Emma Stark was a beautiful girl in all the beautiful ways. Chestnut hair falling in untrammeled waves of natural curls, eyes like the sky, lips as pink as fairy roses, skin as pale and soft as linen, ears as dainty as seashells. Let's put her description into AI and see who appears:
A perfectly pretty girl who never existed.
There she is: A perfectly pretty girl who never existed! Perhaps then you won't be distressed to learn that Emma died of tuberculosis at the age of fifteen. She had lived with her Ma and Pa in the little town of Ponce de Leon, Missouri—the locals to this day call what's left of the town (and there's not much) "Pawnsee"—in a cabin on a hill overlooking the healing waters of the Ponce spring.
So, how did Emma contract TB?
Mr. Balog, the Hungarian peddler is how. He had been to Bonne Terre in east Missouri to visit his brother, a lead miner. Bonne Terre was a bustling town in 1880 because the St. Joe Lead Company had innovated deep earth mining, a godawful means of extracting ore and a miserable way to earn a living, but damn it to hell, a company has to have a return on its investment, am I right? The residents of Bonne Terre—the real Americans—decided that poverty was preferable to deep earth mining, so the St. Joe Lead Company went all the way to Eastern Europe to recruit Hungarians to come to America and work as miners. Two of those suckers, uh, recruits, were Luca and Jozsef Balog. Luca worked in the mine for only a week when he said, "Bazdmeg," [look it up] and moved to the Ozarks to become a clock and candy peddler. Jozsef, however, remained in Bonne Terre to work in the deep mines. The crowded shanties and sewage-soggy streets and claustrophobic mine shafts and smoke from kerosene lanterns not to mention the pervasive dust from hammering, chipping, and cracking rock created near-laboratory conditions for the wildly successful propagation and contagion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Jozsef lay dying of tuberculosis in the squalor of his shack when Luca came to visit, whereupon Luca became a carrier though he didn't know it.
Jozsef Balog died a week after his brother visited, but that's okay: He had already made his contribution to our story, which is really about Emma.
Ah, ah, be patient now. Say it with me: History is tedious. Didn't you learn that in high school? The names and dates and never-ending wars. The razing of cities and enslavement of weaker nations. Economic factors. Political movements. The constant improvement in weaponry designed to create as much "collateral damage" as possible. The coining of words like "collateral damage" to justify any amount of violence.
History is a butcher shop with lies sold through the window.
So . . . Mr. Balog had been back in the Ozarks for a couple months and was peddling clocks and penny candy in Galena when his mare got the bots, and after she spewed a large amount of diarrhea on the front of his wagon, Mr. Balog placed her in the care of a witch master who lived in Jamesville (a town that no longer exists in anyone's imagination). Mr. Balog spent long hours sitting beside Old Nell, comforting her with warm compresses, stroking her distended belly, and murmuring Hungarian encouragement in her ears. For his part, the witch doctor made wax images that he stuck with needles and shot silver bullets at the moon. By the time Old Nell recovered, Mr. Balog's latent TB had become active TB (he thought he had a cold) and when he visited the Stark household to sell them a cuckoo clock, he leaned over and took Emma by the chin and coughed in her face.
First he died and then she died. Thus ends the historical part of this story.
Emma went to heaven as you would expect, but it didn't go well. She complained about the food. She told her guardian angel she was sick of cotton candy and white cake. She wanted beans and cornbread like her grammy made. She wanted biscuits. If they could bake a cake, why couldn't they bake some goddamn biscuits? She wanted a pork chop, but the angel told her, "There are no pigs in heaven." At that, she threw herself prostrate on a cloud, not in adoration but in a temper tantrum. She was grabbing up bits of fluff and throwing them at the angel. The angel asked her, "Aren't you a little old for that?"
And Emma said, "You're stupid. You and everybody else up here."
Then she complained about the weather. She wanted some rain. What's the point of having the same sunny weather every day? It's so . . . well, she probably wouldn't have said monotonous, but that's what she meant. Then she wanted to know why the other kids were stuck up, and the angel said, "They're not stuck up; they're holy," and Emma said, "Well, it seems to me like the same damn thing." The angel said, "You can't keep using language like that," and Emma said, "The hell I can't!"
(You can see where this is headed.)
And then Emma started complaining about God Himself. Why, she asked, did she and all the other souls have to spend six hours a day singing His praises? She asked, "Doesn't he already know he's good? He's God, for Chrissake! Why does he need us to tell him he's good?"
The angel said, "God loves his own glory more than anything else."
And Emma said, "That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!"
Her angel said she shouldn't say things like that, and she said, "What's he gonna do? Send me to hell?"
He did.
But she was a bigger pain in the ass in hell than she had been in heaven. She pulled the little devils' tails and hid Satan's pitchfork. When she was thrown in the tar pit, she made a tar pie and smushed it in her guardian devil's face. He started yelling at her, and she laughed and said, "Ya-ya! Shut your ugly mouth! You look better now than you did before." The tar was in his eyes, so he couldn't grab her, and while he was flailing around, she pushed him in the tar pit.
When Beelzebub tried to throw her in the fiery lake, she ran away and stuck out her tongue and hid in a hole. "Come and get me, you stinky demon!" she yelled, but his hands were too big to fit in the hole, and when he tried to worm his finger in, she poked it with a thorn. Later that day, she called Grover Cleveland "President Big Ass," Queen Guinevere a slut, and Robert E. Lee a "big, fat failure." When Satan bellowed, "That's enough, little girl" and opened his mouth to eat her, she grabbed a rock and chipped one of his teeth. He roared with pain and dropped her, and she kicked him in the shin.
"Big bully!" she hollered. "Everybody everywhere is nothing but a big bully after you die!"
So, Satan told the guardian devil to escort Emma Stark back to her cabin and make sure she stayed there. When she walked through the door, her Ma and Pa couldn't believe it! They reached out to hug her, but she said, "Okay, that's good. I can't believe y'all still live in this stupid shack! What a mess! At least heaven was tidy. I want some buttermilk! Where's Grammy? I'm tired. It's cold in here. At least hell was warm. I want some beans! Where's Ranger? Stupid dog. Give me a blanket. Is that dumb Balog still dead? Good! Serves him right; the son of a bitch gave me tuberculosis." And so on.
And so pretty little Emma Stark lived happily ever after. But no one else in her life did. No one at all.