My Personal Demon

21:38

I wake up to find him slumbering beside me. Last night, after finding me in the studio, he refused to leave my side.

"You shouldn't be alone," he said after I tried to push him away. He rephrased his statement. "I don't think you want to be alone."

He wasn't wrong. I let him stay, sleeping on the edge of my bed like a dog with his back facing me. There was enough room on the bed for the both of us.

Under the cover of the night, he offered to hold my hand like my husband used to. He knew about my sleepless nights and heard the endless loops of Satie's compositions.

I might have said yes if I hadn't seen his shadow in the moonlight. Even if he wore my husband's face, I still saw the horns in his silhouette.

I settled for curling my index finger around his, pretending that I was no softer than a baby. Over the course of the night, he slowly migrated up the bed, stretching his demonic form over the sheets. Somehow, he kept his distance and our fingers entwined.

In the light of the morning, I pull my hand away. He stirs in his sleep but doesn't wake up, pulling the sheets to his body.

I make coffee in the kitchen, a small guarantee that I will taste my breakfast. I prepare my cup – two sugars and one cream – taking a small sip before looking at his mug. I'm tempted to prepare Charles's coffee – three sugars and no cream – but the man in my bed was not my dead husband.

He was a demon and I didn't know how he liked his coffee. I could paint his true face from my subconscious, but I hardly paid attention to the sort of breakfast he ate. He could make his own food so it really wasn't a problem that I didn't know these details about him.

But it bothered me, the not-knowing.

Blood drips from the ceiling steadily while dark clouds gather outside. There were no appointments at the tattoo shop. I'm promised a quiet day indoors.

I return to the studio, noticing the leather belt still hanging from the scaffolding. I cringe at yesterday's memory, embarrassed by the state he caught me in. I felt remnants of sorrow from the day before, but I tried to ignore it.

Whether he was dead or alive, I would always paint.

I hear the clatter of pans in the kitchen as I unscrew tubes of paint. He cooked a lot, more than any sane person did. If he felt that he deserved a sumptuous feast, he would toil for hours on dishes that I'd never heard of before. Sometimes it was a delicacy from Hell or a dish long lost to history. The answer was never what I thought it was.

Today, I don't paint flowers. It's not the sort of day meant for delicate petals and vibrant colors. No, today I was the stormy sea, wrought with steely shades of gray and dulled blues.

When we first moved here, I would take many walks to the beach. Living by the ocean always seemed like a luxury to me, reserved for retired elderly couples who made their money and had nothing better to do than to lounge under giant umbrellas while sipping cold colorful drinks. People vacationed on tropical islands to embrace the beach, swaying to palm trees and flocks of seagulls that always seemed to know where the food was.

But that wasn't the sort of scene one found in Brisrock Piers. The sun rarely appeared unless it was forced to. There were seagulls on the beaches, but they had scraggly, starved bodies from the overfished seas. Sometimes people would set up tents to camp out by the water, but never any giant umbrellas for the sun that never came. Plenty of people brought their grills out for hotdogs and the few fish that swam in the waters. When the summer heat became unbearable, people swam in the gray waters, but there were never any waves for surfing. The wealthier folks had their speedboats yet somehow even that didn't seem too fun.

It was that kind of beach.

The gloom didn't stop me from dragging Charles with me on weekend walks up and down the piers. I never got tired of looking out into the brackish sea. I think I even have the patterns of the waves memorized and all the colors they turn when the light hits them a certain way.

I recreate the scene from memory. We walk along the pier, avoiding the splinters in the wooden boards. There were no ships at the dock, giving a full view of the vast empty waters. The sun was out for a few seconds, but it was the most we saw in months. He spots dark clouds on the horizon behind us, blanketing the sky in drying machine-lint gray. The steady patter of rain reaches our ears as the storm creeps behind us.

Normal people would have run for shelter. They would've taken cover from the heavy rain, and pulled their jackets above their heads as makeshift umbrellas against the storm. But it had been a hard week for us, the kind that left a twisted knot in our souls.

So we stayed out in the rain, holding hands when the lightning and thunder frightened us. It was a miracle that neither of us caught a cold that night.

That is the sea that I paint today, the storm that tossed up the ocean but left us unharmed. I'm so engrossed in the process that I don't hear the demon enter the room. I vaguely register someone pulling up a stool and easel beside me, but nothing more than that.

I was still content with being lost at sea.

"One of the circles of Hell looks like that," he said, reaching for the tubes of paint behind me. "The sinners are tossed about in an eternal storm. Perfect for swindlers with seasickness."

He smears paints on an extra palette, using a wide brush to paint the canvas in a base coat of green.

"I didn't know you painted," I said. I find myself tempted to ask about his breakfast and whether or not he made coffee for himself, but I refrain from those surface-level details. It was much more interesting that he decided to paint with me today.

"I picked it up from a man who was jailed for fraud. He could paint like the greats, using the right type of paints and mimicking little details that no art collector would think of. But he was careless. He boasted about his feats to the wrong person and died less than he could have been."

I think I read about a man like that in the paper. "Do you miss him?"

He paused. "No, he was whiny. A bit painful to torture when he was nice to me, but all of those sinners were the same. If he could trick me and escape, I'm sure he would've. Painting was the only thing he was ever good at."

I nod, returning to the sea before me. What did I know about the matters of Hell? He could lie about every one of these sinners to me, but I would still believe him.

The cold gray waters embrace me as I paint the foam on the waves. I remember that it was freezing that day, a small circle of winter in the middle of rainy April. It was exactly this time last year that we visited the piers together.

The demon tucks something behind my ear, interrupting my train of thought. I reach up to pull it out, but he stops me.

"It's a magnolia. I hope you don't mind, but I've picked a few from the front. I think it looks pretty in your hair."

Heat rose to my cheeks at the unexpected compliment. "Thank you. And I don't mind you picking flowers. I would've done it myself if I remembered to."

"What made you forget?"

The rain. The grief. The bottomless pit of sorrow in my heart only seemed to grow wider with each passing day. But none of them were things that I wanted to admit to him.

"It just slipped my mind," I said after a while.

He doesn't press further, his eyes glued to the canvas. His silence was a response itself, the emptiness of it telling me that to some extent, he understood whatever I was feeling. He had, after all, lived hundreds of years as a demon in Hell. He was probably bound to forget a thing or two as well.

I focus on my gray waves while his brows wrinkled over soft pink petals. Occasionally, a bird would slam against the rain-spotted windows, but they weren't bluejays this time. They were small nameless brown birds, the kind everyone saw in their gardens.

I wondered when I got used to all of this, when I got used to him.