All This and More

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include a factory line where molten lead spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread his leather wings to leap into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints enacted your days in sinuous slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes the frame froze, reversed, began again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered behind the drapes, parents alive again and puzzled by this new form. That’s why you clawed your way back to this life.