Lipstick And Lightplay

- a brief Good Omens meta essay, by LelithSugar.

Hell does not in fact smell of brimstone. 

And nor does Crowley.

Hell smells of whatever invokes the deepest horror in the tormentee. So yes perhaps, to some - the devout whose piety extended to fearing eternal damnation but not, say, to resisting the temptation to abuse a position of power - hell does smell of bubbling sulfur.

To some it might smell like whiskey on breath. To someone else perhaps it's disinfectant and petroleum jelly. Others, Like body odor, or offal, or like a festival portaloo that's been in the sun for three days. Like ammonia or stale lavender or burning tyres.  You know that bit in Mary Poppins where the medicine tastes like whatever they like most? The revolting reverse of that.

When Aziraphale enters hell, he finds tohis surprise that it smells of nothing at all. Sterile. Not a whiff of smoke or rotten egg or any of it. Just… Nothing. Really intense nothing. 

This is because to Aziraphale, hell should smell like the absence of his dearest friend and eternal companion. His other half. The thing he fears most, has suffered the most, is missing Crowley. 

And since demons carry the smell of hell, this is a paradox, impossible and self defeating: the olfactory equivalent of dividing by zero. Something can't smell simply like the opposite of the absence of itself, especially when it should inherently smell the same as the thing that smells of the lack of it. That's just preposterous. 

So Crowley chooses to smell of Bvlgari's Black Jasmine. 

And hell, thereby, smells of …not that. 

Imagine this body without an apology.

Without a dancing hour of caveats and girding.

Imagine pleasure without pain first.

Imagine sex without a summit of negotiations. Just when you want. Just because you want.

But wanting has never been enough, in this body. Brain must protect heart must betray flesh must explain skin.

Imagine waking up how you were meant to be.

Couldn't be me.

The thing is, some of us, we are car crashes. 

But we're little ones. Fender benders. Prangs.

Not worth stopping to check the damage, not worth the excess on the insurance.

And we can keep doing that for years. Decades.

Slip fifty quid and an apology under someone's windscreen wipers. Hope nobody calls the police.

How many ditches we narrowly avoid ending up in. How many curbs we bump and jolt awake.  How often we catch ourselves just before swerving across the central reservation.

The thing is, I'm 34 and I treasure this rust bucket, dented scratched shell covered in stickers. I'll keep it going as long as I can. Gets good mileage, I think.

The thing is, I don't even drive.