Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

by Ananda Lima

There’s a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind. And the prize is the soul.

I recognized some of what I’d been carrying inside, mirrored on his face.

But the Devil reached in and lightly touched my stomach. It felt like flowers were blossoming inside me, emanating from where he had touched. The nausea was gone.

The Devil said stories were more than knowing things, facts. There was no soul in that. It was in the telling and the words, the spaces between them.

It is hard for me to fully understand it now. It was all immediate, all feeling; I could only understand it while I was feeling it.

I wished I could explain to myself in 1981, and myself now, how time worked. Its mind-boggling speed, even when each day can be slow like a trudge through tar. How you blink, and here you are.

This was a thing my mother liked to bring up, not too often, but often enough so that it would be remembered. How I would realize things once she was gone, and by “realize,” she meant “regret.”

This, she declared to herself, was also home. It was not the same, not Brasília, but maybe it shouldn’t be. She was here now.

She was full, bursting, in love. That was how a new place took root inside. Searching for home, she was stretching herself, letting her love expand categories, to fit more in.

Sometimes, the Devil said, you had to let things germinate—sprout and grow. And later, you tended to them.

I had American bones now. I’d thought I was the eater, but America had been eating me the whole time, from within.

the idea of freedom is used to assign the source of evil to individual choices (i.e., we are all given just enough choice to be deemed responsible for the bad stuff).

Time was impossible to hold on to without a means to measure it, contain it.