Demon Stories

Josephine: Releasing the Lilac Addict, 1925, France

Josephine

Releasing the Lilac Addict

1925, France

The smell of fresh bread fills my senses. Far in the distance, a woman on the street is singing an old song for small cash. Up above, a needle drags on a spent record with static sound in an apartment. My man takes my hand with his large warm hand. He's talking to me about something trivial, something to do with his business in the large city near this small town. I'm only paying half attention, because there's something which has caught my other attention. 

A speeding car sound. 

Its a minor annoyance. Something which shouldn't normally hold my attention. Something which happens all the time, someone reckless and stupid, ignoring the speed limit here. But for some reason, this time...

As it gets closer, my heart begins to race unexpectedly. What is going on? For some reason, my heart is going crazy. I adjust my cotton shawl higher up on my shoulders in the late Autumn chill, but it does not help the inner chilled feeling which is filling me up slowly as the sound of the car comes closer and closer. 

Closer with a hellish bent. Right at us.

With a half gasp of a voice I ask, "may we take in a show, or perhaps eat together?", leaning into my man, looking up at his face. 

He laughs calmly. How can he be calm? If he knew what was coming at us! He pulls me to him by the waist, not caring who could be seeing. "You are an expensive one, aren't you? That's okay, because you are so pretty." I look up at his handsome face with a heavy drop in my heart as my body gets a prickly feeling hearing the sound of those tires. 

I almost confuse my desperate feeling to get inside away from it with the desperate feeling I have for this man. This man whom, a few months ago, picked me up at the bar for two hundred cash and ignored the fact that he was paying for me. Who treated me as a real woman, even after discovering who I am as a man that night in the bedroom. This quip, this nod, to my profession by him is a dagger in my heart. They have been occurring more and more often. My mind tries to assure me he is only joking, making a poke at how we first met. But my heart stares me in the face sadly. He is married, it whispers to me again, he has two beautiful children. 

My heart knows this whole thing is a joke. A cruel joke, for even if he weren't married, there is yet that secret which he has not discovered about me, and can never discover about me. The secret, which has the entirity of my flesh wishing to tear open his stomach and kiss his insides, every moment of every day we are together. I know this whole thing is a joke. Yet I may have this joke, I may live in this joke and try to be happy for at least a few precious moments. 

I lean on him, towards the little pastry shop on the corner. "Buy me something with strawberries," I smile to him gently, taking all of myself to not show my nerves, "your Lilac wishes to put a strawberry in your mouth." My heart pounds faster as the car's speeding sounds only a block away. Why is it coming? What is going on? What is this madness? 

"Huh," he says, making an annoyed expression, looking at the end of the street behind us, "what is that racket?" He turns to it, becoming intrigued, "is someone running from the police?"