It’s there at the same time every morning, just like I am. Of course, totally unbothered by the cold.

Dante described a layer of hell as a frozen wasteland, where the cold was used to torture instead of fire. The damned were frozen up to their necks, traitors to trusted friends and allies, and I agreed it was a suitable place for such wretched sinners.

My own sins were unknown to me. But I suppose the damned always say that.

I can’t ever see its face, so I don’t know if there’s really a skull or what underneath that hood. He turns this blank, unmarked void in my direction as I trudge to my assigned place.

“You’re late,” the voice is monotone, tired, but hopeful. Even the deity itself doesn’t know exactly when those yellow lights will shine through this white darkness. It raises a bony hand clutching an hourglass up to my face.

An angry schoolmarm trapped in the body of a mythological menace.

“You’re early,” I reply with my best sneer, but my bravado is hiding a real sense of fear. I pretend I’m not using my side-eye to peek down the street.

Looking for the lights. I couldn’t have missed them. Maybe they’re late, just like me.

The hourglass disappears, and it turns away, droning on. The voice he has today is gruff and fuzzy, like an old man grinding through the channels on a ham radio.

“Same drill as always,” it sounds bored. “Five minutes late, I take two of your fingers. Ten minutes, four more, along with your ears and nose.”

It is bored. So am I. Years of this. But it has to tell me, just the same. Divine protocol or something.

“Twenty, and you never have to go to school again.”

The statement ends with an uneven hiss that might pass for laughter in Hell.

“Burning in hell doesn’t sound so bad at the moment,” I stamp my feet, a combination of a tantrum at the unfairness of it all and the will to keep from dying.

The yellow light is weak, but cuts into the void. Two lights brighten on the street, and two others, red with authority, join them in banishing the creatures of the cold.

There wasn’t so much as a whisper. Death was gone. At least for now.

Better luck tomorrow, I thought, and was not entirely dishonest. It would be better to die, cross the river Styx, and be frozen in a pile of stinking mud than go home and tell my mother I had missed the bus.

I ascend into the school bus, all ten fingers intact.