Mimi's Demons

Chapter 7: Demons Speak

One day, in the first few months of second grade, a summer after the place with the soft doors and pill-flavored orange juice, Mimi tripped at recess and skinned her knee really bad.

Her eyes had watered with tears, but she didn't cry out loud, because she had learned there were worse things in this world than skinned knees.

One of the kids she'd been playing with ran to get the teacher since Mimi had a hard time standing up. As Mimi's gaze went up to follow her classmate, she saw them: the devils, poking out their heads from around corners, bushes, even the playground, to sniff the air. There were all kinds, but most of them were the kind she saw most hiding around street corners; flesh-red things with no wings and long, skinny tails and sharp, pointy teeth. They didn't have pupils, but she could always tell where they were looking.

This time, they were looking at her. Or more specifically, her scraped knee.

She took a deep breath to bury the scream pricking up from her belly. If she screamed, everyone would ask why and maybe she'd be taken back to the scary place. Maybe she'd have to take the medicine again. It was already hard enough to hide the one pill her mother gave her each morning, and that one only made her really sleepy and jittery. But it made the devils meet her eyes longer, made them smile, so she'd hide it under her tongue till she could spit it out while brushing her teeth.

The devils weren't smiling, though, when they crawled towards her from their various hiding places. Their jaws were dropped, showing all their teeth, and drool dripped from their chins. A spidery one hand mandibles instead of teeth and kept rubbing them together as it picked through the grass on its many legs.

All the hairs on Mimi's body stood on end. Despite the big owie on her knee, she got up and started towards the school. When she saw she wouldn't make it before one of the devil's reached her, she started to run, trailed after by curious, cawing classmates.

She met her teacher at the door.

"Oh, Mimosa, what's wrong?"

But Mimi couldn't say. She couldn't say there were devil's coming up behind her, drooling and staring at her knee like it was a cheeseburger.

She did manage to get into the classroom, but it didn't stop the devils from slipping through the tiny crack around the doors and windows or through the vents. She gripped her teachers sweater and focused hard on the pearly puppy brooch on her chest.

"It's okay, Mimi, it will only hurt for a second." Her teacher had disinfectant already in hand and some cotton balls in the other. "This will kill the germs so your knee doesn't get sick."

They're not there, Mimi chanted to herself. You're just seeing things. It's your brain making up stuff.

But then she felt a cold, needle-like touch on her leg and screamed.

"Mimosa!" her teacher cried in alarm.

Down below, with one clawed hand on her ankle, was one of the common devils, it's bulbous yellow eyes on Mimi's.

"What do you want for it?" it hissed.

Never before had a devil touched or talked. If one ever got close enough to touch her it would phase right through her, like a ghost. All she had ever heard was their clicky, chilling laughter in the locked-doors hospital.

Mimi froze up. All her muscles went stiff. Even her lungs stopped working.

She was hardly aware of her teacher rushing to clean up her bloody knee and chanting reassurances to her.

The little devil gave her ankle a little shake. It could touch and move her leg.

"What do you want for blood? Exchange. Exchange."

It seemed impatient. Its pupil-less eyes were narrowing with each swipe of the cotton ball that took some of her blood away.

"Go away," Mimi squeaked.

The devil's thin lips curled back impossibly far in the widest grin Mimi had ever seen. It opened its maw of shark teeth to let out a long, dark-purple tongue.

The tongue dashed across the scrape on her knee, lapping up the blood before the cotton ball could reach.

It was slimy and cold.

Her teacher barely noticed the cotton ball coming back still clean.

"Okay, here comes the band-aid!" Her teacher tore open the paper packaging. "You're almost done."

The devil sucked back its tongue, shivered, then dropped to the ground. Then, like lightning, it dashed through the wall of the classroom, disappearing.

The other devils grumbled from where they watched. Some crooned like whining dogs. Mimi didn't hear her teacher's next words under all the noise.

"I want to go home," she whimpered.

The devils were glaring at her, angry. But they did seem to be turning and going away. Was it because she asked the one to go away? But none of the others had gotten the blood—that's what exchange meant, right? One thing for another?

Her teacher didn't let her go home then, but she did walk Mimi out when school finally ended and her mother was waiting for her by her car.

"I heard you got hurt today," said Mom. "You doing okay?"

Her baby brother cooed from inside the car.

Mimi felt bad for wishing her brother wouldn't be here today. She needed Mom today and didn't want to share.

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Please star, like, or comment. It will help me and my story out a lot, or just make my day, but you don't even know me so it's not like you'd go out of your way for a stranger. I'm just a poor woman with cold feet because my cat doesn't feel like warming them. Neither does my three-year-old. And the nine-year-old is too bony and cold himself. What's up with kids being so bony no matter how much you feed them anyway?