THE GIRL WHO NEVER FINISHED HER 40’s

Based on a character created by J-Bird Osprey.

“I never finish my 40’s” said Chloe, sloppy and sassy off the 30 ounces of Old English coursing through her tiny body.

“I know” said Becca, her long-suffering suite mate. She was the one who always wound up pouring out the bottom quarters of Chloe’s 40’s. 

Chloe swayed back and forth, considering and furrowing her brow. Finally, she leaned in and said

“Do YOU wanna finish my 40?”

Becca smirked, and lit up a cigarette. This was the smoking suite, so you could smoke inside. She waved the 40 away.

“Dump it out in the sink if you’re not going to finish it” she said, and sashayed over to the foosball table.

“WHICH ONE OF YOU BITCHES FEELS LIKE GETTING HER ASS KICKED?” Chloe heard her say, in the mid-distance, over the sounds of Missy Elliot’s “Work It.”

Later that night, there was a terrorist attack at Red Robin, and Chloe died.

As she shook free of her mortal trappings and ascended to purgatory, she looked around for Becca, and her other girlfriends from college who'd been out with her that night, but they were nowhere to be found.  They were in Heaven.

I can't believe my head exploded thought Chloe.

She passed through a portal in the sky, and emerged, ghostlike, in the courtyard fountain of the Motel Purgatory.

There was a long line for the front desk. Everyone was a ghost, it looked like, but no one could float through anything. The new arrivals kept trying to float through the crowd to get to the front, and bumping into the ghosts at the back.

Chloe didn't mind waiting. She was one of those people who was a little bit interested in everything, but very interested in nothing, so talking to people in line was her bread and butter. People were like 40's to her: Fun at first, with steeply diminishing returns after the first 10 minutes.

Brendon, the guy in line behind her, was a waiter. He'd been killed in the Red Robin Massacre, too, it turned out. They talked about that for a couple minutes, then decided to play the game of figuring out the good and bad things they'd done that could've landed them in Purgatory.

"I got good grades, but I smoked cigarettes."

"I was honest, but I ran over two dogs."

"I had a great relationship with my parents, but I made my boyfriend take the heat for a DUI and then broke up with him."

Finally, they were at the front of the line. There was a big bland desk with a big bland woman named Lonny behind it. She looked up at Chloe, then down at her computer, and pointed.

 "Room 40."

Room 40 tuned out to be a giant black room with a giant beer pong table in the middle of it. The beer pong table was about the size of an elementary school basketball court. And arranged neatly on the surface of this giant table were about 200 red plastic party cups. On the far end of the beer pong table there was a young man dressed in a sleeveless shirt and a cowboy hat. He was  chewing tobacco and looking at Chloe with a confident sizing-you-up type expression.

"Welcome to Purgatory" he said.
"Thanks," said Chloe.

"You know what you're in for?"
"No" said Chloe.

The stranger didn't tell her.

"Are you my new roommate?" she said.

The stranger laughed.

"What's your name?" said Chloe. She could be very persistent, conversationally.

"People here call me The Kid" he said.

Chloe rolled her eyes. "What am I in for?" she said.

The Kid took a long time to speak.
"WELL..." said Chloe.

"C'mon, Chloe" said The Kid, patronizingly. "You didn't finish your 40's!"

And so Chloe was forced to play beer pong, on an absurdly large table, with party cups containing her entire life's worth of unfinished 40 water. The Kid was very good at beer pong, obviously, and Chloe never had a chance. She threw up a couple times, even. But she drank all 200 cups--in only 32 hours!--and she never had to drink 40's again. (She did, though.) I guess you could say she finally finished her 40's.

In line for the portal to heaven, she ran into Brendan, from before, and told him what happened. She was expecting him to be shocked, but he was barely even listening.

"You think that's bad," said Brendon. "I had to take blunt gut mokies out of a 17 foot bong!"