At night, I turn into a demon and ride people. My girlfriend doesn’t like it, but what can I do? It’s in my nature. We curl up on the living room floor in a pile of blankets, and I tell her about the things that I’ve done, the worn oak floor creaking beneath us when we move to get comfortable. I prefer to keep my face inches from hers while we talk, but she can’t always stand me. I tell her often about how the transformation feels. I shrink to about two feet tall, squeezed like milkshake through a straw until I fit into the miniature body. My legs and arms become thin and scaly, kind of like a chicken’s foot, and I am a ball of hair from my knees to the top of my head. Growing that much hair every night is so itchy I often take a little Japanese rake I stole from a bonsai zen garden and go to town over every inch of myself. It’s hardly any fun. I tell Amarina—that’s my girl’s name—about how I ride the local Anglican priest. I climb up onto his back and stick my hands into his ears, so that I can control him. He is the most boring mount of all because he is so easy to make feel ashamed, but I explain I have to hit my quota of at least one churchman a quarter.
I drag his mind across the street to the woman waiting on the sidewalk with dyed two-tone hair—red-purple and blonde—as he leaves the chapel and walks down the front steps. He thinks he can defy me by looking into the rain puddles, but I slide his eyes to a pothole that holds her reflection. I will admit, his surprise at seeing her face when he had hoped to avoid it was delicious to me, but it tastes like those malt balls you get at the movies, sweet yet insubstantial, and they melt on your fingers, and you question the effort. He is odd, though, I tell Amarina, because the thing that really gets his face hot is not even thinking about wild sex with the sweet-faced woman—and I do mean high-grade stuff—but when I get him to think about his own wife’s breasts and unhidden body. At this, Amarina pulls one of the blankets tight in her hands. Her movement shifts our covering and lets in little streams of light that dapple her face and stun my eyes. She tells me the priest might just be a gentle sort of person and wants to protect his wife’s body, that he holds something sacred in her form. I tell her I don’t think so. She says I really don’t get people. I tell her if she saw what the priest and I thought concerning the woman across the street, the word she’d use for him would probably be something more than gentle. She just rolls her eyes and says don’t priests have to be single anyways, and I’m probably mixing up the people I’ve been riding again, which, in her defense, I sometimes do. They are all so boring and pathetic it can be hard to keep them straight. I tell her it’s an Anglican priest, and I begin in on some church history, but I can tell she’s not listening. She hates when I call people “it,” but that’s something I can’t help. It’s in my nature.
I keep on a while about the Church of England because we demons have a lot of church knowledge that we rarely get to use, and I like to show off. I aced that part of my testing, and Beelzebub himself said I was exemplary before my baptism of hellfire, but I’ve mostly become complacent in the decades since I graduated, crawling onto the same wretched people, taking them down the same filth-covered alleys—heroin dens of the mind and body. One of my former classmates is good at making his subjects kill things and is so proud of himself, but I know he can’t really get them to do more than roaches or vermin, and where’s the dignity in making suburban moms go hunting rats? Anyways, Amarina gets up to go make eggs benedict and waffles, and I stay on the floor and sleep a dreamless sleep that’s closer to waiting.
That night, my band and I play a smoky little bar called Sleazy’s. My voice is still raspy from howling the night before when I rode some guy around his neighborhood in underwear and his wife’s bra. I was hoping she would finally divorce him when the cops brought him home, but she says Kyle can do nothing to surprise her anymore, and they go back to their separate rooms. I could have taken the blonde cop out to bother some poor dropout schmucks leaving the chemical plant, but he already wants to, so where’s the fun in that? I knew my heart wouldn’t have been in it, so I’d gone on home.
There’s a decent crowd at Sleazy’s. My black clothes and demeanor have turned out to be a big hit for the band. People think I’m this disaffected, brooding guy, when mostly I’m just exhausted from staying up all night after shows. My dead eyes aren’t because I’m mysterious. They’re a standard part of the uniform, more or less. Satan’s tastes for his hordes are still pretty basic. He’d still have most of us wearing horns if the petitions hadn’t been so lively.
Overall, the show goes pretty well. Len, our guitar player, bends a note that holds for so long, wandering and strange, that for a moment it maybe even moves something inside of me. I look over at the crowd and wonder if I danced like the leather jacket dervishes flailing in the crowd before I became what I am. There is blood in my tear ducts, so I wipe them with my arm and growl into the microphone even louder.
Afterwards, someone offers to sleep with me, but I brush past without considering whether they are good-looking or even male or female. Amarina is about the only person I could be bothered to have sex with anymore because she’s the only person who can genuinely surprise me, not just do something chaotic or unexpected. I don’t even mean that sexually; nobody at all can do that—I’ve tried it all at least thrice—but I never feel like I know her, not really, and that’s thrilling. We met when I rode her, my hands wrapped in her flowing hair, and instead of me controlling her, she just went for ice cream. She sat in the parlor and ate all alone while the couples around her made disgustingly sincere eyes at one another and shared licks of their cones. She wasn’t sad, just self-contained. When we were done, I felt like I hadn’t even seen beyond the foyer of her mind. The next day, I introduced myself and pseudo-apologized, but she just shrugged and we’ve been together ever since.
In the manager’s office, I argue with the fat man over money, and he screws us out of our cut. It’s a laugh that I’m somehow the band’s manager. No one has ever called me responsible. That night, I ride one of the bar backs and make her believe the fat thing has groped her pretty good. I underestimate her reaction. She pulls a bottle of Jaeger from the shelf and follows the guy to his car, douses him in the stuff, and lights him on fire. I grip her hair in my hands and search the hive of her mind and my own to see if this is what I had intended.
His screams are like warm honey down my throat, in part because I have a thing for fire and he’s beautiful as he burns, but also because I know he’s done stuff like that before to other women and been caught and had no remorse at all even when he was beaten by boyfriends. There’s nothing that I can’t stand in humans more than evil without remorse because getting people to feel like whiny wretches and hopefully hit things against themselves is kind of my whole thing. I’m the demon, not that guy. I studied hard to earn my empty eyes and amputated conscience, so I don’t take kindly to freelancers.
When I tell Amarina all of this, she interrupts me here and says to stop being so high and mighty. She leaves to get bagels, but refuses get any for me and tells me to think about what I’ve done. I remember too late that I should have lied or at least amended what happened, that Amarina would be angry at me for ruining that young woman’s life. I want to tell her things like that don’t occur to me, that demons don’t think about the future, but that will lead to a conversation about our five-year plan and demon babies, and I truly only live for the moment.
Amarina doesn’t come home, and I lie on the floor all day watching Law and Order reruns. Perfect demon TV: inane, pointless, and full of death. When Amarina finally comes back, she is carrying bags of groceries and is full of energy. She unloads matzo crackers, potatoes, onions, sour cream, and apple sauce on the counter and then pulls out a cutting board and begins a steady chopping that mesmerizes me with each motion. She leans over the butcher block and rocks her arm from the shoulder all the way down through the knife, slicing perfect ribbons of onion that make us both cry. She tells me about the man at the grocery store who followed her down every aisle. His eyes on her body felt like a cold, dead, slimy finger tracing obscenities across her flesh. I note the number of verbs she decided to use but understand that it is also an understatement because maybe there is a fat thing in her past too.
Amarina is not one to wait around, so she tells me she went to the spice aisle and uncapped cayenne pepper, poured some in her hand and watched the man come near in the rounded mirror on the ceiling and, when he was close, turned and blew the dust in his eyes. I tell her I am proud. She hugged me then and kissed me at the corner of my eye and thanked me for being supportive. She often says I don’t understand people, but I don’t think she understands demons.
I change the subject and tell her about an exsanguination episode of Law and Order. I regale her with what percent of a person’s weight is made up of blood and how many pounds of the red stuff she likely has. Finally, the oil is hot and the ingredients mixed together. Amarina drops the first latke into the pot, and I shut up while the fritter dances in the bubbling liquid and the edges brown and curl into crispy bits. In the early days, Amarina had been worried I wouldn’t like her being a jewess and all, but I actually prefer it since there’s little chance she’ll start in on rants of loving Jesus.
The latkes are perfect as they always are, and we sit on the living room floor with our backs against the wall and devour them. I lick my fingers when I am finished, and I tell her I’m glad she’s no longer angry about the thing at the bar, and she squints at me, her last latke halfway to her mouth. She puts it back on her plate, which says clear enough that she intends business. Then she tells me I am a scourge. I tell her, yes, I am a scourge. I am blood, and I am war. But really, we both know what she means. She means I am not that sort of terror. She says I am stupid, which is far from evil. I don’t take out the garbage, never get the mail, can’t be bothered to throw away the legions of half-eaten candy around the apartment, which stick to everything, and although I manage to keep my teeth despite my sugar-laden diet, my breath almost always smells like rotting fruit. Worst of all, I never bring in any cash from the band because, just like last night, I always let club owners walk all over me, which means we can’t even sleep in a proper bed. By the time she’s done talking, I’ve forgotten exactly what we are arguing about, and I ask if she is going to finish her latke. She screams and throws her plate against the wall before getting up and locking herself in the bathroom.
That night, I find a man I’ve ridden before pumping gas at an all-nighter convenience joint. I climb on his shoulders and decide whether to take him for a spin, but really I had already committed to it because when you’re two feet tall, crawling up a grown man is a lot of work to change your mind about. We’re in a part of the city I’m not too familiar with, so I cast off down the sidewalk, leaving his car door open and the pump gushing gas all over the concrete. We wander below the weak yellow streetlights with no plans in mind. We growl at a dog that growls at us, and when it scampers off from the KFC bits it was licking, I finish gnawing at them myself, and by “myself,” I mean I make the poor sod I’m riding crunch into the gristle and bone.
The best part about nighttime, as my best demon-friend Aaron puts it, is that one moment is as another, but on nights of boredom, it becomes purgatory, which is a little too close to heaven for comfort. I walk the man a few miles further, piss on a church door, upset a couple kissing in a car, try to punch a mangy cat. I find my mind tipping into worry about Amarina as we stumble along with no real purpose. Demons cannot truly worry, but occasionally, pre-baptism thoughts bubble up like noxious swamp gas in the bog of my mind.
I am hoping she won’t leave me when I trip over a homeless man hidden in a tattered quilt or rough piece of carpet. He sits up as I curse. I despise the homeless because they are absolutely impossible to ride. They are unpredictable to a fault, and often, more than most, they know the mind of God. Before I can escape, he asks for money, but I knock the cup he has produced from who-knows-where out of his hand, spilling change and bills everywhere.
I hurry away, shaken by the encounter. I am only grateful he didn’t call us ‘brother.’ Less than a block away, I decide to abandon the night altogether and climb off the man’s back. He is less confused at finding himself in a strange part of town than I had expected. Instead, I watch him walk back to the homeless guy. Not only did he go back to talk with a pretty much pointless human, but is so stupid he gave him honest-to-satan cash. I mean, took out his own wallet and slipped a thick stack of bills into the hands of the creature on the ground. He tells the homeless thing to take care of himself. When I tell Amarina all of this later, I ask her if the guy is really so idiotic that he thought he’s helping the hobo, when he probably just shot him up with a lethal amount of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Amarina just laughs. I don’t get it. I ask her what she finds so funny. She leans in and kisses me at the corner of my eye. And then says that she loves me. At that, I pull away from her so I can see her full face. I am brimming, hot with uncertainty and curiosity. And she says, again, that she loves me. Loves me because in a world that is needlessly, infuriatingly, soul-crushingly complicated I will never be more or less than exactly what I am.
