My Personal Demon

19:45

Birds don't die on my front porch anymore.

I'm relieved that I won't be mopping up blood and digging small graves in my backyard. The decomposing bodies were starting to smell. A miasma of death hung around the house, keeping the other animals away.

But today, there were four cardinals at the bird feeder pecking away at the seed mix. Their red feathers shone in the early morning light, standing out starkly against the gray. They remind me of the color of blood, the kind of red vampires must see before they feed on their victims. There were no hypothetical vampires in the neighborhood, but then I remember the demon in my house and the probability that they actually existed goes up exponentially.

Strangely, the knowledge doesn't scare me. Reality doesn't collapse in the face of the supernatural. It just stands on different legs.

Blood doesn't leak from the crevices of the walls. The dead bodies behind the plaster, real or imagined, don't fight for my attention or slowly decompose. They and the maggots have disappeared to an imaginary graveyard, safely buried by imaginary living people. Or they've been stolen by imaginary grave robbers, stripped of valuables and dumped into a stormy sea where their flesh becomes a small feast for mindless fish.

Just some food for thought. Even with the hallucinations gone, the pieces of my sanity are held together by the same poorly sewn thread.

Because he's still here, right? My dead husband has been replaced by a demon from Hell, the one who is pretending to be my lover. He holds me in his warm arms and I can feel the flames of damnation lick my body, wearing my flesh down to my bone.

On the surface, we look like an ordinary couple. I play the lonely widow who has found new love and I cast away the gray threads of my depression garments, exchanging it for the red of romance. He plays the new human boyfriend, hiding his horns behind polite smiles and a bouquet of roses. He makes himself smell sweet with the cologne he buys with money that he summons from thin air. Or maybe he charms the cashier, selling them a story of his good intentions while he walks away without ever paying.

I don't know what he does or what the rest of the world sees. When we walk outside together, people are nicer to me than normal, with some even shooting me looks of envy. They think we've chosen each other freely, two lovers who met through work or running into each other in the grocery store. He tells them a different story each time they ask. They don't see the chains of our loneliness, the way we trap ourselves in each other so much that we've tricked the world into thinking we need each other. Frankly, if he was swapped out for another demon, would I feel his absence? If he was trapped in any other house except my own, wouldn't he have made himself soft for any woman for a scrap of company? I can't answer those questions until I've freed him.

I'm afraid to know what he's done to be stuck here with me. I find it much more plausible that he was sent as punishment for the murder of my husband. I was driving the car so I deserve to live with the misery for the rest of my life.

Jesper offers me a lighter, a smoking cigarette already wedged between his lips. I'm living through my dead husband's bad habits. There are ten cigarettes left in the box. All I need is crippling anxiety and a blue pen to fully become him.

The pages of the story he wrote are still on the bed stand. I don't have the slightest clue as to what he wants the ending to be. His agent has called me again, asking for the scraps of his story. I make the same promises, asking her to call back in a month. At some point, she will stop hoping that I will give her those pieces of him. Or at least, I assume she will after the fifth call.

I've started packing his stuff away. I carry stacks of his clothes and books to the attic, shoving all of these remnants of his existence into dusty corners. I'm tired of missing him and I'm sick of the constant guilt.