Work Text:
"Where is the best place to pray for the devil?" a pastor with eyes glinting yellow asks you one day, as a joke.
Not in a church, you think. Somewhere unclean.
Maybe if it was somewhere unclean, he could hear you better.
So, you head home.
When you get back to the house, rented for two weeks— your dad is sitting at the dinner table, assembling a gun that will someday belong to your older brother. A .45 with ivory grips he said.
Didn't matter to you; you've only ever been allowed knives.
When he turns twenty, your brother will get dad's guns, dad's car, dad's jacket, dad's music; everything he thinks he wants. It hurts to look at.
Neither of you are the favourite.
You spend the afternoon in the kitchen, tossing newspaper clippings into a burning metal bucket; the smoke alarm batteries resting nearby on the counter. As the last image melts, a poster of a missing girl your age, her eyes inverting as the fire eats her alive from the inside out, you start to wonder if this is forever.
That's when the doubt begins.
A warm hand on your shoulder breaks the stupor as your left earbud gets yanked out of your ear somewhere within the third verse of Flagpole Sitta. Your brother twists the wire between two fingers as he tells you to get off your ass and start getting ready. You go slow as you watch extra bullets being shoved into jacket pockets. You make sure to put on more layers this time.
When a job takes all of you, it never ends well.
You step around the bodies lying on the floor, not over them, you've always had more respect for the dead than most. Dads got a makeshift tourniquet over his leg, barely stopping the blood from blooming underneath, and your brother is out cold. There's a knife in your hand, it's silver and curved and drenched. There's a knife in your hand as there's always been and you're trembling as you stare down into the inverted eyes of the girl from the poster.
This cannot be forever.
Your brother is still unconscious in the back of the car, the reminder turning your knuckles white on the leather steering wheel as you turn down a dim lit road. Sirens blare behind you a few streets down, and you struggle not to heave as the red under your nails, around your mouth, and in your hair begins to dry and crust.
Your feet barely reach the peddles; you shouldn't be driving.
In the passenger side, your father huffs a laugh to a passing billboard on the way out: SIN WILL FIND YOU. HE HAS PLANS FOR ALL.
Somehow you can't bring yourself to disagree.
"Where is the best place to pray for the devil?" you joke to the new pastor, in the new town, and he turns to you with concern.
You don't go there again.
There's a point, as you get older, when your brother finally turns twenty and turns more into your dad, when you had your first kiss with a girl you knew for less than a day, when you've lied for the last time, when you've had enough, when the men of the family are three hundred miles and a drunken phone call away that for the first time, you’re given the taste of free will. And you've forgotten the question entirely, as if it never existed.
There's still a silver knife under your pillow.
You now have choice. The freedom of choosing. Loving and laughing and drinking and studying; honest work for honest money, having friends, having the time to be alone, having a boyfriend that crushes your heart time and time again just to watch you break and come back— putting your foot down and bumping into a girl that looks just like him a week later; telling yourself over and over she’s the one and you are safe, and this is normal.
Normalcy lasts a year and a half.
It goes like this; she dies first, it's abrupt and unfair and ruled an accident. It's too much and you lie, catatonic on the motel bed furthest from the door, smelling of ash and smoke. Your brother lies with you that night, like you used to do as kids, and it almost drowns out the guttural sobs coming from your throat.
You don’t know how to apologise to her for being alive.
The next death hurts more, only because you know it's coming.
You always thought if your dad ever died, they'd have to tie him down first. It's the scrap, the fighting dirty that you get from him. He moves his head only slightly in the hospital bed towards you, and you think of the time when a messed-up leg was the worst of his problems. He knows your brother will die young, and that his death is not for him, it is for you. The bloodline rests with you. You shake your head and back away.
It will not rest; you think in a panic. It will end.
In the bathroom mirror of the motel room, you see a figure, alone, covered in dirt and blood.
Human? Maybe, but at least you try.
The reflection in the mirror is more like a shadow, a camouflage.
You hoped your mother liked her body, took care of it. You wonder if she would love yours.
You wonder if she knew what you are.
In the bathroom mirror of the motel room, you see a body you never wanted, and years later you will find it never belonged to you at all.
"Where is the best place to pray for the devil?" you will ask the fallen angel, not as a joke, but a bored statement, in the space between nowhere and everywhere, as he scrapes the marrow off your ribs with his teeth.
"Somewhere unclean." He will reply in the same disinterested tone, maw bloodied, and then bow his head to continue with his work.