things he’d said—better to be angry than...well, let’s not even go there—but all I could picture was my vibrator in his large hands. How he held it, looked at it, knowing exactly what I’d used it for. Ugh. I did not want to imagine that. Did. Not.
Desperate for a distraction, I turned to the treadmill. How did this even work? I hadn’t seen any electric outlets in the walls anywhere here. This thing wouldn’t run on its own.
On closer inspection, I did find an outlet where the power cord of the treadmill was plugged into. Although it looked...well, precarious would have been an understatement. It appeared entirely, amateurishly self-made, a thing from the earliest days of electrical discovery, straight from the chaotic workshop of a reclusive 19th-century engineer who’d never heard of “safety first.” I suspected I might get an electric shock just by looking at it.
I cleared my throat and backed away from the treadmill. Hey, at least if this thing caught fire, there was a trusty hellcat to spit it out.
I did some yoga, browsed the books in the living room—a few of my own, brought here along with my stuff, in addition to a broad selection of world literature and a handful of genre books related to my reading tastes—had lunch, again delivered by the grumpy goblins, though they kept a closer eye on me now, and by the time “evening” rolled around—noticeable only by the timing of dinner—I was bored stiff out of my mind.
Even as introverted as I was, I’d grown up with an always accessible connection to the wider world in the form of my phone and the various social media and chat apps on it. And like many others of my generation, with the wealth of information on the internet and access to my friends just a swipe and a click away, I never felt truly alone. Among the people I knew, there would always be someone online, available to chat, or someone would have posted new content for me to respond to.
The only time I’d really felt cut off from this constant source of information and connection was when I’d gone camping with my mom once in my later teens. There’d been no Wi-Fi—obviously—and the signal had been so weak and spotty that I couldn’t really connect to the internet during the whole week. True to my status as a technology-spoiled teen, I’d whined about it every day.
But at least I’d had my mom then. Someone I loved who was there, keeping me company, sharing this experience with me. In hindsight, it’d been a wonderful time with her, one of the few vacations we could afford. My dad paid his child support all right—still, money was tight after the divorce.
When I was younger, my mom stayed home with me, giving up her job to take care of me until I entered school, and even then she only applied for a part-time position so that she’d be there for me in the afternoon. That was possible because of my dad’s income, a luxury not many families could afford in those days.
What little she earned with that job, however, was barely enough to provide for us both after the divorce, and she struggled to find a full-time position in her field for quite some time. The job market isn’t kind to mothers who stayed home or cut back on their hours for their kids for more than ten years.
So even with my dad’s alimony, Mom and I struggled for those first few years after our family broke apart. And I could just hear my mom’s voice, bitter and insistent, drilling into me to never depend on a man, to always make sure I stood on my own two feet and be independently financially stable.
“As long as you have your own job that pays your own way,” she would say, the lines around her mouth deepening with bitter regret, “you can always walk away unscathed. Your life is still yours. If everything comes crashing down, you’ll still be standing.” She’d pause then, her gaze turning inward, her voice growing quiet. “You won’t be buried under the rubble.”
Now, as I sat there in the medieval living room in my quarters in Hell and surveyed what was left of my once independent life, the memory of my mom’s warning clogged my throat. What would she say if she knew? Despite her trying so hard to secure a better future for me, I’d ended up in an even