Come Closer

by Sara Gran

“Amanda!” he called. “Come in here.” I rushed to his office. He picked up a handful of papers off his desk and stared at me, his flabby face white with anger. “What the hell is this?” “I don’t know.” It looked like my proposal—same heading, same format. My hands shook. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. Leon handed me the papers and I read the first line: Leon Fields is a cocksucking faggot. “What is this?” I asked Leon. He stared at me. “You tell me. You just dropped it on my desk.”

what-

I read the second line: Leon Fields eats shit and likes it.

Because it was true; Leon Fields was a cocksucking faggot, and he did eat shit, and I had always suspected that he liked it very much.

oh?

Then at the end of the month I went to a conference on the West Coast for two days, and Ed noticed that he didn’t hear it at all while I was gone.

girl its you YOU are the tapping

And then in one great leap he jumped up the two steps and attacked. With his front paws, as strong as human hands, he pushed me against the wall, ignoring my horrified screams, licked me right on my mouth and tried to seduce me.

LMAOO NOT TRIED TO SEDUCE YOU

On our walks home from the train I used the biscuits to teach him a few more commands—walk, lie down, stop-trying-to-fuck-me (which we abbreviated as Stop).

You can’t blame this sophisticated, civilized man for not having the same instincts as a wild dog.

We could devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental, but most of us don’t. And neither did I.

“I’m sorry about dinner,” he called, still in the bedroom. “I TOLD YOU I WAS SORRY!” “You’re always sorry!” I yelled back. “You and your FUCKING APOLOGIES!”

okay cause the all caps is sending me

It wasn’t one of his more attractive qualities.

I made the x of excuse me at the top of my throat, but the tip of my tongue instead reached to the bony part of my upper palate to say, “Do you have another smoke?”

I had ordered a book from a small publisher out of state—Design Issues Past and Present— that I was hoping would inspire me a bit with a project at work. I came home to the loft one rainy April night pleased to find a package waiting by the door. But when I got upstairs and opened the box I saw they had sent the wrong book—Demon Possession Past and Present—instead.

She put her arms around me and pulled me tight against her. Our ribs crushed together and our hipbones slammed and she pulled me tighter until I couldn’t breathe, I was choking, and my spine met hers, vertebrae against vertebrae.

well if you wasnt possessed before you are now boo

On our way out of the drugstore we heard a rapid, high-pitched beep. “Step back.” A teenage security guard ordered us back through the alarm. Ed and I rolled our eyes at each other and stepped back into the store. After a nod from the security guard we stepped back out. Beep-beep-beep. The guard waved his hand for us to step back in. We stepped back in. “Open your bags, please.”

the lipstick is in your purse

“It must have.” “Must have.” “Yeah. It must have.”

omg shut up

and when it ran out, in mid-November, I went back to the same drugstore and stole another tube.

Ed would ask what my problem was and I would say I didn’t have a problem and he would say I was sure acting like I had a problem. Then I would say I guess the problem is that you think one member of the household can come and go as he pleases while the other has to account for every minute of her time. And he would say where the hell were you tonight. And I would say at the office, like I said. Call and check if you want. And he would look at the phone on its little desk by the bookcases, sitting there like a slug, and then look back at me. Forget it, he would say. Fine, I would say. Fine, he would say.

LMAOOOOO

The cigarette was in its usual place between the first and second fingers of my right hand. I thought, What if I stuck Edward with this cigarette?

girl

It didn’t. Instead my hand made a quick turn to the right and stabbed the burning cigarette into Edward’s leg, an inch above his left knee. He screamed. I screamed. I ran into the kitchen for ice and Edward kept screaming. He jumped up from the sofa screaming bloody murder. “Shit! Fuck! What the fuck did you do that for? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Ed didn’t believe that just because something was alive, that meant you had to love it.

“You don’t like it, get out. I don’t need this.” I got angrier. All I wanted were a few magazines and here was this abuse.

It wasn’t until months later that I would look back and realize that, most likely, I had killed the magazine dealer myself.

Then Claire turned toward me again. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Sure about what, honey?” I said. She ignored me. “Okay,” Claire said. And then she let go of my hand and ran to the water’s edge and reached her hand out to the nearest swan. The bird bent its long neck toward Claire with a nasty look on its face. It all happened in the blink of an eye. I ran down after Claire, scooped her up, and jumped back. The bird waddled up the riverbank after us. “Hey!” I yelled at the swan. “Fuck off!” It stopped and stared with its beady eyes. I ran with Claire in my arms like a sack of potatoes back up the embankment. After a few yards I put her down and we walked back toward her parents. “Claire, why did you do that?” She squeezed her eyebrows together and pouted. “She told me to!” She cried. “She said I could!”

He went to the back of the shop, opened a door, and called out in a language I had never heard before—Portuguese, maybe—but somehow I knew what it meant.

how he never gave up trying to seduce me, even after I made it clear I was married.

But I wasn’t there. I was watching it all, I could see it, but I wasn’t inside of myself.

I was comparing prices on T-bones when the demon slithered back into my thoughts. Make dinner? she said. Hours in the kitchen and then he won’t even come home on time and will never appreciate it. Besides, Ed hasn’t cooked for you in ages, not since that horrible string bean mess he concocted months and months ago. I dropped the steak back into its bin, abandoned my cart, and left the supermarket.

“I’ll help you,” I said. I swam toward her. While I was on my way another little wave came along, knocking her down again. I dove toward her and then reached out and grabbed her hair, as if to pull her head above water. But I didn’t. I grabbed her hair in my right hand and pulled down. Sickeningly, I could feel the life drain from her as I held her under the water, feel the heat from her body trickle away.

woahh

The most common first sign is an unusual noise in the household, perhaps a scratching, a tapping, or footsteps . . . Once inside its victim the demon will usually start off with small mischief—petty theft, arguments, and the like.

THE DEMON WROTE a check for $250 and drove back toward the city. Almost there, close to the airport, she stopped at a hotel lounge and made the $250 back having sex with a businessman in the hotel bathroom.

what?????

To tell you something about Sophia, I had never, in the six years that I knew her, not on one occasion, seen the soles of her feet.

what

“I don’t understand,” he yelled. “You didn’t make ANYTHING? We have people coming over in one hour and you don’t even have a box of fucking rice in the house? What the hell am I supposed to serve, cereal and ice cream?”

LMAOOOO

“No, Ed,” I told him. “You mean you didn’t make anything, you don’t even have a box of rice, and you have people coming over in one hour. And no, they can’t have my ice cream.”

LMAO the last part got it

“One drink. I’m not ready to go home yet.” I felt my lips turn up. One eyebrow arched and my head tilted slightly toward the right. “Sure. Why not?” He stood up and reached for his coat. Then the edges of my vision turned darker and darker until I was seeing through a pinhole, and before we were out the door everything was black and I wasn’t, I no longer was . . . And then I was back. A horrible smell, years of urine and decay. Darkness. After a moment my eyes adjusted and I saw that I was outdoors, in an alley. No, not an alley, but a tunnel. I turned around. The tunnel was about fifty feet long and ten feet wide, with a dim light at either end. Under the smell of piss was another smell, familiar, a mix of grass and dirt and shit. The park. I was in a tunnel under a hill in a city park. I was standing above James Cronin’s body. He was lying on his back. His neck was bent so his head was parallel to his shoulders and behind it I could see a thick pool of blood.

“Eric,” I said. I didn’t know how I had gotten here or how I knew his name, but here I was. “Naamah,” he said. “That’s a weird one. What’s that, Arabic?” “Satanic,” I answered. “Huh?” “Akashic.” “What’s that, like Persian?” “Oh yes.”

On his last day at home, Ed found me in bed with another man. The man had come to read the gas meter, apparently, and I couldn’t say for sure what happened after that. When Ed came home, the man got up, got dressed, and scurried out of the building so quickly I didn’t see him go. Edward left me right then and there.

oh wow

Edward threw a shoe across the room. I felt my lips bend into a smile. I rolled back and forth on the bed and I heard myself laughing. The demon was hysterical, ecstatic. She wanted him gone. The last thing I remember from that day is Edward kneeling by the bed, trying to get me to focus on his words. “Amanda, are you listening? Amanda this is TOO MUCH. I’m leaving. Amanda, do you hear me? I’M LEAVING!”

YOOO LMAOO

First I stabbed a girl with one of those homemade knives. I don’t know why. Then, in solitary, I grew my nails long and attacked one of the guards. Lucky for her she wasn’t pretty to begin with. So I got moved to high security.