Purgatory

The room reeked of sweat. Old anxieties leaked through the skin and into the 1950s upholstery. A ceiling fan spun lazily overhead. It did little to clear the air. When the switch was flipped, it'd rained down cobwebs and a disgruntled brown recluse.

Augustine smashed it with a newspaper and frowned at the guts. He flicked them with an article about a terrorist attack and watched them sprawl on the rug in two pieces. They blended in with the burn scars from dozens of old cigars. Someone had put a vase of lilies in the middle of the table, old mourning flowers. They looked distinctly out of place, and their odor made his headache worse.

The room was silent. That bothered him. Silence was good for thought, but not just his. The others were using that silence too, thinking, deliberating. He wanted them doing neither. He wanted them making bad decisions on the edge of a second, on a time scale thinner than the hundred dollar pill perched between the chips. Instead he could see their eyes riveted on their cards. Bad poker faces. Too much tension, not enough twitch. They couldn't play casual the way he could.

He needed the dough. Dough meant bread, bread meant a little more time to find a job. It wasn't his fault he'd been laid off. The immigrants were always working for less. He took pay cut after pay cut until it broke him and he snapped. They released him for his cheek and for asking to be treated like a real man, not like them illegals posing as American. He hated the guy that'd taken his job. He dreamed so hard of killing him he could see it in his head clear as day.

Augustine dealt the last of the cards with a sneer. Even his name sounded pretentious. Like his mother and father were trying to deny their own slumming by forcing their kid to be a snot. All it ever got him was a black eye. He always knew they could have done better, but they were too busy throwing out their cash on whimsy to care about anything but the here and now. He was sick of the here and done with the now. He wanted a then with less pain and a future with more freedom.

He'd get it with the damned cards if he had to.

Ronaldo drummed his fingers against the table. It was the only part of him that moved, because his eyes didn't have to. His hand wasn't the best and wasn't the worst. It was the middle-ground, and he was used to that. His work broke his back but it was better than resorting to peddling drugs or people. He wanted to be better than that. Bigger than that. He didn't want the sins of his father to bleed down into his own skin.

Augustine didn't like him; he could smell that in a man. He could see it in his beady eyes and in the sweat gleaming off his brow. Every time he looked up he got a sneer. Men like him were the reason he always kept a baseball bat in his truck.

He shuffled his cards. Shuffled them again, playing them back and forth between his fingers. He gave the others a smirk that was meant to be cocky. Both glared. They looked ready to strangle him, and he wondered what they had on the table besides the chips. What they were gambling against. He wondered if they had a kid out there too, who wanted a present for his third birthday. Wondered if they wanted to get him a big gift this time since they couldn't be there in person.

He knew his son would rather have him there, but he couldn't grant that yet. Not if he wanted dough to put the bread on his belly.

Ronaldo flicked his eyes to a spider skittering across the table. Brown recluse, it was. Nasty things whose bites left rotting bruises. He crushed it, scattered it, and turned back to the others again. There was a faint pain in his chest, sharp like heartburn, and he thumped it with a fist distractedly.

Azrael watched his opponents quietly. The spider clambered to life again and wandered towards the table's leg, and his eyes traced it as the others sweated over their dead man's hands. It rose up and bit Augustine in the leg but he didn't feel it. Of course he wouldn't. Dead men didn't tend to be aware of much besides what'd killed them. Even then, Ronaldo was still oblivious to the blood flooding his shirt, and Augustine clueless that half of his skull was caved in.

The angel of death looked up at the clock and sighed. It would be a long sit, this poker game in purgatory.

He tossed in his chips with a click.

"I'll raise you."

Maybe.