Issue 124 January 2024

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Editorial: Possessed

by Rebecca Halsey

January 1, 2024

I achieved sleep paralysis on the third day of looking into the topic. One could say that I’m far too susceptible to suggestions to attempt this kind of research. But I did, and so there I lay, locked but wakeful, a scream trapped in my lungs.

Sleep paralysis is when you are awake and conscious, but your body can’t move. Because it can be accompanied by hallucinations, it has been used to explain a wide variety of phenomena such as alien abductions and hauntings. Which is essentially how I came across the term. I wasn’t just diving into obscure sleep research, I was immersing myself in the theme of this issue – possession, in the paranormal, demonic sense.

After all, what else could be pressing me into the sheets but a demon from hell? This wasn’t the chest pressure of heartburn after a rich holiday meal. No, it was a wild, malicious entrapment. Something was holding me back, pinning me down.

Obviously, this is a really helpful metaphor for…well, anything that feels complex and overwhelming. Like adolescence. Particularly for young women. Quite a few famous titles, in books and film, feature female characters growing up and inadvertently getting possessed. (Never mind the useful “first blood” imagery. And the historic demonization of women within church dogmas. That’s just gravy.)

As a youth pastor in Hendrix Grady’s book My Best Friend’s Exorcism puts it:

Adolescence is a complicated time, and some really bright people think that when the adult emerges, it’s like you’re being taken over by a different person. Almost like being possessed.

Not that teenagers have a lock on losing their sense of identity. Think about the cultural resonance of the phrase “midlife crisis”—an event in which the sufferer is in danger of a complete personality change.

I’ve already had one of those. Not sure I need my night demon to impel me to do anything more drastic than purchasing a literary magazine. [Looks at camera meaningfully.]

Terrified, I tried to release the scream building up inside of me, but it came out as a bark. Otherworldly barking—coming from inside me and all around me. Of course, your personal demon could take the form of an animal. Your personal curse might even be an object. My own, my precious.

When I could finally—gasp!!—move again, I lay stunned.

Sleep paralysis has probably occurred for all of human history, yet the experience didn’t feel like something that could be explained by science. This might have been what the medieval Europeans called an incubus. What the Arabians called a jinn. What the Norse called a mara. As I recalibrated my surroundings, I understood why ancients chose to believe in witchcraft and abductions. It felt evil, just like my sources promised.

In this issue, I have chosen a couple stories that make references to the religious trappings of possession. Our lead story, “Imago Dei,” by Josh Pearce, describes a trucker that picks up a young runaway who has delivered a very special child. For a more literary treatment, our reprint for the month–“Salt” by Emily Anderson Ula–depicts a wife dealing with her husband’s break with reality.

If you are seeking a science fiction version, look no further than Lora Gray’s “The Pieces of Her,” in which a cyborg is in possession of both a dead woman’s body and the mind of its AI creator.

Finally, what possession issue wouldn’t be complete without a story about a cursed heirloom? In “Wood, Amber, Smoke,” Lyndsie Manusos depicts a family haunted by grandpa’s pipe.

For this issue, I also asked the FFO staff to give me some of their favorite books about possession. We’ll be sharing these thoughts throughout the month, on Patreon and our various social media platforms.

 

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Imago Dei

by Josh Pearce

January 5, 2024

Jaya picked up the girl two miles past the burning car, that Buick Cutlass with the carbonized skeletons in the front seats, fire crews already working on it. The girl wore a calico dress, muddy rain boots, cradled a blanket-wrapped bundle to her chest, and hopped in as soon as Jaya pulled the truck cab alongside.

No questions. Jaya had a chrome revolver under the driver seat and a combat vet’s paranoia of strangers and strange objects on roadsides, but she recognized a half-starved underage runaway when she saw one. It was the same the world over, from Arkansas to Afghanistan, anywhere a clan of men tried to install a patriarchal hardline.

She eased back out into traffic. A line of emergency vehicles passed them going the other way. Calico’s front was dark with damp spots that smelled like sour milk, and the bundle made liquid sloshing noises whenever it squirmed in her arms. Jaya side-eyed them. The hell was that?

Jaya drove until dusk—watching her mirrors the whole time—then pulled into a motel. She brought the gun in with her. Calico sat cross-legged on the single bed and shrugged down the top of her dress, unabashedly revealing pale freckles and dark nipples, then brought the bundle up to her tit. The pose reminded Jaya of Old Masters’ paintings of the Madonna embracing the lamb. A white snout poked out of the blanket and began to suckle. When it was done, Calico took it to the bathroom and came back a few minutes later with empty arms and her clothing back in place.

She put a finger to her lips. “He’s sleeping.”

“’Bout time you tell me what your deal is.”

A fairly well-worn tale—on the run from a person in power above her. Everyone within 200 miles of the state line knew about the Reverend Dolphin, so-called because he’d been knee-deep in marine mammal/LSD communication experiments several decades ago. Then he’d had an encounter on a mountainside, and upon that spot had built a church, and around that church a compound, and from that compound ran a lucrative TV ministry of healing and revelations. The church’s billboards lined Jaya’s regular route.

Way she told it: shortly into her tenure as the reverend’s handmaiden, Calico had lifted the trapdoor in the church’s basement, which led to the cave system beneath the mountain, and found—

“And those two in the car—who were they?” Jaya asked.

“Church security.”

“What happened to them?”

Calico shrugged. “God works in mysterious ways.” Seemed like she didn’t want to talk about it. Well, Jaya thought, hearts and minds took time, and one person with a pistol wasn’t going to undo an entire organized religion, anyway.

Jaya used truckers’ pills to keep herself awake all night, watching the barcode passage of headlights through the window blinds, gun in hand, while the others slept, until she, too, dozed sitting upright in the bed next to the girl’s curled form.

A noise outside woke her, at first hardly distinguishable from the white noise of interstate traffic, but then louder and closer, approaching and accelerating. Jaya opened the door and stepped out, looked up. The sound, loud as a helicopter but the wrong pitch. She’d picked up the ability to identify aircraft purely by their rotor sound on her desert tours—a low-flying object hovered overhead, about the size of a Reaper drone. Streetlight reflected off a domed cockpit, and she glimpsed a long tail, but all other details of its body were hidden in the dark.

Something—the cockpit, a spotlight, or a weapons pod—rotated to focus on her. Cold adrenaline filled her guts. The long tail curled forward between its skids and from the end of it sprayed a violent liquid, like an industrial fire sprinkler, coating the motel parking lot in something thicker than water. Jaya stepped back and shut the door. Suddenly had to use the bathroom. While she sat on the toilet, heard soft squelching from behind the shower curtain. She flushed, buttoned up, hesitated.

Swiftly threw aside the curtain, and screamed. Another noise behind her, Calico creeping up. “The hell is this?” Jaya shouted.

“Shh,” the girl said. “Don’t wake him.” She looked adoringly at the giant maggot, squirming in its own juices and her milk.

Battle-hardened Jaya backed away from the tub. Ain’t never anything like this before. She fetched up against the wall. The rain outside was climbing up the window and creeping under the front door. Viscous liquid ran in rivulets up the walls of the motel room. Calico said, “Careful, the gods are indirect and indiscriminate inseminators.”

“God?”

“God in three persons—he lives within us in myiasis; the dragonfly of the Holy Spirit descends upon our heads; the estimated mass of all maggots on Earth is 3×1017, omnipresent. Behold here, the Son of God.”

Something wet slipped under Jaya’s pant leg. She tried to shake it loose, but felt it crawl past her knee and farther up the inside of her thigh. No! she shouted inside her head, but her outer self clamped down a calm facade and searched instead for targets. The loud engine noise returned, and Jaya saw the domed compound eyes focus on her as the griffinfly filled the motel window. “So then, who is that?”

“Imago Dei!”

Jaya, a lapsed Buddhist, thumbed back the hammer on her gun.

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The Pieces of Her

by Lora Gray

January 12, 2024

I tell myself Miranda would have wanted this.

I know as I stand in the ship’s blood-splattered control booth, that Lilith sees me. Her Pilot processors whir, approximating my height and weight. My muscle mass. My age. Miranda programmed her to assess potential threats, after all, and my wife was nothing if not thorough, but Lilith doesn’t seem alarmed.

Maybe because it’s me holding the detonator.

Miranda would never have feared me.

Lilith simply slouches against the terminal, her cobbled-together body slumped, hip cocked, a human quirk of Miranda’s that the Pilot AI she created never quite erased, as she begins hacking into the ship’s communication system.

Lilith doesn’t understand.

Grief is a dangerous thing.

* * *

I remember the first time I saw the pieces of Lilith in Miranda’s lab, paper thin circuit boards spread over the assembly table like doilies, chunks of thighs and arms floating in preservation tanks, kidneys suspended above Miranda’s work station like jewels. 

“Donated, of course,” Miranda said, oblivious to my revulsion as I peered inside the largest tank, where gray matter coiled away from a woman’s severed skull like hair. “It’s Lilith Booker. You remember her from Deep Space Mining’s investor gala last fall? Brice’s wife? Turns out, she overheard that conversation about organics being better for the Pilot program than lab-grown tissue. She left her body to science.”

I swallowed thickly and wondered if Lilith would’ve been all right with her corpse carved apart and stitched back together like this. Had she honestly believed Brice and the other Deep Space Mining investors cared about her legacy? Her donated organic tissue was another expense avoided, and Brice had been grumbling about the Pilot programs ‘exorbitant’ research costs for months. He cared about profit, not science.

Nightmares of what that might mean for Miranda’s safety during the test flight, alone in the dark with that golem, had haunted me for weeks.

“How do you know she’ll be stable?” I asked. “I know you wrote her code, but, hell, you didn’t grow her, and the Deep Space Mining guys get the final programming pass. You know what they’re like. They don’t give a rat’s—”

“What do you want me to do, Denise?” Miranda pressed her palm against the tank. “I signed a contract. Besides, this is what Lilith Booker wanted. Immortality. To be part of something bigger than herself. I’m sorry you don’t understand that.”

We argued then, just like we had a dozen times before, about safety and posterity, corrupt investors and ethics and vulnerability, our voices pitching louder and louder until Miranda finally said, “Oh. Sweetheart. Your ulcer.”

Later, our tempers cooled, she tugged me into an alcove, ran a delicate hand over my cheek and kissed me. “The end will justify the means, love. What difference does it make as long as we get a Pilot into space? Besides, I’m the brains of the operation. They won’t let anything happen to me. They need me.”

I sighed. “At least take my Taser with you.”

“All right,” she murmured into my hair.

Still, a week before the test flight, I renewed my Flight Safety Clearance in spite of the antacids I was popping like candy. I hacked the ship’s computer and the scuttle codes and emergency detonators, so I could protect Miranda in case those nightmares I’d been having lurched to life.

When Miranda saw my name on the ship’s manifest, she was furious I didn’t trust her to take care of herself. Her shoulders tensed as we ate dinner that night, her food growing cold on her plate, her gaze drifting toward the kitchen window as if she’d rather have been out there in the cold dark than with me.

“Miranda, please…” I reached for her hand, but before I could touch her, she stood and took her dishes to the sink.

We slept back to back that night, the space between us unbridgeable.

I thought I’d make it up to her by keeping her alive.

* * *

My wife is dead.

I tighten my fingers around the detonator as Lilith bores her way deeper into the ship’s computer. The communication code for Deep Space Mining flashes on the screen and then, over and over, ‘UPLOAD PENDING.’ Lilith cocks her head, like Miranda used to cock her head, my wife’s blood smeared on her cheek like a bright red swath of rouge.

My grief burns.

Funny how all of Lilith’s safeties failed when she saw that Taser on Miranda’s hip. Funny how the emergency overrides the Deep Space Mining programmers were supposed to double-check refused to kick in, how nothing stopped Lilith from ripping Miranda’s right arm away or twisting her skull to pulp, or pulling her spine from the gaping hole in her lovely neck.

Funny how Lilith had received a suspicious, encrypted communique from Brice’s security team the night before.

If Lilith relays her findings now, Brice and the other investors will have access to everything, all of Miranda’s research, every nuance of the work she never lived to finish.

It will make them all very rich.

The detonator is warm in my palm. “She didn’t create you for this.”

“I am the Pilot.” I hear Miranda in the way Lilith forms her ‘o’s. I see her echoed in the perpetual crease between Lilith’s eyebrows, the contour of her jaw where flesh meets silicone. The pride there. The optimism. The unflinching, stubborn, beautiful woman I fell in love with, evidenced in a delicate hand on her hip.

If I don’t do something, my wife’s legacy will be parceled and hacked apart, a piecemeal abomination sold to the highest bidder, stitched back together into something soulless and unrecognizable.

I take a deep breath.

I tell myself Miranda would have wanted this when I toggle the detonator.

I tell myself I see Miranda beside me, alive, immortal and, in that final, blinding flash, the pieces of her sear into me, brilliant and inescapable, expanding ever outward into the vast and silent dark.

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Salt

by Emily Anderson Ula

January 19, 2024

My husband writes the names of his nine demons on post-it notes and burns them in the kitchen sink. He eats only apples.

An apple a day will keep them away.

That’s the doctor, I remind him.

It’s all the same.

A priest sent us incense and holy water and clippings from his own beard. This priest had good reviews online, but he rarely returns my calls. So I am left to my own devices.

I Google Exorcism with Holy Water.

I search Speaking in Tongues

and Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor

and Lead Poisoning.

I search Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit and somehow end up in a chat room about Lyme Disease. At first, everyone in the chat is polite. Then they begin to call each other names, and it frightens me. Still, I search my husband’s body for ticks, combing through his thinning hair with a toothpick until he falls asleep in my lap.

Today my husband is jumping on our bed, laughing like a jackal. He seems to have forgotten my name. He calls me Persephone and asks for pomegranate seeds. And of course more apples.

The word Liminality has been scrawled on the wall in black sharpie. I wonder how I will explain this to the landlord. It is a word that begs for context, but I have no context to offer.

Finally, the priest calls in the middle of the night, apologizing for his delayed response. He was busy praying for a hurricane to turn around.

Father? Can I call you Father? I need to make a confession. At the university, I explain, we lay on the graves of Civil War generals and decomposing poets. We poured ourselves a large glass of the blood of Christ and took it to our forest bed of leaves and straw. You see, this is all my fault. His mother kept garlic in his pockets, but I thought it was an old wives’ tale. I wanted to be a fresh, celestial sort of wife with nothing but the latest fears. I promised to rub salt on his brow, but I worried it would make him old before his time.

If you want to be whole again, wave a raw egg over his body. Tie seven knots in a piece of string and bury it.

It’s not my land, I say. It’s our landlord’s land.

Or is it the lord’s land?

Then he is gone.  

The next morning, our conversation feels like a dream. I’m in the garden, digging, when I hear a cry for help. I go to him. “What is it?” My husband looks confused. He can’t remember if he needs me. He can’t remember if he ever needed me. There it is again. It’s only the mating calls of the neighbor’s peacocks, the same every February. By March, they will have forgotten.

I toss in the knotted string and the egg. But the hole demands more: Jack Daniels and all of our sharp knives and his collection of books. The Satanic Verses. Leaves of Grass. That pervert, Nabokov. Dante, because Fuck his contrapasso.

Later, I sit in an empty bathtub. Hey Siri, who will inherit the earth?

It didn’t work, I whisper into the phone when the priest calls. As proof, I list all the foul names and accusations my husband has hurled at me. I hurl some of my own. I’m sorry. I’m just tired. It’s these late nights. I can’t sleep because I’m always waiting for your call.

The priest changes the subject. Today he laid hands on a woman who couldn’t stop setting fire to things.

Did it work?

No news is good news. He sounds quite smug. Oh, and about dear husband: feed him the names of saints on strips of rice paper.

That I might sleep, he reads from Revelation. A red horse, a white horse, an ashen horse.

I dream of the priest laying hands on my abdomen and wake, moaning.

It’s dawn. The peacocks are in a frenzy.

My husband swallows all the saints, washes them down with milk. He coughs up Saint Anthony and Saint Augustine. Even Saint Jude, the saint of hopeless cases. I call the priest to ask why my husband’s body rejected these saints. His voicemail is full, but I see he’s been commenting on political memes. He is typing as we speak.

I am sure the peacocks are yelling Help. I can’t stand it, so I pack my husband and a sack of apples into the car. When we reach the coast, he recites Edna St. Vincent Millay. We squint at the sea.

I arrange nine apples on a towel. Their names are Redlove and Hidden Rose and Envy and Beauty of Bath and Glory to the Winners. There is an apple called Liberty and an apple called Jazz. A love-letter of apples. I send a picture to the priest. I promised myself I wouldn’t, but I am so lonely. He replies: What is this you have done, Daughter?

My husband ignores the apples. When he removes his shirt, his vertebrae are like beads on a rosary. I count every one of his ribs.

He wanders down the beach, and I worry I will lose him among all the grains of sand. Gulls circle. Kelp flies collect around the apples, so I lay my body over them. I can feel my heartbeat in all the places where the apples press against my skin.

Far away, my husband flirts with the sea. She folds around his ankles. Licking his wounds. All the places he’s carved his skin with a box cutter.

I can’t hold off the flies. I toss the apple called Envy and watch them descend as my husband dives beneath a wave.

If only I had thought to be an ocean, I could have withstood his insults. I could have harbored his ill will gracefully.

Myself, I am entirely bereft of salt.

* * *

Originally published in The Blood Pudding, April 2021. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Comments

  1. Jerrod says:
    February 23, 2024 at 12:37 pm
    Bravo! Captivating, had me locked in the whole time.

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Wood, Amber, Smoke

by Lyndsie Manusos

January 26, 2024

In the den at my Oma’s house, I found Aunt Olivia smoking grandpa’s meerschaum pipe. She was allergic to smoke, yet here she was, taking deep drags, a small light glowing from the bowl. The smoke eased out of her nostrils, and she sighed.

“I see him,” she said, pointing to the old woven chair in the corner. The springs on the cushion had molded to grandpa’s bottom, and no one sat in it now.

Olivia turned to me, green in the face but serene. She smiled, and more smoke snaked between her uneven teeth.

“He’s lonely,” she said. “He misses me. I was his favorite, you know.”

* * *

In the den at my Oma’s house, I found my eldest cousin, Charlie, smoking the meerschaum pipe. His parents, Aunt Olivia and Aunt Claire, insisted he didn’t “partake” in such activities, but he held the pipe as if it belonged on the ridges of his teeth. The lone window to the den was open. Laughter floated up from the pig roast Oma hosted outside. 

Charlie shivered despite the summer heat.

“I see him,” he said, pointing to the large, framed illustration of a shot duck falling to earth. “There’s blood coming out of his fingernails, like that time he hit his thumb with a hammer on accident. He built my playhouse.”

That same playhouse sat rotting under the willow tree in Oma’s backyard. Now, she used it to store mulch.

* * *

On Halloween, I crept to the den to take the pipe off the shelf. It felt like my turn. Most days, it nestled on a soft velvet cushion. I dragged a stool from the bathroom to reach it.

Mother swept in. She hooked an arm under my armpits and grabbed the stool with the other.

Mother pressed her cheek against mine. “That pipe’s not for you, Bug.”

Bug. 

That had been Grandpa’s nickname for me. 

Later, downstairs in the kitchen, while she mixed egg salad with her hands, licking mustard dressing off her fingers, I asked why.

“Why is it not for me?” I asked. “Everyone else smokes it.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” she said.

Lick. Lick. Lick.

“You smoked it yesterday,” I said. “When we came over to help with Oma’s laundry. 

Her lips scrunched up in a frown. “You have a cruel imagination.” 

* * *

At Thanksgiving, Oma sprawled on the couch next to the woven chair, the pipe held loose between two fingers. The bowl smoked; thick tendrils orbited her face like a caress. 

“It’s all wrong, Spiro,” Oma said to the air.

She held up the meerschaum pipe as if to inspect it, then she jutted her chin at me in the doorway.

“Did anyone ever tell you where this came from, Liebchen?” she asked.

I was told that when she married my Greek grandpa, they threw both sides of their families into disarray. They’d reveled in it. 

I stepped toward Oma, overcome by the smell of tobacco smoke and something pungent, like sweat and fresh fertilizer. 

Oma chuckled. “His father won it in a bet coming to America.”

The pipe smoke thickened.

“He cheated, your great-grandfather,” Oma said. “He wanted this damn pipe so bad that he cheated at cards. The other man had carved it with his own hands and was a better cardplayer. Your great-grandpa was a slimy bastard.”

She sniffed. “Runs in the family. ‘Well, darling,’ he’d said to me after we married. ‘When one is desperate, one can be forgiven to cross lines.’”

Oma’s voice sounded exactly like Grandpa’s when she told the story. It was as if he had crawled into her throat. 

“The man knew he’d cheated and still handed over the pipe. He told your great-grandpa the pipe would be a sword in his back. It would never leave him. If he got rid of it, it would come back. Anytime he tried to sell it, pawn it, or give it away, it came back. Here it is, Liebchen. Your legacy.”

Oma laughed. It did not sound like her laugh.

She rolled to her side and slid off the couch. She walked to the edge of the den, where the shelf was, and placed the pipe on its velvet bedding. The smoke disappeared. Oma’s hand hovered outstretched above the pipe, as if she might grab it again. Then her fingers clenched into a tight fist, and she dropped her hand to her side with a grunt.

“Damn him,” Oma said, staring at the pipe. “Did you know, during each birth, your mother’s and your aunt’s, that your grandfather left my bedside?”

Of course, I knew. Oma told this story as constantly as a prayer.

“I knew he was smoking that pipe,” Oma said. “Oh, eventually he came back. Eventually. But there I was, bleeding rivers out of my uterus, milk bursting from my breasts, baby screaming, and he’d cry about his goddamned father. ‘I see him,’ your grandpa said. ‘He’s lost.’ Then he’d take on a voice that wasn’t his own, a bounce to his walk he had no energy for. You know who had that bounce to his step, Liebchen?”

I nodded, knowing she meant my great-grandfather.

Oma trembled, her peppered curls a shroud over her eyes.

Oma patted the pipe like a child; she’d meant that pat for me. Without another word, she went downstairs. Soon, I heard her arguing with my mother and Aunt Olivia. Aunt Claire had to step in to mediate. Apparently, globs of butter had leaked from the plate of Greek pasta baking in the oven.  

I smelled smoke.

“It’s all wasted,” my mother yelled.

* * *

No one came for me this time. 

I grabbed the stool, dragging it to the shelf where the pipe waited. My fingers found the smooth surface of the pipe, its sculpted curves. The mouthpiece felt wet with saliva. 

My fingers curled, lifting. 

At first, I thought I might not be able to lift it, surprised at its heft, shocked at its warmth. 

At first.

Comments

  1. Penny says:
    February 1, 2024 at 7:28 am
    This is beautiful – thank you.

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