There is a kind of silence that is only heard after loud and outrageous drunkenness has ended.

When he fell he took all the pride that the family had left. A man in his prime who drinks all day long and cannot get up from bed is not a man. You can say he is; but are you telling the truth? The truth is that he is a voice that his children hear loudly complaining from the bedroom. He isn't their father: he is at their mercy while mom is gone.

They are good children. They sit quietly and obey their oldest sister Maria. She works hard to cook and clean and care for her younger brother Dominic and baby sister Esperanza. Their mother works two jobs starting at five in the morning and ending at seven at night. What is sleep?

Eleanor's beauty faded fast. She was young in a way, but she was also very old already. She can find joy in anything and yet she has not smiled in a very long time. She loves to take her children to Saint Margaret of Cortona's Catholic Church. Her tithe is always generous and her prayers feverish. While her children go out to play on the swingset she would say a novena.

That is where the first of her devils found her. Praying on her knees before a silent god. Alone with her first devil.

She looked up and her red face and tears made her devil smile. She saw nothing there but she could feel its presence. The master imp whispered to her:

"God isn't interested in your prayers today. There are people out there who really need some of God's help. Sorta sinful to ask for anything. What have you done for God lately?"

Eleanor got to her feet and looked at the large crucifix behind the altar. She felt rejected and unheard. She left.

Her children obediently came to the car and got in. She let her oldest daughter choose a song on the radio to listen to on the way home from church. They drove past the butcher's where the bay door was open and the raw meat was hung behind drapes of plastic. The smell as they drove by was blood on the wind.

Artemis was waiting for them when they got home. He wanted to know if Eleanor had time to come to his office on Monday. He never just called and she hated it when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement just showed up. Two years of this treatment had changed her from a cowering mouse into an intolerant dog. But Artemis knew she had no bite and lorded over her like she wasn't yet housebroken.

Eleanor went back inside her home and let Maria make breakfast for the little ones. It made her wonder what they would know if they had stayed in Nuevo León. Her husband was once a cavalier in her eyes. As she stood in the open doorway of her bedroom staring into the darkness she felt his eyes on her. What did he see when he looked at her from his rotting cave? Did he still see his young bride?

Sometimes all she could see were flames. She hated those colors, red and orange and yellow. Often it was the grayness around her that made Eleanor quake. But brightness was somehow more painful and shocking. And what can be said to such an aversion? It is a lonely feeling, to be surrounded by those who look away. Colors are the lies they stare at.

Eleanor woke up Sunday evening and the house was silent. Her children were where? She got up and found she had slept upon the couch. She found them as pale and straight-mouthed bodies in their snug beds. Their dreams were quiet and without life. Eleanor kissed each of them in their middle eye as they sailed the stars.

The night was unkind to her. It left her trying to win a moment of peace in the glow of moonlight. She worried that if she looked up at the full moon she would stare at it. In staring at the moon she would go mad. A lunatic.

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The hour she had to leave for work arrived as the temperature dropped. Her first job was to arrive at the home of the Jetterly's. All day she cooked and cleaned and looked after their two children, the same age as her own youngest. She treated them as she would her own and they loved her dearly, knew her better than their own mother.

Then her second devil came to her. It simply pointed out the fact that she was spending her days in this household instead of her own. Then it mocked her for avoiding the thought. When it was time to go home she shook her head. She went up to the room where the children were taking a nap. She gave each of them a kiss too.

Her second devil watched this with arms folded and a fang-showing frown. She saw nothing but its shadow and ignored it.

On the way home Eleanor saw a young man on a bicycle fall into a ditch. She pulled over to try to help him. He was on his way to get his drug and when he was in her car he got an idea and he presented his knife to her throat. Eleanor begged him, forgetting her English Second Language, and laughing and mocking her native tongue he left her throat unslashed.

As Eleanor walked home she realized she had no way to get to her second job across town. Without a phone she couldn't even call her work. Worse, she had missed her appointment with Artemis. He had warned her she would get no more opportunities to make things right with Uncle Sam if she didn't meet him.

And when she got home she found that social workers had raided her home and taken her children. Her mental breakdown came at a crescendo. The body on her bed stood no chance without her ruthfulness. Couldn't stand anyway.

"Paliperidone." The nurse told her as she injected her. Eleanor had done this same routine for weeks. She discovered her psychotic break had gotten her involuntarily committed. Every day she asked 'what?' and the nurse said what the sting's name was. Now it registered.

"Where is Gabriel?" Eleanor looked up and had tears in her eyes. She was worried that a monster had torn him apart. She could remember showering his blood off of herself as she stood clothed in the shower.

To this the nurse said nothing. She was alone with her third and final devil. This yellow-skinned creature was entirely visible. She tried to scream but no sound would escape. Terror seized her mind and fought to escape from her shackled position. Yet under her panic and revulsion she felt oddly calm and unconcerned. The drugs were quick.

"God forgives you. It wasn't your fault." The creature had red where eyes were white and white where eyes were black. She loathed its colors and told it so as well as:

"Of course God forgives me; you hideous thing." Eleanor was choking with fear and defiance.

"That is good. You go to Heaven and I get to go back to where I came from." The creature looming before her appraised with a clever grin.

"Is this how you paint it black? I have done everything, I never took anything for myself." Eleanor suddenly felt the pride and rebelliousness in her rising. The devil came to her and only offered her praise?

"I know that." It said with a flourish.

"So what do you have? Nothing. Be gone, Satan." Eleanor glared.

"Gladly." The yellow hellspawned horror smiled and did a little bow as if about to leave then held up one claw on-a-thought. "Oh, just one more thing, before I go back to Hell."

"What is that?" Eleanor cringed, worried it had something nasty to add to the conversation.

"It is all paved in gold, you know. The streets, everything. Gold." The yellow devil held out a closed fist over her hand until she opened it. Then the creature dropped her wooden beads for her. She noticed that the holy rosary had left burns on its skin. Painful.

"I will pray for you." She offered.

"Don't bother." The creature laughed demonically in multiple scary voices and then spread its tattered and leathery wings and flew invisibly out of the opening in the yellow wall.

For a moment she saw Hell and it was the darkness of her bedroom and the feeling of eyes watching her silently from that darkness. Not so much a sound, but the feeling of souls tormented in that place and waiting for her. She could see them writhing like maggots over one another and flayed skinless and leaving a trail of blood as they crawled.

At this her scream unleashed itself. The shattering of her last moment of peace left her clutching her rosary. A streak of her hair had turned brittle and silver. All the colors of Hell, reds and yellows and orange. Fire's colors were in her eyes as her shrieks grew dim and hoarse.

If only the gray would return. But there was no more gray. There was not a color left that could have an unprofane meaning. Make it black or white, paint it blue and gild it in sin.

Madness is a virtue.