You fumble for your mobile. “Boss. I’ll there in about 10 minutes. Sorry. You’ll never guess what I’ve just seen”
Working last night up to 1 am was too much. Shouldn’t have to take the accounts home – not after a 10 hour delivery day.
You hear a grumble, see a spray of earth flume upwards as the paving-stones lift corner by corner. With a creak and snap of cables, the telephone booth upped on points and pirouetted on one corner.
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Billy Thomas sat red-faced, eyes lowered, as the new preacher ranted about the demons the devil placed in all of us, then glared at poor Billy; sins of the flesh sent to tempt us into evil doings.
Friends of Billy’s persuaded everyone to go skinny dipping in the river. Old Mrs.Pugh had come across them, screaming at them that the Lord would strike them down for their sins. Personally, Billy thought Mrs Pugh had a demon, as she had stood watching them for ages according to Huw Parry. Off she went to tell the preacher and our parents, hence we all had to attend chapel to renounce our sins.
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Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.
‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.
‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.
The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.
‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’
‘It’s a job.’
‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’
Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.
Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.
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I read a lot, stories mainly, it helps to pass eternity. One idea that regularly catches my attention is the advice that you should always be in charge of your own stories: never let others tell them on your behalf or you will inevitably come out badly. So very true, and excellent advice for we demons who have suffered greatly from such blatant cultural appropriation down the ages.
I mean, you’ve heard the one about the Gadarene swine? Completely Fake News. Where was the demonic voice in that tale? Suppressed, and completely rewritten to make demons look really bad. As well as all those artists like Fuesli, another really atrocious exponent of anti-demon propaganda is Salman Rushdie, who ruthlessly exploits the demonic repertoire for his own profit. It makes me weep the way demons have come to be associated with wickedness.
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Everyone on first meeting Lucinda thought she was a delightful little girl, with her long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, she seemed such a perfect little Angel. She lived with her parents and her younger brother, Damien in a nice large house in the countryside. The family pet was an old retriever named Goldie, who faithfully followed Lucinda wherever she went.
In school term, there was a nice easy-going atmosphere in the house as everyone had a definite routine to stick to. Lucinda went to ballet and gymnastics after school, and Damien had swimming lessons, not that they did him much good. The weekends were usually pretty booked up with sleepovers and camping trips.
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It started off like a game. Lucy passed me her piece of cake under the table on Mum’s birthday. It felt funny singing happy birthday when half an hour ago Mum was crying, and Dad wasn’t living with us anymore. But I got two slices of cake and that made me smile.
Then she started putting all her lunch in my lunchbox. I didn’t know what to do with it.
It wasn’t only the food. She shouted all the time and she was always in her room. Mum said it was just teenage behaviour, but I didn’t think so.
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“Hey Belial,” Lilith shot the demon a furious glance, “will you quit your beatboxing, or I swear to Dog I’ll beatbox your ears.”
His single, vein-etched eye widened as she swept a taloned claw inches from his snout and he tumbled backwards in mid-beat into a vat of moral turpitude soup.
“Watch it, mam,” he coughed, picking lumps of jellied depravity out his hair, “you nearly had my eye out then.”
She skewered him with a look that would have frozen sunspots.
“What,” she snarled, “do you think I was TRYING to do?”
He tensed expecting another wave of maternal violence; she was always grouchy at this time of the millennium.
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