The Lesser Demons

“Impression” by Valeria Amirkhanyan

When Lucy shows up possessed after summer break, I can’t help it. I’m pissed off.

“I wanted to tell you,” she says, leaning against my locker as though she can’t even stand up straight without support. “My mom said I couldn’t.” She rolls her eyes. “Like, as if everyone wasn’t going to find out immediately.”

Girls steal glances at us as they walk down the hall. They’ve been murmuring about her since homeroom, how she looked weird, or sick, or different. Though there was a sprinkling of theories about her catching mono from kissing one of the boys at Holy Cross, I know Lucy is right. The second our classmates lay eyes on her — pale and trembling and unmistakably burdened with the presence of a malevolent deity — they’ll all know exactly what’s wrong.

“Don’t be mad,” she says. She touches her fingers to my elbow and I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Locking eyes with her normally feels too intense, too vulnerable, like I may give something up in my gaze. Now, it’s easy to stare in the same way that the girls passing by are staring. Her hair is unkempt, her eyes glassy like she’s peering out from somewhere further back than usual. She looks defeated.

“You know how it is,” she says with a sigh. “People just freak out about it. They think that it’s contagious, or that I’m doing devil worship or something — which I’m not,” she adds hastily. “It’s just random sometimes.”

“I get it,” is all I can think to say. Unspoken words swell my tongue, ones I’ve been practicing in the weeks since we last saw each other — before things got weird and she stopped responding to my texts. Now we have this whole demon thing to deal with first.

“We can totally talk about — everything. Soon,” Lucy says as if sensing this. “Once everything clears up.”

“Sure,” I say, because it’s Lucy.

Her face falls into an exaggerated pout, and I can’t help but snort — and then we’re both laughing as if there isn’t any demon at all.

***

As far as my mother knows, I stop hanging out with Lucy. She’s never really liked any of the friends I’ve plucked from the sea of proper, white Catholic girls she’s marooned me in. But with Lucy in particular, my mother is always checking for space: enough space between us in the car when she picks us up, between us on my bed when she finds an excuse to barge into my room, between our cheeks when we hug goodbye.

She brings me hot tea and shortbread the night she hears. “I know you’re probably feeling a little confused right now, baby,” she says. “But just understand that this isn’t your fault. It could happen to anyone.”

I know she’s talking about the possession, but from the way she looks at me, I’m sure she knows. She sits next to me and my mattress settles around her, heavy with everything I want to lob into her gravitational force but know I can’t.

“Does that mean it’s Lucy’s fault?” I ask.

My mom fixes me with a look that makes me flinch, then she rolls her eyes. “I’m sure your little friend is going to be just fine, Lila.” She pats my knee. “But for now, maybe a break wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

The next day, I wait for Lucy by her locker with a container of leftover cookies, as if I can somehow heal her with the power of butter and sugar. When she finally appears, I hardly recognize her for how tired she looks, her hair limp and eyebrows light as if they’d been plucked at with a heavy hand. I’m not sure what to say to her, but it doesn’t matter. She glances at me for less than a second, like she’s never seen me in her life, like I’m not there at all. Then she walks past me, not so much as pausing to blink.

***

The school holds another assembly after Kathleen Mayfield’s demon makes her throw herself off the roof of the science building. As our principal gives us the sanded-down version of the story, we weave our own truth among us in the bleachers.

They say it was quite the spectacle, like something out of a movie. Kathleen threw her head back and cackled, spouting a stream of obscenities and damnations with a deep, masculine voice that came from somewhere other than her own throat. I’m even told her eyes glowed red.

“We must not succumb to fear,” Sister Marie Jo says from the combination podium and pulpit, a reiteration of what she says during all of these assemblies. “But we must stay alert. Sin is all around us, and the Devil never rests.”

They say that Kathleen — or the demon, or whatever — punched out our biology teacher despite his best efforts to restrain her. Then she hurled herself off the roof, twisting her body like she was performing some deranged cheerleading routine. A holly shrub broke her fall and rewarded her with a thousand paper-thin slashes, a scatterings of red lines that decorated her face and arms and carefully tanned legs. Then she got up and bolted down the street despite a freshly broken ankle until the teachers finally caught up with her.

The story does not align with what I’ve known of the possessed girls in school. What I’ve seen is a quiet thing, an existential exhaustion, a fading. I try not to think of what the scene may have really looked like: Kathleen quietly sneaking to the top of the building and stepping off, passing herself off from the force of her demon to the force of gravity. Kathleen landing in that bush, bruised and bloodied, and lying there alone until the ambulance came. Instead, I take the rumored account as truth and pass it along with my own twists and embellishments.

I spy Lucy in the bleachers across the gym, nestled among a group of other tired, sallow girls in the back row of the senior class, the circles under their eyes so dark they’re visible across the room. She’s beginning to look more and more like them, letting her hair grow long and dropping her usual accents — bows, bracelets, brightly-colored earrings — from her uniform.

In other girls, this shift may have been more subtle. But with Lucy, who emails handmade study guides to our entire class the week before exams, who always bakes a batch of cookies to bring to school on our friends’ birthdays, who routinely sneaks delicate and ornate notes and cards and books she thought I’d enjoy into my locker between classes — it was as if she had disappeared and been replaced with another girl entirely. It hurts to see her like this, but maybe not for the right reason. An anger I cannot place seeds a heat within my chest, followed by an anger with that anger.

I’m not the only one stealing glances at Lucy as her name swirls with Kathleen’s and is braided into the gossip. But in the congregation of faces across the gym, I realize many are returning their gazes to stare back at me.

 ***

I wait for Lucy outside of the gym when we’re dismissed, and she finally emerges with the others in a cloud of ivory limbs, pink knees, chapped lips, dark eyes. I grab her by the wrist before thinking, and though it’s not tight, the shock in her face reads like pain. I drop my hand quickly, but girls are already staring as they return to class. “Can we talk?”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Lila,” she says with a huff that seems to shake the entirety of her frail frame. It’s more emotion than I’ve seen from her in weeks. “I can’t do anything about it. You can’t do anything about it. There’s nothing to talk about.”

I know I should ask how she is, or how I can help. I should tell her how much I miss her, how I don’t know what to do with myself since I’m not cramming with her between classes, exchanging gossip with her over coffees after school, sitting on video calls with her almost every evening we can’t be together, sometimes talking but mostly doing our homework in the quiet of each other’s company. I should tell her that I’m lost.

Instead I say: “What is it like?”

As Lucy sighs, I realize the irritation clouding her eyes is actually something softer, like pity. It’s the look of someone trying to explain something incomprehensible to a child who can never hope to understand, like she can’t overcome the chasm that’s split between us.

“It’s hard to explain,” she says. She speaks slowly, sorting through what few words we still share in our common language. “It hurts. From the inside. It makes you sick in a way you’ve never experienced.”

I don’t try to stifle my scoff. It’s the same bullshit in the pamphlets and powerpoints and PSAs. The same hollow spew all the survivors share on the talk shows and book tours. Ambiguous and ultimately meaningless descriptions of bodily pain, mental anguish, blah, blah, blah.

Lucy glances over her shoulder and steps closer to me, and there it is, like clockwork — my heart fluttering, beads of sweat itching at my brow. She speaks in a whisper, the way she always communicates the truest things to me, in hushes, in private, where no one but us can reach.

“That’s not what makes it so bad, though,” she says. She’s inches from me now, whispering, and for a moment I think she might open her mouth and swallow me whole. “What makes it bad is that part of you likes it.”

 ***

The school shuts down for two days after the assembly. I go with some friends to catch the last warm days of fall at the beach. Kathleen doesn’t come up once, and neither does Lucy, and neither does anyone else who ever was or ever would be possessed. We just swim in the ocean.

“How’s Lucy?” one of the freshmen who tagged along inevitably asks as the sun sets. I don’t know her very well, and she doesn’t know Lucy very well, but her towel is laid out next to mine and everyone else is in the water.

“Uh, I’m not really sure,” I tell her. “I think she’s fine.”

“Oh,” the freshman says. She seems familiar, but I’m not sure why. “I just see you guys together like all the time.”

The words feel like an accusation, and it must show on my face because she doubles back. “I mean, I just thought you guys were like... you know. Super close,” she says. This feels worse.

Despite my resolve not to, I think of Lucy — always with the same gaggle of girls we used to make fun of, more theirs now than she ever was mine. She now belongs to the world of the possessed and of the exorcised who are navigating what it’s like to be wholly themselves again. Doing a victory lap, Lucy used to call it, neither of us veiling our ire for the way they raked in all the attention thrown their way.

“We’re just giving them what they want, anyway,” the freshman says. She’s speaking so quietly I can barely hear her. This is the type of speculation that only happens in secret: anonymously on social media, in murmurs behind the bleachers, under the din of the ocean’s roar. “They just want attention,” she says.

She may be right, but it just feels a little too obvious.

I shrug. “Or maybe it’s really that hard.”

“It’s not,” she says. “Well, it wasn’t for me.”

I blink at her, and she blinks back as if I should be familiar with her personal trauma, as if it was too unimaginable an anguish for it to go unwitnessed by anyone on earth. This girl’s pale skin is kissed red across the cheeks from the sun, or maybe the conversation. Suddenly, I want to hold her.

“I mean, it was only a few days or whatever, and when they got it out they said it was a lesser demon or something, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass.” She draws circles in the damp sand with a manicured finger. “But I don’t think I am. I think they just need to suck it up.”

The sun sets in the distance, and two fish spring from the ocean behind her, bobbing in and out of the waves in perfect unison. As they flail against the water, I realize they’re not fish. They’re hands, waving frantically.

I turn my gaze to the sand and begin adding my own swirls to the freshman’s, winding around her marks until our fingers meet. She lays her hand flat and I trace its shape into the beach. “Do you ever still feel it?” I ask.

She purses her lips to the side as she watches me work, my fingers brushing against hers as I etch her into the shore. “Not really,” she decides. “Some days I feel different from everyone else, so maybe that’s why.” She shrugs. “Or maybe I’m just growing the fuck up.”

Over her shoulder, I watch the partially submerged hands wave with the type of pure chaos only desperation can bring. The freshman studies my face and then peers behind her. “Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god,” she shouts. She stands and bolts for the water, joined by the numbers of others who see the commotion and begin swimming toward the drowning girl in a frenzied, flailing swarm of arms and legs.

The freshman glances over her shoulder at me as she runs, in her eyes a fear of, not a fear for. I stand and collect my things as the scene unfolds, turning to walk toward the highway. Behind me, the chorus of screaming is swallowed up by the wind.

***          

My mother is sitting on the porch when I get home. I don’t know what time it is, but I know it’s too late. For a moment, I see only desperation in the way her body is twisted, curled into itself as she holds her head in her hands, curls spilling out of the satin bonnet she sleeps in. But the second she sees me, there is only rage.

Her shouting feels miles away, like I’m hearing the echoes of a fury that happened hours before. “What’s gotten into you?” she yells. “Have you lost your goddamned mind?” When I don’t react, she slaps me across the face. She’s crying, but I can see that she’s finished, and I walk inside.

I climb into bed, the echoes of the ocean’s waves continue to rock me. The motion is imprinted onto my muscles, the pushing and pulling of forces sealed in my body’s memory. As I drift to sleep, I think that maybe this is what damnation feels like: maybe it’s not something dramatic and extraordinary, but something churning and constant that’s almost indistinguishable from everyday life.

 ***

I wake in darkness to the sound of my name.

“Lila,” it calls in a voice that knows me impossibly well although we have never met.

“Lila.”

I stir, immediately knowing what it is, who it is, the inevitability of it.

“Lila,” the voice calls again.

I sit up in my bed, and there is a face in my window.

It’s Lucy.

“Oh my god,” she whines. “Lila, get your ass out of bed.”

She climbs through my window as she’s done dozens of times before and brushes herself off. I turn my light on. She looks like an entirely new person — fresh and filled, the pink undertones back beneath her cheeks, her hair pulled into a neat bun, mascara plumping her lashes. Despite myself, I reach out to touch her cheek to feel for myself. She flinches away and then laughs.

I realize then that we aren’t alone — a handful of our classmates stand outside my room, picking at their nails, staring at their phones. I recognize them one by one: the bright, lively versions of all of the possessed, had-been-possessed, and to-be-possessed girls who lurked the hallways of my school.

“We doing this or not?” one of them calls.

Lucy holds my hand for stability as we climb through my window and follow the other girls down my street and out of the neighborhood. I feel half-naked in my pyjamas and mess of kinky curls amid these girls with their tight clothes and firm bodies and glossed lips.

“I freaked out at first too,” Lucy whispers to me, her hand still in mine. “Don’t feel weird.” She drops my hand and pushes to the front of the group. “It’s this way.”

She leads the group to a small camp park framed by a thick of trees. We come to a clear patch of grass where a few more girls are nursing a fire in one of the pits.

One of the girls opens a bag. I expect knives, pentagrams, candles, eyes of newt. Instead, she pulls out a blanket, a bottle of wine, and a few bags of chips. The girls gather round in a circle, continuing the mindless conversations they’d begun on the walk over — what they’ll be wearing to homecoming, the latest music, the girl who almost drowned at the beach today, how annoying their parents have been lately.

Lucy pours a generous cup of wine and hands it to me. “Don’t be mad,” she says before I can speak. She squeezes my knee. “Please don’t be mad. They made me wait a while before I could tell you. It’s just one of their weird rules.”

I swallow a mouthful of sweet wine and look around the circle. Without the anguish, without the sulking, without the stories, they’re just girls.

“Has it always been like this?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she says. “I mean, I think it was real once upon a time. And I don’t know, maybe sometimes it still is.” She shrugs in defiance of an unspoken rebuttal. “It’s not like anyone can tell the difference, so I don’t see why it would matter.”

I can’t help but think of Kathleen, splayed in the miracle of the needled holly bush that saved her life. Of her staring at the cloudless sky, crimson streaks of blood slowly dripping across her body, adrenaline or fear or a type of pain I’ll never know preventing her from even realizing that the bones in her ankle were shattered. Of the freshman from the beach and her modest desperation, one so hushed and humble that it left no signs or scars during or after the running of its course. Of what hovered over them, stewed within them, and pressed upon them with a heaviness that Lucy and these girls could never understand.

But when Lucy squeezes my hand, all of this fades. I’m too exhausted to think clearly, and I smile, blinded with how sweet it is to see her like this again — the way food is so much more delicious when you’re famished. I want to trust that things will make sense eventually, and that maybe they don’t have to make sense to anyone but us.

A familiar tightness blooms in my chest as her hand lingers on mine, hidden from the circle on the ground behind us. She draws small spirals in my palm with her thumb, the same way she’s done so many times, the same way she did when she kissed me for the first time over summer break — a complete impossibility that also made no sense until it did.

“Lila, what are you doing?” Lucy says suddenly. She pulls her face away from mine, widening the distance I was unconsciously closing between us. Her eyes are on mine, brows furrowed in confusion or at least a performance of it, and then they’re darting around at the faces of the girls in the circle who are attempting to be subtle with their glancing, their giggling.

She doesn’t have to say any more; I immediately understand. What I thought we shared she has once again made mine alone: a secret somehow more unbearable, more threatening to her than the one bound within this circle. I feel this truth in my body as if she has deposited it into my mouth. It drips down my throat and into my gut, coats my insides with something thick and burning.

Lucy draws her hand from mine and rejoins the bustling conversation of the pack, their features shifting as the flickering light of the fire shapes and reshapes their faces. But inside of me, something is growing, flooding, scalding. And it knows my name.

About the author

Sunny Ahmed is a mixed Creole writer from New Orleans. She has stories in Waccamaw Journal, Bear Creek Gazette, and Necessary Fiction. You can find her on Twitter at @sunnyaprilsunny.

about the artist

Valeria Amirkhanyan was born in 1991 in a closed Siberian town where nuclear waste stored. Lifeless polygons, where there is not a single tree, created the dull look of her hometown. She decided to become an artist when she was 13 years old, graduated from art school and college (2012). She studied landscape architecture at the university (2017). Valeria believes that deepening the connection between our deeply rooted nature and the real world, makes people careful with nature. The land is for plants, not for nuclear burial grounds. Valeria has been managing the “Art Garden” studio for 1 year, where she teaches painting and grows more than 50 plant species.

artfullera@gmail.com | @valeriamir_art