Jan Stinchcomb
There’s a little devil running around our neighborhood. We’ve seen him.
In colonial Massachusetts, on the other side of the country, people once believed the devil was a living, breathing entity, not merely a symbol of evil or a shadowy abstraction. They believed he walked among them. They saw him in action, doing forbidden things, often with people they disliked, and they feared encountering him in the middle of the dense woods.
This is nothing like our devil, a dark and strangely shaped little creature, something between a pig and a dog, who skitters along, usually at dusk. The first time we saw him, we laughed aloud. What was that? Can you believe it? Yes, I think—yes!—that was the devil.
Just imagine: a hairy little guy who looks embarrassed to be spotted in the world has caused so much historic fuss.
He disappeared between two houses and we went running after him, but we couldn’t find him again. He only appears when you’re not expecting anything from your evening walk. And curiously, it’s usually when you’re alone.
We were the first couple to experience the devil.
We couldn’t have a child. I’ll say that right off the bat before anyone assumes I’m talking about this runaway devil as a child replacement. I won’t analyze the dream I had where I picked the devil up and held him in my arms while he transformed into many things: a punk rocker, a windmill, a child’s rocking chair.
We didn’t really want a baby, and then it was too late, and finally, we watched the earth transform until nobody was sure how much longer food and water would last, not to mention air.
We congratulated ourselves and spent the money on travel, but then there was a long stretch of time when nobody wanted to get on a plane, and after that the prices shot heavenward, leaving us behind with our clever plans.
We used to have Salem Night, a popular quarantine-era practice, in our little neighborhood. We would sit around, masked, and accuse one another of everything we had suspected or heard or feared. Who was sleeping with whom. Who was using pesticides. Who had bribed a schoolboard member. Whose out-of-control grass was an affront to the community. Whose children were bullies.
It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Often we would learn a rumor wasn’t true, or an offender was truly sorry, or someone was simply unable to remedy a problem.
The worst crime? Putting your house on the market, or even thinking about it. You see, we live right on the edge of a bay to the north of a big city, and we enjoyed the bump in property values during quarantine, when everyone was trying to escape other people. This has recently been corrected, in response to the nationwide return to the office, but also because the insurance companies are scared off by the rising sea levels.
After we saw the devil, we wanted to bring Salem Night back, mainly because we felt so lonely. We missed sitting in the Circle of Accusation.
And those two houses the devil disappeared between the first time we saw him? They both went on the market the very next Sunday.
We should not have been surprised when we felt his little furry body between our big and relatively smooth bodies around three o’clock one morning. I stopped moving, kept my eyes closed, and held my breath like a child hiding from a monster.
What should we do?
I don’t know.
Will he bite?
Maybe just don’t move? Try to relax.
Somehow we fell back to sleep, even as the bed grew warmer and warmer. In the morning, the real morning with sun and hope, we were amazed at our shared nightmare. Did it really happen? We both remembered every detail of bodily sensation, every line of our whispered conversation. There was no devil between our legs when we were fully awake. We threw back the covers to examine the sheets, and there, I was excited to find, was a little pile of black and bristly hairs.
We do not have a cat.
We were not surprised the devil had appeared to us again, and we knew the choice of our bed was significant. We felt it warranted a response.
We made love on those devilish sheets, but it was joyless and self-conscious, as if we knew we were being judged. We kept expecting someone to barge through the door or fly through the window.
A certain oily smudge, dead center on the bottom sheet, would never come out, even after several washings. It looked like a beast in a cave painting when you held it up to the light.
We have each had an affair. We never caught each other. Neither of us ever confessed. We never spoke of it, not once.
I only discovered my partner’s affair by accident, long after the time of my own transgression.
It was our greatest moment of togetherness, each of us too wrapped up in someone else to notice the other’s deception, in sync yet unaware.
This was years ago. If I told this story now, at Salem Night or at my own breakfast table, it would be greeted with howls of laughter.
A long time passed without the devil. We missed him terribly and felt incredibly foolish for thinking we could live without him. We went so far as to admit that we hadn’t had much of a life before him.
We went for long walks at dusk, but it was no use. Our little devil never appeared when we were searching for him. Nevertheless, we began seeing him everywhere: under cars, in attic windows, in the tall brume that thrived at the shoreline, deep in the tangle of blackberry lining the gravel road where the houses ended. It was never him, but instead a cat or a child or nothing at all.
We became despondent.
We sat up in bed one velvet midnight, each of us having been struck by the same lightning bolt. I know what we need!, we exclaimed in one voice.
To sin.
Truth be told, we weren’t very good at transgression, aside from lust, as evidenced by our skillful adultery, but we considered the Seven Deadly Sins. We mostly micro-dosed when it came to sin: false modesty coated our obvious pride, we were too politically correct for true greed, wrath came out in occasional and rather mild temper tantrums, high taxes had pushed us away from envy, gluttony was too painful to implement in middle age and only occurred on birthdays and holidays, and sloth didn’t appeal since we loved both exercise and work. Had we outgrown sin? What could we do?
We revisited the Ten Commandments in case we had missed something. Idolatry seemed silly. We had long since stopped saying goddamn. Our parents were dead. There was nothing we needed to steal; in fact, we were obsessed with discarding our possessions. We lied all the time in little, harmless ways. Coveting houses and wives was pointless in a planned community once given to swinging and now slipping into a pervasive melancholy.
It wasn’t until the sky went from black to dark blue that we came upon the answer. We would have to kill someone, preferably on a Sunday. But who? There was nobody we disliked enough to push into the bay. We could never kill a child or an animal. We would never kill each other.
What about the devil? We did not want to kill him, but we could capture him and hold on tight. Make him talk to us. Of course, there was the distinct possibility he would end up killing us, but every worthwhile thing we had ever done had involved a high degree of risk.
Had anyone ever survived an encounter with him? Didn’t they always lose their soul, and is that not a horrible trade-off?
We waited for him. The seasons moved from cool to warm to hot and back to cool again, but not in the way they once had, and never with the right amount of rainfall. More houses were sold. Children left and came back.
We started to doubt we had ever seen the devil.
We still took our evening walk, no matter the weather, and the effort became pure meditation, the two of us always waiting for him but never speaking of it, looking for him but only out of the corners of our eyes.
It was October, naturally, when something dropped from the sky through the gloriously chilly, spice-filled air and landed on our heads. We could not speak; there was no time for words or thought. We grabbed at the devil as he fell, wriggling, between us. This time our bodies knew what to do: we pressed ourselves together until he was trapped, hot and hairy, against our bellies.
I wanted to look down. I was hoping for a glimpse of his face. A glimpse of our future. I so wanted this.
First, though, our eyes met, and then we understood our position. We could stick together, forever, like this, warmed by the devil, or we could let go. We could become more ourselves than ever before, the devil binding us, or we could release him, step back, and become like everybody else. Who knows how long we stood there? It grew dark. We worried that the devil had already disappeared, but every so often he would move, startling us, buoying our unearned ecstasy.
So whose fault was it? Did my partner move first, or did I? Is it possible for any couple to stay pressed together forever?
We have fought about this for so long that the whole neighborhood knows something is wrong. No Salem Night needed. Our secret is out.
We saw the devil, we knew the devil, we had the devil, but we let him get away.
And now he has gone back to what he was before, a story we are condemned to tell. A tale that’s hard to believe.
Jan Stinchcomb is the author of Verushka (JournalStone), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have appeared in Bourbon Penn, SmokeLong Quarterly and hex, among other places. A Pushcart nominee, she is featured in Best Microfiction 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2018 & 2021. She lives in California. Find her at janstinchcomb.com; Bluesky: @janstinchcomb; Instagram: @jan_stinchcomb.
Photo by Doncoombez on Unsplash