I would thank you to not read this if you are in a good mood and wish to keep it that way.

My earliest memory was of a great pain in my big toe. It splintered out like white hot light, the creation of life that haphazardly threw together the framework for which I would understand the world. The hand carved coffee table, as clear as a picture, spun in the air and landed on my right foot, letting me know the universe would bite. Dad was screaming drunk, and Mom held me to her chest, pointing a jabbing finger into the air, spitting obscenities. But the pain was there, and it was real, and it brought me alive.

Skirting among the underbrush in the tree line near the dilapidated house I grew up, Mom whispered things to me. Things that children don’t understand. Things like, “This is the last time.” Or “He’s gone too far.” She inspected my foot. The nail on my big toe was bleeding. Anytime I fell and scraped a knee or something stupid like that, I’d squall but this felt different in ways I still don’t understand; that is to say, I didn’t cry. But she did. No matter how many times she repeated the mantra, she was jobless and there would be no way for her to eke a living with me in tow. There was no leaving. There was only weeping in the tall weeds as she pulled her young son under her throat and held him there until he couldn’t even remember why he was there or what it all meant.

Silly little critters that we were, we crawled into the house after a night half asleep among the pretty fireflies with crickets in white noise. There Dad laid in the floor, among shattered bottles that caught the glint of the morning light coming in through a living room window half covered by a blanket hanging from nails; it wouldn’t be until I was older that I realized real people, if there ever was a thing, didn’t cover their windows with towels and quilts. What a ball I had when I could whip a curtain back and forth along a rod’s length. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. It was like I could choose when people could see me. But I had an affinity for the immobile towels and quilts too.

Nothing was said after and nothing was done. No apologies, not a single word. There were only the cornflakes in my bowl with little more than a spit of milk. I stirred the bowl with my spoon while examining the crinkly texture of each individual flake. Through the open threshold leading from the kitchen to the living room, I could see Mom picking up empty bottles, being careful not to spill the leftover contents on the carpeted floor. I stared down at my foot dangling off the edge of one of the chair spokes; it was wrapped loosely in gauze and electrical tape.

“Not very tasty, is it?”

I flinched and lifted my head to what should have been the open chair across from me at the small round table. Angled forward over the table with great bat-wings and gnarly jutting teeth and curled pigtail horns was a man with red skin. He hunkered on his chair with his feet in the seat so that his knees came up to the bottom of his angular jaw. It was a demon. Rolling my tongue around in my dry mouth, feeling my heartbeat in my throat, I tried to speak but could not.

He put his hands into a pyramid shape on the envelope-cluttered table. “That’s okay, little one. Most of you have a hard time when you see me.” Sun shafts cut across his grin. I glanced to Mom in the other room; she was stepping her way over Dad’s splayed unconscious body. The demon went on. “Don’t worry. You’re the only one that can see me. It’s not as though I would show myself to just anyone.” He looked at my bowl and craned across the table. “I don’t blame you, kid. That’s not too good. Not too good at all.”

I opened my mouth to say something as he leaned back in the chair.

He put up a flat palm and my words caught in my throat. “It’s probably best you don’t speak to me yet. I don’t want your mama thinking you’ve lost your mind. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Good.” He peered into the living room at snoring Dad. “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

I didn’t move.

“It’s alright. I get it. He’s your papa.”

Mom returned to the kitchen, the bruise on her face quickly turning a swollen red.

“I think that’s my cue to leave.” The demon nodded and disappeared in a puff of black smoke.

Mom took up in the chair he sat in moments before. The curls of her hair came down across her forehead in sweating strings; she took up one of the old envelopes on the table, fanning herself with it. “It’s so hot in here. We need an A/C.” She looked over at me; my hands rested flat on the table. “You should eat before it gets soggy.” She smiled.

Years went by before I saw the demon again. At least in the real world, because I would see him all the time in my nightmares. He would tell me of the place he came from and what sorts of things happened there. Then he would go on about how Dad would go there and if I weren’t a more careful man, me too. The way that vivid dreams go to antiquity, they leaked away into foggy places so that I could imagine them only in the most unsatisfactory capacities.

Dad stayed out more and more. The long hours after work would sometimes steal his whole night at home away. But when he did arrive, he would stagger in with drywall dust still clinging to his hair and white construction mud covering his blue jeans. Almost always he carried with him a case of beer. He would plop onto the armchair in the living room and demand Mom remove his shoes. Sometimes there was a fight but sometimes there wasn’t. Regardless, I would move to my bedroom and read chapter books pilfered from the library.

When the weather was dry and hot, Dad would have me help with outside chores he usually left half finished. Lining the gutters of the old house were clotting twigs and leaves. He’d twist around at the top of the ladder while I stood at the bottom to collect the refuse in a large white garbage bag. Those accumulated bags would sit along the backside of the house for years after. The first time I ever saw the blackish sludge he removed from the gutters, I made a face. Dad laughed at me and chucked it into the open bag I was holding. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“It’s bug and bird shit.”

When I squinted and pursed my lips to indicate disgust, he laughed. It wouldn’t be till I was older that I realized he was telling me a joke. It was almost fun.

My cousins, a rude bunch of much older boys, would hang around our front yard; they only lived a stone’s throw from us and so would drop by often to either drink small bottles of liquor or look at porno magazines. I’d stand on the front porch, alongside a mildewed piano, striking hollow keys alone. Dad always talked about getting it fixed but never did; instead, he shuffled an ever-growing pile of rebar behind it. The boys told me I was quiet and weird so that probably meant I was gay, but I didn’t even know what gay was. To hear it from them, it must have been bad so I told them, Psh naw.

The biggest cousin whipped open one of their worn magazines to a spread with a woman on two pages. Her teeth were exposed in a ring of red lipstick but her eyes hardly smiled. “You see this?” Said my biggest cousin. “This is something like you won’t ever get.” He kissed the pages. The others laughed and I chuckled too just because.

It was a day filled with dew, very humid, when they trod across the front yard with two burlap sacks; they angled across the brown grass towards an unused clothesline post. Whatever monsters were inside the sacks must have been the cruelest sort, because it looked as though they wanted out very bad; what doom could the creatures within those old bags spell out for us humans? My cousins were laughing. I watched them from the porch, beside the piano, idly wondering what they were doing. The biggest cousin pointed at me and laughed before putting up his middle finger. The others wrangled the sacks to the ground as they unspooled a strand of bright yellow twine. After teasing out furry tails, they proceeded to tie many knots around them. The monsters in the bags kicked and screamed and howled. My cousins lifted the sacks with the two tails connected by a short line of that bright yellow twine before looping it over one of the arms of the clothesline post. Once they were sure it was secure, they removed the sacks and what was within burst with claws and teeth ready.

It was two stray cats, confused, terrified, dangling from the twine around their tails, clawing at the nearest thing. It just so happened to be one another. My cousins laughed hard as the howling cries of the cats filled the air. I stood, frozen at the sight of the two animals ripping into one another with their protests only being met with the giggles of teenage boys. I felt sick but more than that, I could feel something bubbling up just beneath the surface.

I took a step forward, edging my bare toes over the edge of the top stair on the porch. A gentle but stern hand landed on my shoulder and I stopped. The hand was cold. So cold. I shifted my gaze up to meet the eyes of the demon towering over me. “Whoa there, kid.” He spoke in a whisper. “Are you sure about that?”

I jerked out of his black clawed hand.

He raised his eyebrow. “Alright.”

My cousins’ giggles slowed until the yard was silent save the squalls of the bleeding cats. They were staring at me, expressions of terror scrawled across their faces. The shadow of the demon’s massive wings bellowed out and the monster laughed.

The boys in the yard screamed and scattered in all directions. Once they were gone, the demon went to the dangling cats. One hung limply off the line while the other hissed as he approached. He extended a single clawed index finger and sliced the line with a sharp black nail. The dead cat dropped hard and the winner ran off without looking back, still with the frayed yellow twine coiled round its tail; it disappeared somewhere in the trees.

“It’s easy, kid.” He said. I moved from the porch and went over to the unmoving cat, prodding it, willing it to be living. “Sorry about this one.”

I wonder whether or not it was then or before that I was bound. Surely a deal with the devil, even when expressed in your head, is not a good thing.

He hung off me everywhere I went, looming like a deathly figure. I would see him everywhere. When I would lie on my belly and scribble in my coloring books or when I would start school or when I talked to the guidance counselor about bruises. He would be there. I’d go throughout my day, usually with my nose in a book and when I would look up from the pages, there he was, towering among the children in the classroom or behind Dad or Mom or poised on the side of the road like a ghastly hitch hiker with his thumb out as the car windows went by in a watercolor blur. But the daytime was hardly the worst of it, because in the night he would sit at the foot of my bed and watch me with yellow eyes in the dark, white teeth gleaming in the milk light that came through my bedroom window. The demon’s eyes told a story to me; they said it would always be like this. They said we were in this together.

As a last resort to meet people, I told stories. Sometimes the fish would be this big but sometimes the fish would be THIS big. Stretching the truth didn’t matter; everyone loved the guy that told a story. Even if it was a mask. Being well equipped with an imagination made it so that I didn’t ever have to get to know anyone in a sincere capacity. Seeing my friends was like seeing figures at the edge of a deep fog; I could only ever make them out in approximations and I’m sure it was the same going the other way. Or maybe I just hoped it was like that.

With pimples and wispy upper lip hair, I started looking at girls, examining them from a distance like watching a star through a telescope. And I hoped that would be in the cards for me. And I wondered if marriages were always like Mom and Dad’s. Parties were wild; I would go to some where the poor kids went to the junkyard and bumped to rap music, beating the hoods of worn-out cars with their feet in forty-ounce glee. We’d chug malt liquor and talk about being something greater than we were; we all wished for it but the fact of the matter was that most of us were cruelly subjected to forces far outside of our control. I don’t think there’s destiny, but there is a thing at play in the universe that’s unfathomable to humans. Sometimes I think that if we let go and let it take us where it may we’d be happier. Maybe.

The kids from school started smoking weed too and doing other things. I thought it’d be nice; everyone said it relaxed you and this much was true. But the more times the loose rolled joint passed in the circle, the easier it was for me to accept whatever else came my way, because I was the guy that collected stories. As it turns out, mixing OxyContin and cough syrup and weed has troubling side effects. It felt the whole rest of the night like gravity had a personal vendetta against me and I blacked out in a grass field down the way from the junkyard, clinging to the earth as though I was afraid it might buck me off into space.

When I returned home, Dad waited on the porch with a bottle tucked neatly beneath his chair. He sipped from a red SOLO cup, mixing the contents with a two-liter soda pop bottle; the ultimate signifier that he intended to be like that for a long time. As he laid eyes on me when I wavered up the gravel driveway, his eyes cut through the crisp morning light like black pebbles. Try as I might to slip past him quickly through the front door, he snatched my arm and held it there.

He squinted up at me from his plastic chair. “You think you can just come and go as you please, huh?”

With a whole life’s experience of slipping out of his grasp, I figured I could pull away and dart to my bedroom before he’d be able to catch me. I’d slam the door and have it locked while he was still trying to gain his balance in a drunk stumble through the house. That would have been nice. But he caught me off guard and I was still drowsy. Dad slammed me into the wall by the front door and stood all in one swift motion, mushing my face into the paint chipped panels. I pushed my feet off the wall and we fell down the stairs in a scramble of arms and legs and him cussing at me. Within those seconds, I was certain I’d found my way out of the predicament. Going on hands and knees, I crawled at the driveway as quickly as I could, but he caught me in the end and put his weight on my back, pinning my scrawny arms with one big hand; I was still a gangly kid.

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I felt his thick fingers in my hair as he pulled it tight and drove my face into the gravels. The first few times my head met the ground, I only knew adrenaline pain; the sort that is there but also not. Then it really came when one of my front teeth chipped. I felt it in my mouth. It’s strange the sorts of things you think in moments like that, because I should’ve been worried about the two-hundred-pound man holding me down, but all I really thought was how badly I didn’t want to swallow that piece of tooth. Like they’d be able to put it back if I saved it. Then it was harder to see, blurry. And my mouth went slobbery wet. The drugs were coming up with a vengeance. The vomit burned and I hardly remembered it.

But I do remember what Dad said. “Oh my god! You got it all over me! Jesus Christ!”

He let me go and I laid there half in the grass and half in the driveway, head throbbing and all I heard were the crickets and I was reminded of the night me and Mom were chased from the house.

After Dad sauntered inside to clean himself off, I pulled myself up to my feet while idly scanning the ground wondering if I’d lost that piece of tooth for good.

Once I’d given up and made it to my bedroom, I shut the door behind me and was sure to double check it was locked. There was the demon, perched on my bed. “I could do it. Nobody would miss him.” He said to me.

I don’t want you to, I said.

“Yes, you do. I can feel it.” There was a pause as he shifted his legs off the bed. “I’m here for you.”

Can’t you just go away? I pleaded. I don’t want you here anymore.

“Don’t be that way.”

Go away!

His hands were around my throat in seconds, pinning me to the closed door. The way he’d so gracefully lifted me off my feet scared me. He’d never done anything like that before. “You piece of ungrateful shit.” The demon’s voice roared, harsh like crashing metal. “You think what he did to you is bad? I will fuck your soul, kid. Don’t you ever talk like that again.”

I couldn’t speak. I was choking and my vision was going dark till he could only be seen through pinholes. Feeling nauseous all over again, I was afraid I’d lose my guts. I couldn’t move and my muscles went loose.

He shook his head. “Quit shaking. You look ridiculous when you do that.”

The demon dropped me and moved across my room. I massaged my throat. I didn’t move from the spot. He could kill me; I was certain of that much.

My voice trembled out the line, Leave and don’t come back again.

He looked over his shoulder and my muscles tenses. I could feel the hatred coming off him. Where the courage had come from to say the words, I’m not sure. My heart caught in my throat as seconds passed while feeling line an infinity.

“You don’t mean that.” Said the demon. “I’m here for you.”

Go away.

Once more in a puff of black smoke, he went. The room was quiet and I stood totally still against the door, feeling as though he might creep from the edges of my periphery; his long red fingers might spring from the corners of my vision and pierce my eyeballs like squirting grapes.

I tried dusting myself off but the vomit had already dried down the front of my shirt. Feeling my face swell from the altercation with Dad, I stripped and climbed into bed, throwing the sheet over my head. When the following day came, I refused to go to school; catching my reflection in the window near my bed should have been enough but it was also hard to see out of my left eye and I didn’t want people asking.

It felt like perhaps the demon was gone and would finally leave me be; for years after, it began to feel as though he might never make a return. That would have been nice.

After receiving my high school degree by the skin of my teeth, I moved out of the old house. Leaving Mom there was rough but it was better than being there. I hated him but I reckon I hated her too for a lot of other reasons. Her complacency was enough to get that from me. I was still an air headed kid not willing to subject myself to the more nuanced grays of it.

Directly out of school, I stuffed pillows in a textile plant. The money was terrible, but the comradery among the people that worked there was enough to dispel their aching knees and backs. Not a day went by that someone wasn’t being picked on. Working people do that. They pick. And it’s the absolute best way I’ve seen them make friends.

We’d meet up at bars after work, sipping beers while still tangled in bits of thread and stuffing dust.

Barely keeping my eyes open following a twelve-hour shift was when my attraction to bubblegum girls started; one stood against the bar and I was awestruck by her aesthetic. Rainbow hair colors paired with eccentricities seemed to draw me in and I’m sure that some therapist would posit that it was a longing for something light and fun. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe I just liked the tattoos they had under their clothes.

I met one such girl and after coaxing her with my broad vocabulary, which just so happens to work as a well enough substitute for actual intelligence to most people, we did the deed in my twin sized mattress in the single wide trailer I rented with two other men. We lied alongside one another, staring at the ceiling, chests rising and falling. Her purple hair caught along the wrinkles in the pillow case and I played with the strands; years of dying had left the hairs stale and dead feeling. I wondered if this said something about her and if it was anything like I felt on the inside. But that’s an unfair assumption that most likely says more about me than it does about her. She probably just liked the colors. The calm after was nice even if it was a one-night-stand.

She rolled over on her side and put her head in her hand. Looking over my bare chest, she poked me in a rib. “Why don’t you eat more? You look small and a little sick or something.”

I flinched at her jabbing before grabbing her hand and pushing it back. Don’t do that, I said.

“What?”

I just don’t like it when people do that.

“Okay.” She said this with raised eyebrows and a shrug.

Tucking the blanket up around my chin, I rolled away from her. Will you hold me? I asked. It would have been nice to be the little spoon, I think.

She slung her arm limply over my shoulder but finally pulled away. I heard her shifting around on the opposite side of the small bed. “This is weird. I thought you knew what this was.” She was slipped her pants on and buckled them shut while scanning the floor for her bra. “You’re fucking weird, dude.”

I’m sorry, I said.

“Whatever.” She left quickly and without a goodbye.

Was I weird? Without a doubt.

It went like that for a while except I learned not to get too close to the girls. I started falling asleep after so they wouldn’t be subjected to my weirdness. It was adjacent to intimacy.

Then I received the phone call. It was at the factory during my lunch break as I hung among the other smokers beneath the sheet metal cover hanging off the side of the block building. People were laughing as I put my cellphone up to my ear. “Is that you, son?” It was Dad. I nearly hung up immediately; I’d not spoken to either of my parents in years. Something in his voice was different though. The deep commanding nature of his tone was far gone and replaced by wavering.

Yeah. I said.

“She’s dead.” He sobbed.

I clicked the red phone and returned to work without saying anything. It wouldn’t become real till after I left. And maybe if I never left, it would never be real.

Clinging to the rafters with hooked claws was the demon, watching from thirty feet above the factory floor. He couldn’t be real either. He’d been a figment of my imagination. He must have been. I hoped. The demon’s face teased me from up there. I kept my head down but that was not enough. As I focused on my work, he swooped from his perch, gliding till he came to a standstill directly beside me.

“Long time no see, kid.” He whispered in my ear. “What’s brought you back? Did you finally realize you can’t live without me? You need me. I won’t leave you.”

Maybe if I ignored him, he would go away.

“C’mon, kid. Don’t be that way.” He lifted a hand and placed it on the back of my neck. The touch of his cold fingers nearly brought me to heel. “You know I’m here. I know you know I’m here. So, let’s stop pretending.” He showed me the sharp end of the nail on his index finger and then pressed it against the back of my neck, drawing a horizontal line across it. I shivered. I wanted to scream but no one would believe me. No one would see what I saw. No one would feel what I felt. I placed a hand up to the spot he’d nicked and swiped it before pulling my palm up to my face. It was runny red. My stomach lurched. I sprinted to the bathroom and upturned my lunch into the toilet.

After leaving work, I saw him on the side of the street, with his thumb out. My head spun. It was impossible. I’d made him up. The stinging on the back of my neck told a different story.

How had she died? Was Mom really gone?

Weeks after, the demon remained. I lost sleep, watching him perch on the end of my bed like he’d done so many times when I was a kid. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t speak to him. The words never came.

Letters started coming in the mail with handwritten addresses. It was Dad’s scribble scratch. I never thought I’d receive letters from a prison. They didn’t come that often but it felt like they came all the time. I like telling stories and I’ve hardly ever been short winded when it comes to words but when I’d sit down to write him, something stopped me. The demon held my hands frozen and the pages remained blank. Then I was getting letters I’d never be able to respond to and they piled up like crazy. My roommates told me I should respond. The last letter I got before I moved was a thick one. I stood alone in the kitchenette. Everyone was out for the day. I sipped coffee and watched the unmoving paper on the counter. Sitting my cup to the side, I lifted the envelope. The demon watched me with a puzzled expression on his face.

“You know you can’t.” He said.

I ignored him and pinched one corner of the envelope with one hand and squeezed the counter’s edge with the other. Screaming, I began whipping the paper against the counter. I was crumbling to my knees till I sat in the kitchen floor, ripping the unopened letter into oblivion. I couldn’t breathe and I could not cry. But I wanted to.

“So melodramatic.” Said the demon.

After I moved and had an apartment all to myself, I started seeing women more often. I don’t think the demon liked that. I would fall asleep beside them and wake in the night to them clawing at the sheets as the disappeared over the bottom of the bed; he took them and they ceased to exist. It was like they’d never been at all and I was left to wonder if they’d ever been real at all. I wanted to die for the inevitable trap I led them to. The horror grew and swelled all the time. If I looked sickly thin before, the dark circles around my eyes made it so that I easily passed for an amphetamine addict.

“They were good.” He said.

Please, leave me alone.

He did not.

I stopped talking and subjected myself to days with the demon. All alone with each other. To say that I ever became comfortable with him would be a lie, but his presence became unsurprising. He nibbled at the edges of my life like moths to cotton.

“Your mama’s in hell.” He told me. “Your papa will be there soon enough. You too.” When he said that, I was surprised I wasn’t there already.

I started taking moonlit walks in the night, tired and sweaty and feeling him around all the time. So cold.

Eventually, I found myself walking along the private streets of residential homes and that’s where I met Macy. She held a long pipe over her head, angling it towards one of the gutters running the length on the front of her house. She was trying to nudge a basketball off the roof that had caught on the cusp of the gutter. Try as she might, she couldn’t quite get it. I stood in the street and watched her jump. Probably I should have said something. Maybe help her. She jumped again and the basketball came down, she flinched away, looking down to the pavement so that she wouldn’t be caught in the face by the ball. But she’d also nudged out a hunk of rotting leaves that splattered over her head. She squealed.

The basketball bounced then rolled down the driveway until it came to a stop at my feet. I lifted it as Macy tried pulling the dead leaves out of her hair.

“You’ve got bug and bird shit on you.” I said.

Macy jumped. “Whoa! What the fuck?” She turned to face me. The demon stood atop the slanted roof of the home and glared down at me with his arms crossed. I ignored him.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “Can I have my ball back?”

“Uh,” I looked to the orange globe in my hand. “Sure.” I tossed it to her and she caught it with an expert’s touch.

“Are you any good?” I nodded at the ball.

This is how we met and for a long time, the demon was easier to ignore. Me and Macy would go dancing or meet up for strolls or eat pizzas as big as our heads.

She would tell me, “I thought for sure, when I met you that you were some kind of murderer.” This would be immediately followed by a laugh, but I would still scan the vicinity to see if the demon was there. He was, looking on, tut tutting.

The I love yous came easy with her and every night we spent apart, I would plead with the demon to spare her. Don’t do this, I would say. Let me be happy, I’d say. For the first time in a long time, he had no cleverness to offer and he simply looked through dead eyes. I didn’t know his intentions.

I kept my past in the past but she wanted to know. More than anything, she wanted to know. I met her family and they were lovely people. Her Father was a doctor and her Mother was an interior decorator. Good sorts. Not in a million years would she meet Dad.

“What was your childhood like?” She’d muse as we laid in bed together, staring into the TV absently in my dark bedroom. “You never talk about it.”

“Normal.” I said, hoping to leave it at that.

“I want to meet your family.”

“They live far away.”

“We could take a vacation and see them.”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not? You’re a dweeb, but I’m sure they’re cool.”

I’d chuckle nervously. “Yeah. They’re okay.” They were not okay.

“Please?”

“Someday.” Someday would never come.

Macy would tilt her head and curiously raise an eyebrow. “Why do you always clam up over it?”

“Do I?” My mouth would grow dry and it would feel like I was drowning.

“You do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m tired.” She would roll over and sling the blanket up around her neck and snore and the room would be cold. So cold. And I would see the demon standing there in the corner, grinning. He would take her like he’d taken the others. He would rip her to shreds and send her to hell.

There was a fight. A fight about leaving clothes on the floor but it wasn’t about that, not really. We were screaming about the hamper and she was crying but I wasn’t because Dad said that was for pussies so I raised my voice instead, to scare her, and it worked. The demon whispered in my ears. “It’s better. You and me. That’s all. She’d just go anyway. I won’t leave you.” A chill passed through me.

She booger wept and my stomach churned. Would the demon take her from me? Would he assure that I would die alone, cold. “Who are you?” she asked, “Sometimes I don’t even know who you are.”

“What are you even on about?”

“You don’t tell me anything. I don’t know anything about you or where you’re from.”

“Why’s that important?”

“I don’t know.” She choked out her words. The demon stepped from around me and approached her.

My heart pounded to the point I was sure it might burst from my chest. “Don’t.” I said to him.

He stopped and shifted around to stare me down. As our eyes met, he grinned. “Excuse me? I don’t think I heard you right, kid.” He began approaching me in slow steps and I felt my knees grow weak. He might’ve cut me clean in two right there. I’m certain of it.

“I want you to leave me alone! Go away!”

Macy’s expression was one of unadulterated shock. “Why?” She asked.

“Don’t ever come back! I don’t need you! I never needed you”

The demon blocked Macy from view and it was just me and him standing in a vast unblinking black vacuum. “I’ll tell you what, kid. What a pair of balls you’ve got on you. I wonder what you’d look like inside out.”

“I’m done. I don’t want you around. I never needed you.” I said. We were within kissing distance. I was shaking, ready to die in those dire moments.

“You don’t mean that.” The demon offered.

“I do. I don’t need you. Please, leave me alone.”

“C’mon. Don’t be that way. We’re good together, kid.”

“I hate you.” I spoke as clearly as my quaking voice would afford. “And I want you gone.”

He raised his hand and every muscle in my body twisted drum tight. I felt he would kill me, take me apart and put me together again in worse ways. The claw came down in a swift motion. I closed my eyes to prepare for the white hot pain but when I opened them, I was peering through tears. I was blubbering. I was crying and it was amazing. Cement came off my chest and my shoulders shook as I held my forehead in my hands. I felt soft fingers on my shoulders. I looked up and there was Macy.

“I-I am messed up, Mace. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She said nothing and rubbed my back.

“I-I-I,” I never realized how hard it was to talk like that. “My Mom is dead. A-a-and my Dad is in prison.”

Her expression did not change. It was not one of judgement, but one of compassion and it was one I’d never known well.

The demon is in my dreams but he remains there and with time and hope, I am sure that he will waste to memory.