On the twelfth floor of a forgettable office building that smelled like burnt coffee and existential dread, a plastic plaque on beige carpet announced: LIFE-LINE CRISIS SERVICES — “YOU MATTER.”
Below it, someone had added in Sharpie: …to our quarterly metrics. No one cleaned it. The Sharpie truth had seniority now.
Past the doors, a grid of cubicles. Fluorescent lights hummed an anxious C minor. Motivational posters screamed in pastel: Reach for the stars! One step at a time! Breathe! There was also a laminated flowchart called DE-ESCALATION: SOFT VOICE, OPEN QUESTIONS, NO WEIRD STUFF, which everyone ignored.
And then there was Cubicle 13, where the flowchart was pinned next to a photograph of a goat in sunglasses and a wall of glossy frames labeled EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Every frame held the same smirk attached to the same perfect jawline, the same eyes that shifted color depending on the fluorescent flicker: sulfuric amber to casino black. In the first photo, his hair was styled like a consultant; in the last, it openly defied gravity.
His badge read STAFF: “STAN.” It also read DO NOT FEED HIS EGO in ballpoint under the plastic sheath.
Satan adjusted his headset.
“Morning, Stan,” chirped Janine, the manager, from behind a tray of stale muffins. Janine dressed like an apology: soft cardigans, softer eyes, the kind of person who used the word “space” as a verb. Her mug read WRITE OR DIE, which was on-brand for an office that punted people back toward living.
“You look like a cloud that swallowed a kindergarten,” Satan said, eyeing the cardigan.
“Have you considered not being an ass for ten consecutive minutes? We’re piloting positivity.”
“I am positivity. I’m why you get emails that say Great news! when there’s never great news. Now give me the metrics.”
Janine flipped her tablet around. “Average handle time: immaculate. Save rate: absurd. Documentation: actually legible, which means someone else is writing it for you.”
“I delegate to the damned,” he said, and then sighed for effect. “Who’d we lose overnight?”
“We don’t say it that way.”
He glanced up. The ceiling panels trembled, like the building was listening. “Fine. Who didn’t answer the phone?”
She told him. He closed his eyes for a quarter-second, as if running an internal audit. He didn’t like losing callers. Not because of compassion—well, he’d fight you on that—but because Hell didn’t get anything out of a quick exit.
The finest vintages were brewed slowly: regret, pettiness, rationalisations aged in oak barrels of self-importance. Humanity’s best sinning happened after sunrise.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s keep the humans alive.”
He tapped into the system. The screen blossomed with a dashboard: a galaxy of blinking dots, each dot a person who’d hit the number because everything was too much, or too empty, or too loud. He set his status to READY. Somewhere, a routing algorithm, drunk on probability, spun a wheel and landed on Stan every time.
The line clicked. “Life-Line Crisis Services, this is Stan. I’m listening.”
Silence. Then wind. Then a voice, male, mid-twenties, performing steadiness like a bad actor. “I’m on a roof,” the voice said. “Or… it’s technically a penthouse terrace. I didn’t want to, like, lie.”
“Your honesty is touching. How high?”
“Uh… high enough that if I drop my phone, I’ll need a dustpan? Who are you?”
“Stan. Insurance-approved Samaritan. What should I call you?”
“Trevor.”
“Alright, Trevor. Don’t do anything dramatic while I’m picturing the terrace. Glass railing? Urban jungle aesthetic with plants that died three weeks ago?”
A watery laugh. “Yeah. How do you know that?”
“Because the universe copy-pastes rich people. Why are you up there instead of inside petting a succulents’ grave?”
Trevor’s breath wobbled. “Because I’m a fuck-up, okay? My startup failed. Investors hate me. My girlfriend left, which, fine, she was more into my deck slides than my face. I keep seeing that stupid tweet saying ‘failure is a stepping stone’ and I want to staple-gun the internet. I thought I was going to be the exception. Now I’m… I’m just a guy with a thousand-dollar hoodie and no health insurance.”
“You’re a paragraph in an alumnus magazine no one reads,” Satan agreed. “But newsflash: failure isn’t a stepping stone. It’s a trampoline someone left in the wrong place. It flings you somewhere stupid and you crawl back with leaves in your hair. You don’t get a medal.”
“God, you’re bad at this.”
“I’m phenomenal at this. I’m just not a liar. Look—if you jump, what are you really doing? Ending the pain? Or skipping the episode before it gets good because the writers made two bad choices and you took it personally?”
“I—what?”
Satan leaned back. The chair complained. “Trevor, your conviction right now is fake confidence. It’s like keto. Very trendy, mostly dehydration. Let’s try something else. What if you stay alive to spite your investors?”
“Spite them?”
“Of course. Do you know what hell looks like to a VC? You, sending them quarterly updates about a new boring-but-profitable thing that they missed. Not sexy. All cashflow. Imagine the meetings they’ll have to sit through while nodding and dying inside. You deny them the neat story: We backed a genius who tragically— No. You become the guy with the pizza franchise empire who refuses to sell. That’s not failure. That’s terrorism.”
There was a pause, the weight in Trevor’s chest shifting like furniture. “I could… do pizza?”
“You could do anything that replaces self-myth with petty endurance. Start by coming inside, closing the door, and sending me a photo of your face making the worst pout in history. I’ll rate it. We’ll call that your first quarterly deliverable.”
More wind. Scrape of shoes. A click. “Okay. I’m inside.” Trevor’s voice got thicker. “I really thought—”
“Yeah,” Satan said, softer. “Your brain is a con artist. Never sign anything without letting it sit for 24 hours and a sandwich.”
“A sandwich?”
“Biochemistry is witchcraft. Don’t argue.”
Trevor exhaled, a long human exhale like he’d been underwater and was now stealing air from God. “Why are you so good at this?”
“Because,” Satan said, glancing at the wall of his own smirking faces, “I’ve been around.”
He kept him talking, not about feelings—those would come later, under supervision and boring paperwork—but about pizza ovens and how to weaponize pettiness without becoming a cartoon villain. When he finally transferred Trevor to a warm handoff for local resources (Satan did play by the rules, the ones that mattered), he muted the line and stared at his reflection in the black monitor. The eyes were amber. They were always amber after a successful save. He hated that he knew that.
He set his status to READY again and grabbed a muffin between calls. It tasted like drywall. His phone buzzed: a calendar reminder. Quarterly Performance Review—10:15 a.m. He rolled his eyes so hard he saw the Heat Death of the Universe.
Call two came hard and fast. “Life-Line, I’m Stan.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” the voice snapped. Female, elderly, sharpened like a violin string. “They put me on hold for eight minutes and played what I can only describe as sad elevator music performed by a depressed clarinet.”
“Dreadful,” Satan agreed. “Shall we sue?”
“I’m eighty-two; the lawyers would outlive me. My name is Agnes. I am not on a roof. I am in my kitchen in my bathrobe and I have decided that today is—” She stopped. “I don’t want to dramatise it.”
“You can dramatise it with me. I eat drama for breakfast and wash it down with tears.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“Fine. What made today feel like a line in the sand instead of a sandcastle?”
Agnes sniffed, a brittle sound. “My Harold died last year. We were married sixty-one years. I am a person of routines; I am a list. Harold was my list. Without him, the days blur like bad watercolours. And my knees hurt. And my daughter moved to Portland to become vegan, which I consider a betrayal.”
“Portland will do that to a person.”
“Do not mock me.”
“I would never mock you, Agnes. I would mock Portland. Now, you’re in your kitchen. What’s on the counter?”
“Breadcrumbs. And a plant my neighbor insists is a living thing. It is, in my opinion, a green scam. Also, the toaster I hate. It burns exactly one corner of every slice, as if to say ‘I control you.’”
Satan brightened. “That toaster is your nemesis.”
“It is an appliance.”
“Don’t diminish an enemy. You need something to outlive out of spite. Give the toaster a name.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“Agnes.”
She sighed. “Fine. ‘Cornelius.’ He sounds like a villain in a cheap novel.”
“Excellent. Your project for the next… let’s say eight months… is to destroy Cornelius.”
“How?”
“You will wake each day with purpose: to confound Cornelius by making evenly browned toast. You will adjust dials with the meticulous rage of a watchmaker. You will write letters to the manufacturer. You will become Yelp-famous. You will teach Cornelius humility.”
Agnes made a strangled noise that could have been a laugh or a small stroke. “You’re an idiot.”
“And yet here you are, not doing anything final, because I’ve given you a stupid war.”
“I loved a man for sixty-one years,” she said quietly. “Isn’t that enough? Why must I keep going?”
“Because, Agnes… he kept going with you. That routine you miss? It was built by two hands. One of them gone. The other still very much in possession of a phone and a nemesis toaster. You can miss him and still pick fights with household items. You can be sad and petty. It’s very human.”
“I am not petty.”
“Agnes, you once wrote a letter to the city council about the width of the painted lines on your street.”
“They were too thin.”
“Be that woman again. Weaponise it. Live long enough to become a rumor across three generations. ‘Don’t cross Agnes, she took down Cornelius and an entire zoning committee.’”
A breath, a mutter—“Cornelius”—and then: “I suppose I could… I could call my doctor. The new one. She has hair like a broom and eyes like a clever crow.”
“Call the crow. Then call me back next week and tell me what Cornelius did.”
“You’re really very annoying.”
“I take pride in my craft.”
When he hung up, Janine was watching him from the edge of his cubicle. “You’re not following the script,” she said.
“The script is for people who haven’t met Cornelius,” he said.
“You make it a joke.”
“No. I make it a reason.” He flicked his eyes at the wall of his own faces. “You hired me for results, not reverence.”
Janine pinched the bridge of her nose. “I hired you because you… appeared. In a puff of paperwork. And then the save rate went through the roof. And then HR asked me if it was appropriate that my top performer refuses to attend ‘Mindfulness Mondays.’”
“Mindfulness is theft,” Satan said. “It takes your thoughts hostage and charges admission.”
“God, you’re exhausting.”
“Tell Him to call me.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and waved her tablet. “Ten minutes. Performance review. Don’t wear your sarcasm like cologne.”
“I don’t wear cologne. I exude disappointment.”
He took one more call before the meeting, because the wheel always landed on him.
“Life-Line, Stan speaking.”
A voice that crackled like a cheap speaker. “You’re not supposed to answer this line,” the voice said, too calm. “This is a quality assurance test.”
Satan smiled like a wolf in a nursery. “Hello, Gabe.”
A pause. “We’re masking.”
“I know your masks. You always pick the same cadence. Polite disgust. Catholic schoolteacher who does CrossFit.”
The voice melted into something bright and clean, infuriatingly clean. “Lucifer.”
“Don’t workplace-dox me. I’m Stan at the office.”
“Why are you here?” Gabriel asked, his patient annoyance perfumed with sanctimony. “The Board is… concerned.”
“The Board,” Satan said, “is bored. I’m here because it works.”
“You enjoy it,” Gabriel said.
“Careful.”
“You enjoy helping them.”
Satan’s smile died like a ember drowned by spit. “I enjoy owning the long game. We don’t benefit from early exits. They skip the atrocities. They skip the embarrassments. They skip the delicious small betrayals that make the reunion show worth watching. I keep them alive because life is the only arena where they can really, really step in it.”
Gabriel was silent. Heaven was good at silence. It had committees for silence. “That’s the story you tell yourself.”
“It’s the story that pays dividends,” Satan said. “Now get off my line, quality assurance. I have a toaster to destroy by proxy.”
The call ended without a goodbye. Angels never learned phone etiquette.
———-
The performance review room had one window that looked onto a brick wall and one plant that existed to suffer under fluorescent lights. There was a tray of cookies no one touched because they looked like they had been baked during a currency crisis.
Janine sat at one end with HR, a man named Kyle whose entire personality was a tie clip. On the wall, a slide deck: Q3 Review — EMPLOYEE: STAN. Someone had used the swirly transition effect. Satan wished for plague.
“Stan,” Kyle began, steepling his fingers in the international sign for prepare to be insulted diplomatically, “your numbers are… impressive.”
“Just say terrifying,” Satan said. “It’ll make you feel honest for once.”
Kyle blinked blue eyes that had never seen a sun. “We simply want to ensure your—ah—techniques align with organisational values.”
“Do you have values?” Satan asked. “I thought you had posters.”
Janine coughed. “Stan. We need you to attend a training. There have been complaints.”
“From whom?”
Janine looked pained. “From a caller who said you told them to weaponise pettiness.”
“That was clinical advice.”
Kyle slid a paper forward. “Your recommendations sometimes… deviate from evidence-based practice.”
“Evidence-based practice is a moving target,” Satan said. “Evidence hasn’t met Agnes.”
Janine rubbed her temples. “Sarcasm aside, we really do need you at Mindfulness Mondays.”
“I’d rather gargle a lava lamp.”
“Stan.”
He drummed his fingers and considered being a team player for twelve seconds. Then he remembered who he was. “Fine. I’ll attend. I will be the ghost at the feast.”
Kyle beamed, relieved. “Excellent. Also, due to your performance, you’ve been named Employee of the Month. Again.”
Satan looked toward the hallway where his face already colonised a wall like ivy. “I’ll send a different photo,” he said. “Maybe something moody. A lighthouse.”
“Great!” Janine said too brightly. “That’s the spirit.”
On the way back to Cubicle 13, he passed the break room. A cluster of coworkers gathered around the microwave like villagers around a prophecy. Casey, who wore black eyeliner like a warlord, pointed at the wall. “Dude,” she said as he entered, “you’re viral again.”
She tapped her phone. On some social platform that had replaced the other social platform that had replaced the other one, a clip circulated: an audio snippet of Stan telling someone, “Stay alive out of spite.” It had been auto-captioned into nonsense. The comments were a bonfire of arguments about moral philosophy, psychiatry, and toaster names.
“They think I’m a monster,” Satan said.
Casey snorted. “You are a monster. But like… a helpful one. We were betting what you really get out of this. I said power. Aarav said grace. Tasha said health insurance.”
“Tell Tasha that the American medical system is the only institution I respect more than myself,” he said, and returned to his chair.
He was about to set his status to READY when he noticed the blinking light in the corner: PRIORITY QUEUE. That line was reserved for calls the algorithm tagged as immediate. No triage, no hold music. He clicked.
“Life-Line. I’m Stan.”
“I don’t need a pep talk,” the voice said. Teen, maybe seventeen, maybe twenty with a teenager’s armor. “I need you to acknowledge that everything sucks and then not argue.”
“That’s my favorite pastime,” Satan said. “Name?”
“Mara.”
“Where are you, Mara?”
“In my car. Don’t ask where. It’s not poetic. It’s a parking lot behind a pharmacy that sells cards that say Everything happens for a reason and I want to torch the building.”
“I do appreciate a clear mission statement.”
Silence. Then: “I made a list,” she said. “Reasons to go. Reasons to stay. The ‘go’ column won. I thought I’d call anyway because I like doing things twice, apparently.”
“Read me the list,” he said.
“No.”
“Summarise the vibes.”
She breathed through her nose like an offended cat. “I’m tired. People pretend they love me but they love a version of me that never complains. School is a noise machine. My dad wants me to be a dentist because he thinks sculpting molars is a personality. My boyfriend—ex—says I’m ‘too much’ and then cries when I don’t answer. Also, my brain, which is a liar, tells me I’m a burden. Is that enough vibes for you?”
“It’s the whole chorus,” Satan said. “Let me tell you a secret. The world is a con. Everybody is making it up and then pretending they read the manual. Your dad never read How To Parent A Human Without Projecting My Failures. Your ex never read How To Date A Person Instead Of A Need. The school never read We Are Not A Meat Grinder. And your brain never read anything because it can’t read. It’s a radio that sometimes picks up garbage from the next car over.”
She almost laughed. Almost. “You sound like a guidance counselor if he’d been disbarred.”
“I’ve been disbarred from several things. Now, would you consider an experiment?”
“What kind of experiment?”
“Not dying today.”
“That’s not an experiment. That’s an absence of an action.”
“Exactly. Scientists love absence. Negative results are still results. You’ve run one test—everything sucks, therefore I exit—but your sample size is tiny. Try a new condition: everything sucks, therefore I take a nap and eat something salty and call a friend I trust and say the unsayable and then see how I feel in two hours.”
“That’s… that’s just life.”
“That’s just life,” he echoed. “Which is stupidly resilient. It’ll still be there to annoy you tomorrow, I promise.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I’ll file a complaint. I have a relationship with Management.”
“God?”
Satan glanced at the ceiling and smirked. “Upper management hates my emails.”
Mara sniffed. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
“Burdens don’t call at 2 p.m. to warn the world they might need help. Burdens take and take. You are asking permission to breathe. Permission granted.”
“Who are you?” Her voice cracked. “Like, who talks like this?”
“A man who has seen the receipts,” he said. “Look. We can keep talking now. We can loop in someone local. We can also make a pact.”
“A pact?”
“An agreement. You call me again tonight, and if I fail to make you laugh twice and mildly furious once, I owe you ten dollars.”
“You can’t Venmo me through a hotline.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Obviously you’re rich if you work for a call center.”
“I am rich in karma,” he said. “And trophy plaques.”
She was quiet a long time. He listened to the air move between her and the steering wheel. He could hear the world in the background: a cart, a cough, an automatic door fully convinced of its own importance. “Fine,” she said finally. “I’ll make the call. Not because you told me to. Because I want to find out if you’re as funny as you think you are.”
“Statistically, I am.”
“And… I hate that you said my brain is a radio and you’re right.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll pick up decent stations again.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Then we steal a better radio.”
He stayed with her until the anger arrived—small and hot, like a coal you couldn’t ignore without burning your seat. He encouraged it. Anger, properly aimed, was a survival tool, not a sin. He heard her call the friend with the voice like a lighthouse. He heard her breathe while the friend drove. He heard the door shut and the footsteps and the voices that were not his. Then, gently, he let go.
“Talk later,” he said.
“Don’t ghost me,” she said.
“I don’t do ghosts,” he said, and disconnected.
He looked at his hands. He flexed them. There were faint lines in the skin, too symmetrical to be human, like the scoring of a violin. He had been many things. An accuser. A romantic. A bureaucrat. A poet when no one was looking. Today he was a headset and a mouth and a voice that gave people reasons not to quit. Employee of the Month, forever.
“Nice work,” Janine said softly, appearing like an apology. “You okay?”
“I don’t do ‘okay.’ I do ‘effective.’”
She leaned on the cubicle wall. “We’re not supposed to get attached.”
“I’m not attached,” he said, which was technically true. Attachment was a human thing. He was simply… invested. Investments could be divested. It was a lie he told himself because he loved the elegance of it.
She pointed with her chin. “You’ve got a visitor.”
He followed her gaze. In the hallway, by the shrine of his own face, a man stood in a suit that probably had its own retirement plan. Hair neatly cruel. Smile like a scalpel. He looked exactly like every compliance officer who ever ruined a Friday, and also like the kind of person who had once become a metaphor in a holy book.
“Michael,” Satan said. “Did the Board send both the watchdog and the hammer? I feel cherished.”
Michael looked at the Employee of the Month wall as if it smelled bad. “You’re creating dependencies,” he said without preamble. “People call asking for you by name. We’re not a brand.”
“Everything is a brand, darling. Even Heaven. Especially Heaven.”
“You can’t keep doing this forever.”
“Oh, but I can.” Satan brushed imaginary lint from his shirt. “Because I’m good at it, because it works, and because it makes the numbers on both of our dashboards sing hymns in perfect harmony. Admit it. You prefer a world that chooses to struggle. You think it’s moral. I prefer a world that chooses to struggle because it produces better television. Either way—” he flashed the perfect jawline— “we’re aligned.”
Michael’s mouth did a tight little dance that might have been a smirk in a galaxy with fewer rules. “We’re monitoring.”
“Always,” Satan said. “And if it helps your report: I agreed to attend Mindfulness Mondays.”
Michael actually laughed, a sound like a glass breaking gently. “I’d pay to watch that.”
“Bring popcorn.”
When Michael left, the hallway seemed bigger, like a muscle unclenched. Satan sat. He watched the board of blinking dots. He took another call. And another. And another. He told a chef to make the soup slightly worse so the review would be honest. He told a teacher to become the terrifying legend who wore capes to class. He told a drummer to keep a pet grief and feed it predictably. He told a man on a night bus that sleep wasn’t surrender – it was a mutiny against despair.
He told the truth, claws and all. He told it with jokes. He told it cruelly kind. He avoided the neat arcs; he hated when life tried to be a Hallmark card with extra vowels. He said messy things like “you can be sad and stubborn” and “love is not a task” and “your brain is a radio that sometimes picks up a station that plays static with a beat.”
Sometimes he told people to drink water and sometimes he told them to unfriend their mothers. He made enemies of appliances. He made allies of spite. He never once said It will all be fine because sometimes it wouldn’t, and people deserved more than a lullaby.
When the day yawned toward evening, Janine slid into the chair across from him and spun a pen until it became a blur. “What do you get out of it?” she asked. No tablet, no HR. Just the cardigan and a human question.
He considered lying. He considered poetry. Both felt like theft.
“I keep the game going,” he said. “As long as they’re here, they keep choosing. That thrills me. It also annoys Him. Both are delicious.”
“And the other answer?” she asked, as if there were always two. She was smarter than her mug.
He looked at the wall of his own faces. Employee of the Month, ad infinitum. A joke and a crown. “I get to be right about them,” he said. “Humans. That they are catastrophically stubborn. That they will outlast their worst ideas. That they will turn toasters into gods so they don’t have to name the dark. It’s vulgar and beautiful. I can do both: admire and exploit. I’m very talented.”
Janine nodded like a person who had decided to keep a secret she didn’t understand. “Mindfulness Monday,” she said, standing. “8 a.m.”
“I’ll bring incense and a lawsuit.”
At 7:59 the next morning, Satan sat cross-legged in a circle of coworkers while a man with a ponytail asked them to “notice the breath.” He noticed the clock.
He noticed Casey cracking one eye open to watch him not participate. He noticed Janine trying not to laugh. He noticed that when the man said, “Let thoughts drift by like clouds,” everyone looked relieved to have permission to be haunted.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He glanced down. A text from an unknown number.
This is Mara. I didn’t ghost you. Don’t get emotional about it. Also you owe me $10. You were only mildly funny once.
He felt something move that he would—under torture—call a smile. He typed back:
You miscounted. Check your math with the crow-eyed doctor. Then, because sometimes you throw the other team a bone just to keep them interested, he added: Proud of you.
He locked the screen and looked up at the ceiling. The fluorescent lights hummed. Somewhere, angels argued about policy. Somewhere, Agnes glared at a toaster named Cornelius and sharpened her letters. Somewhere, Trevor googled “pizza oven franchise margins” and prepared to become a civilian menace. Somewhere, a girl sat in a sterile room and told the truth to a professional who didn’t flinch.
The man with the ponytail said, “Notice your body.”
Satan noticed the way the office smelled like burnt coffee and existential dread and, faintly, cinnamon from bad cookies. He noticed his hands. He noticed the plant in the corner doing its best drama about water.
He noticed that he didn’t particularly want to burn the building down.
“Employee of the Month,” Janine whispered after the session, pinning another identical photo of his smirking face to the wall. “Again.”
He looked at the endless row of himself. It was ridiculous. It was hubris. It was petty as hell.
“Take the photo down,” he said.
Janine blinked. “What?”
“Replace it,” he said, grabbing a Post-it and a pen. He wrote, in an elegant, vicious hand: THE CALLER WAS BRAVER. He stuck it under the frame.
Janine stared. “You’re… soft.”
“Don’t slander me,” he said, standing and adjusting his headset. He clicked READY and the wheel spun and fate dialed him in like a favorite sin.
“Life-Line,” he said, with a smile sharp enough to shave a god. “This is Stan. Tell me what didn’t kill you today and we’ll give it a worse day tomorrow.”
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