Narrative of a Demonic Possession

Written August-December 2014

Possession of the Host

The latch on his chipped white picket fence jingled & a gust blew it open, overgrown vines on the door like moss on river stones. I walked through the fence, down the steps to the entrance of his underground house.

I stood breathless, shaking, disoriented, then shimmied sideways through ivy & sharp, prickly bushes to a window. W/ my sleeve I wiped a peephole in the dirt layer of the unscreened window pane.

Looking in, I saw him there. Only a single, yellow-stained lamp bulb revealed the figure in the shadow, & the neon blue of the screen reflected white on his focused grimace. In an overstuffed chair, he was cold & hypnotized by the the fluorescent figures coming from the screen who touched themselves, w/ red O’s taped to their faces like used car advertisements on telephone poles.

A plume of black smoke was emitted by the screen, wafting into his orifices, subtly, perhaps he didn’t even notice. I looked closer at the smoke & saw it moving in an unnaturally narrow line out of the images on the screen & through his face & hands & through the pores of the stone walls.

& out the window. I realized I was breathing in the smoke stream that was interspersed w/ bioluminescence.

Spread of the Parasite

Didn’t belong anywhere, so I hid in shadows in corners outside homes & w/ the lens of the internet, creeped. Unable to interact & invisible, I drifted around, a specter, a spectator watching other people live & watching unrequited loves love others. From the sidelines, life is a detective game, a sociological experiment of reading body language, grouping personalities. Standing on sidewalks looking into homes w/ families around fireplaces, I made stories up about how other people could possibly feel comfort & belonging when my only feeling is a hole in my chest, which grows daily, where a being lives which makes me question why I’m even still alive. “Alive”…relative to…dead? Really: nonexistence. The chest pains & clammy skin & split ends, although unpretty, are signs I’m still alive. Living? I’m a ghost in a flesh shell, still a ghost. People caught glances of me out of peripheral vision. They’d think they’d seen someone there, but looking straight on, it was…air.

Destruction of the Host

I carry a cumbersome body bag, overbearing shit pile containing the corpse of a young female, approximately 8 years old.

Managing my way through the waterlogged, clayey soil is proving difficult in four-inch pleather platform boots. I insisted on wearing them, even down stomping in the swamp, a stupid girl.

The boots are my new identity as a cold, living-dead demon whore who only knows sex & begging & screaming out in a shrill guttural howl but never truly being seen or heard or loved.

This isn't me.

This isn't my voice.

I was born into this world as something else.

But I killed & buried her a long time ago.

Someone incapable of loving, as an evil source of darkness, which only attracts more dark, broken, & lost betrayers, liars, & sexually depraved...demons.

The heels, too high, got snagged in some branches. W/ waning perseverance, I could no longer carry the armload of antiquated junk so I dumped it all upon the green ooze & lily pads, watching as brown swamp water creep & seep over it, & it sinks out of sight.