had, this very morning, before sitting down to type this.

“You should be repenting right now!” He said. “You should be on your knees begging forgiveness. Have you even said thanks yet? I mean, what would happen to you right now if you had a heart attack, or the roof caved in and you died again? You would be fucked for all of eternity!”

“I think Metafilter is down,” I said, clicking the refresh button on my web browser again and again.