Demon

Had I heard those words from an old woman’s lips in another time or place, it might have evoked pathos in me. But I had to remember: Never had Lucian seemed anything less than capable, crafty, and always more than he—she—purported to be. There was a latent cunning beneath the surface of everything she said, a taut power. And when she raised her eyes to me now, I saw something move like a shadow behind their clouded curtain, as one in the street sees a figure in a third-story window, looking down in silence, watching. And again I felt that surge of anxiety that I was missing something entirely.

“Then, with another squalling rush of clarity, I understood: There would be no new creation. He would not discard these mud people to begin anew with a greater or meeker brand of creature. He would offer his all to these mortals because they were the ones he loved.”

“All this time you had been waiting for El to destroy us?” I said faintly.

Now that mouth, which had gone slack, spread wide, revealing crags of stained teeth. “Oh, yes.” And the sibilance of that word was more menacing than if she had shouted, for I realized she had waited to revel in that very thing. Now she leaned back in her chair, tilting her head at an angle I found unnatural, especially for an old woman, as though she wouldn’t mind at all breaking her own neck.

“And yet we were not without means. The world was Lucifer’s kingdom, and El had just entered it in the flesh of a human. And as I held out hope, it lengthened my own, demonic vision.”

I had hardly ever heard her refer to herself in this way except at the beginning, so it struck me with ominous force to hear it now.

“Our Jewish king, so carefully chosen and strategically placed, was ruthless. It was enough that this would-be king threatened his reign, and so he sought to kill the child.”

“I take it he didn’t find him.”

That’s when something strange happened. The demon became distracted, staring with squinted eyes off in the direction of a store somewhere beyond the food court. Following her gaze, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, only shoppers coming in and out of the store, two men standing outside it like disenfranchised husbands waiting on their wives.

“What is it?”

“He had every boy in the area under two years old butchered.” Lucian’s eyes darted this way and that, a dry tongue snaking out to lick at her lips.

I thought again of the nativity scene, so serene and idyllic.

“Not that it helped. Obviously, the baby survived.”

20

I felt it like a bodily urge—like the irresistible need to cough, to vomit, to use the toilet. The story welled to a sickening head within me. I grabbed a stack of paper from my recycling bin and began to write, the physical act releasing it in fits. Even when I reached the end, I sat back, breathing slowly, deeply, waiting for it to subside, and then bolted upright to add in my thoughts, the description of her hands tearing at her hair, the grotesque moment when I’d asked her about human obliteration, her smile the rictus of a corpse.

Shortly after one in the morning, I went to bed with a headache severe enough to turn my stomach.

At 3:00 a.m. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about something the demon had said. If El mended the rift between humans and himself, what would become of us?

Of me?

I thought of the Genesis account. Of the messianic prophecy and the birth of the baby. Something dawned on me that I had not seen before, something that, even alone in my apartment, made my lips part in wonder: The growing pile of pages on my desk was not the story of a fall. Neither was it a demonic coming-of-age.

It was a love story. Of God for humans.

I supposed, too, it was the story of Lucian’s own love affair and subsequent divorce.

If humans could be reconciled, what about demons? Lucian had said nothing about any hope for himself. At least not yet. Perhaps that was where he meant to go next.

But what if not? What if Lucian were truly disowned? Then he must resent people as much as he claimed. And that must, necessarily, include me.

MY SLEEP THAT NIGHT, all three hours of it, was riddled with restless visions. I dreamed of Pastor Feagan, seeing the deep lines around his eyes, the gold crowns on two of his front teeth, more clearly in dreams than I could in memory. But when he opened his mouth in children’s church, he wasn’t the pastor at all. He was Lucian, spewing his hatred for all things human across the carpeted floor of the sanctuary.

And then I was at my cousin’s house. My father was still alive, and we had driven to Nebraska as a family to see his brother’s family where they lived midway between Lincoln and the western panhandle. My uncle had moved there for some kind of work, and I used to love visiting my cousins there, where they burned their garbage in a big bin out back, and we played Kill-the-Carrier in their giant front yard. I was six again.