The devil showed up and he stood outside the front door, a little impatient I guess, I guess I could read that in his posture, his black hoof tap tap tapping. He seemed generally displeased with the state of the sky, which was end-of-the-day electric orange fusing into bottom of the ocean blue. His bright red body held itself quite still, unnaturally so, most likely I figure because he wasn’t breathing, because he didn’t have to. He held a small naked boy’s hand. I was shocked, for obvious reasons sure, but also because I knew that boy — he was me, or I was him, maybe I should say, some thirty plus years ago. Down to the last detail. Same birthmark by our lips and in our inner thigh. I knew this from photos better than I did from memory, which made sense because in those days we were so rarely outside ourselves like we are now, always able to take a look at how we are reflected back in the digital mirror. Plus back then, just looking at me, I remembered all these feelings I had forgotten I still had somewhere buried in the under-used configurations of my brain: how big the yard felt, how crisp the air this time of year, how long a month was, how impossible that the decades would change, how I couldn’t wait to see what it felt like when we moved from 89 to 90; how no separation existed between the creative impulse and the act of creation, no art to make: instead days and nights to shape,, how I described God clearly to my sisters; how I dreamt for one whole week of every episode that would air the next day of Looney Tunes, and was right; and here I was, nude under the hyper-present sky, and the devil was standing there at my door with a bunch of papers and a pen, impatient, waiting, all I had to do was sign and it would all be back again, I would be all mine.
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