A Fig for All the Devils

by C.S. Fritz

if happiness is not one’s center and merely a product of one’s venture, then she can be found seemingly everywhere you look, like fresh flowers perched at the tips of weeds.

Would you call the blade in surgery ‘evil’ even though it cuts away the disease? Would you call lightning ‘evil’ even though it brings with it the rain to feed your crops? Sonny, I am not evil. I am the reaction to your world’s evil. I exist, because your sin exists.”

What severe toil it takes to reach a core.

In time, light will break through, but for now, the killing in you has begun. I know it hurts, I know its voice too, but what I know more is that all of your dying will lead to life. What feels like death to you is the side of you that needs to die.”

fig to all the devils.”

means you can and you should hate this process. It shows you’re real. You must be bothered by what goes bump in the night. But, that doesn’t mean it has to beat you. Hating a process should never equate to hating yourself. Victim or victor.

But, then I realized fear is good. Like a police siren, it warns you when you have to step up. It’s when we run from fear that it becomes bad. Fear makes us value life.

“Yes, if it’s made you better than you are. If your situation is better, your hope purer, your gratitude deeper, your fear weaker, your love richer…then yes, it’s real. If it hasn’t, then it’s a hallucination.”

father in need of a son, and a son in need of a father. The two bonded for eternity, not by their loss, but how the other filled the wounds left by grief.