The land's devil

Blue sky, burning sun.

This summer had stretched into eternity.

The neighbor’s lawn was yellow, the earth was dry. Sissy walked everywhere like walking on ashes - her mother’s. Every one of her steps had someone else’s name on it, she was forgetting to write hers on her homework. Mishearing others, whispering to herself like a lost child; old, already, old all of a sudden. She had trouble with timelines because one day, she was a child stuck to her mother’s skirt, the next she was in highschool with failing grades. When people would ask, she never remembered her age; or how her mother didn't die.

Didn't ?

Her father would lose his mind every time.

He couldn't stand it.

Despair in the shape of her, wearing dirty flip flops, walking around aimlessly - for hours. She never voiced the need to end it, but everyone knew.

She wanted to.

Sissy didn't have a future, there was no one fighting for it. But she had the present, and she was fucking everywhere, like a ghost hunting this town. She was the most social out of the Williams family. She was at every fare, every Bingo night, every big party. She sat on the church’s porch on Sundays - you couldn't convince her to go inside but she was there, saying hi, playing with the children. Helping the elders climb the steps. Sissy was doing more for this community than it had ever done for her, but she didn’t seem to care about the injustice of it all. She was struggling with the existence of something bigger, scarier.

Fate.

Repeating steps.

Birth.

Fear.

Pain.

Death.

Again, and again, and again.

She felt so stubbornly about this cycle, she didn’t let anyone argue with her. She knew. Whatever the good people of this world said, she knew. And since it was such a straightforward path, she also knew the next step. She was born, she had feared, she was in pain, now all that was left to do was to die. She didn't believe it was up to her to choose the date though. She left it to God. He would find her soon enough; pluck her like weed, then bury her into a different soil - a different womb. Or maybe there would be no womb at all, but a perfect egg.

Round like the sun setting down on the neighborhood park.

She was laying on top of the playground’s spiderweb like a broken scarecrow. Her limbs sprawled out, her head half falling backwards as if hanging by a thread, but her skin was bruised where it met the red ropes and she was aware. She was looking at something. No, someone.

Nate was walking this way.

Why ?

“Sissy.”

He called out to her. He already had her attention, it was more like a whim.

“I called you.”

Maybe he did, her phone was dead.

He started to climb.

“Something happened.”

No, something was happening. The chill wouldn’t leave her, from the second she had seen her brother walking towards her from a distance. She had not seen him in a while. He looked like someone else.

He fell silent for a bit, like he was reflecting.

On what ?

“Do you remember ?”, he finally asked.

And as soon as he did, memories flooded her brain; the memories of Sarah, Sophie, the very short life of the egg. The absolute lie on her birth certificate, that birthday she kept forgetting - those evasive numbers burned themselves at the forefront of her mind as she suddenly remembered the many jumps her existence had made through time, as if played by someone else’s hand. She saw the landscape of the cemetery blurring as she cried over their mother Anne, like she did in this life. Then she remembered Anne wasn’t her mother’s name at all.

The thought dropped on the floor of her consciousness like a child carelessly dropping the ball they were playing with.

I guess I never left the museum.

The headache was quick to come.

But the devil was faster.

“I made a mistake.”

He was talking alone, probably like gods did. She was staring at him, but her vision was blurry. She was sweating all over, from something like hay fever. Fear made her unable to move, confusion unable to catch her breath. It was a terrible feeling.

“They told me not to do it in public spaces.”

She understood what he meant immediately despite the pain enveloping her consciousness. He shouldn’t have opened the portal here.

“Why ?”

She didn’t recognize her own voice. He stopped climbing and settled down lower on the structure, looking at her with childish eyes.

“Something dirty got in.”

He had that worried look on his face, the same he wore sometimes when their father yelled that meant nothing. Nate was never sorry. She didn’t think the devil ever was either.

“I can’t get it out.”

He made a pause.

“I don’t know what to do.”

It fell flat. Her next words weren’t any better.

“That’s your problem.”

Are we still in the museum ?

Now she was resisting the thought. It couldn’t be. What would be the point if they were ? And how could it be when all of this felt so real ? But she knew she was lying. None of it had felt real. For once, this town had no name, nor did her school, nor did any of her classmates or teachers. She knew nothing about herself except what she knew about Sarah. Sarah had been alive. She wasn’t.

Every time the narration shifted away from her, she got suspended in time; and information would only drop when it was needed, inserting itself into her brain like a needle - or a parasitic worm.

She was only awake when someone looked at her.

The details left unsaid about her daily life weren’t just unsaid; they didn’t exist. In fact if she thought about it, she couldn’t have been alive for long. One hour ? Maybe two ? But maybe less, maybe not even twenty minutes.

It scared her to the very core of her very young being.

How can a being barely alive not recognize death ?

God had found her, it wouldn’t take long for this life to come to its end. She’d die any minute now. She stood still in front of this tragic fate.

“It’s yours, too.”

Would this motherfucker stop talking ?

“Sissy, it’s your problem too.”

His laughter rose in the hot air of this late summer evening.

“Do you remember ? I said we’d do it.”

She wanted to die - faster.

“Together.”

When his last word fell, she closed her eyes.

She waited like that for a bit.

The sound of cicadas and the familiar rhythm of his breathing.

Death didn’t come.