If the devil were among us

Think about it. It’s 1970’s Europe. ABBA is big, the parents are happy the war is over and secularization has started. A lot of young blossoming women are unbaptized. Churches are shutting down, nightclubs are popping up. People have sex with each other because they always show up to the same bus stop and just started wondering what it would be like.

And in that context, the devil decides it’s time to return to Earth. It wasn’t as much fun in the past. He used to fool men into playing card games with him. But now, there’s very little of a protective spell left over Western Europe. So now he goes to the clubs, he drinks a bit, he chats up the ladies, most of whom have never known men. With enough alcohol in your system you don’t notice something off about those “angel eyes”.

He brings a lady back to his hotel room, unbaptized of course. He probably just asked her casually in the club. “Did you parents baptize you?” “Nah my parents are like, Catholic and Protestant, they couldn’t agree on where to baptize me so they just didn’t do it.” Then she giggles a little, convincing herself it’s not a weird question, guys just bring up weird things like that. It means entirely nothing to the ladies anymore. But the devil is… horny. So he takes her with him, back to his dark abode. He has to rent room 13, but it doesn’t mean anything to her, she barely notices.

“Are you sure you want this.” Even the devil has some basic respect for his victims. “Fuck me now, hurry up before I change my mind.” I’ll skip the details. But as this devil pours his belt into his pants again a few moments later he says: “Well, you already know how this ends I’m sure. I pack my bags and you never see me again. But I have to congratulate you, because now you inherited my powers.”

“Your powers?” She asks, drunk and confused. “You gain magical power by causing suffering to other people. Those magical powers will just be deployed by you in accordance to your will, there’s no real complex rituals involved, those are meant to help you in limiting you in using your powers. Because people are going to suspect from now on, that you are a witch. And people don’t like witches. Your powers can’t violate the laws of physics. It’s like a game of soccer, where you get to control the ball, as long as you keep it in the field and don’t touch it with your arms.” He answers.

“That’s bullshit.” She replies. “Fine with me. I’m leaving now. You’ll fall asleep again and wake up in the morning. You’ll think this was all just a bad dream.” So it goes. She wakes up the next morning, struggling to remember what happened. She went home with some guy. But now she is in a hotel room. “He must have been a tourist or a business traveler.” She thinks to herself. There’s nothing there that reminds her of him. Or, is there? A bite mark on her back. Some dirt on the floor. It looks like a hoof imprint. She laughs to herself, recalling the strange dream she had.

But innocence is easily lost and then it’s only regained through death. In this life we wear many layers of clothing, the blood pours through many of them, but rarely through all. And even if it ever does reach the skin, it is easily washed off again.

Having absorbed her lover’s personality, as is the rule with intercourse, which fragments and reshuffles the souls, the woman becomes a sadist. She enjoys inflicting pain on lovers, something that does not come naturally to a woman and yet is highly sought after by some. She could become a high class escort, if she so desires.

She is cursed or she is blessed, depending on how you wish to look at it. But she feels devalued, as what can not be denied, is that she sacrificed her innocence. Like almost all young women in the 70’s, she marries a soft pushover man and she goes on to have children of her own. She feels guilty, that the strange fellow with the angel eyes always held a place in her mind somewhere. As the years go by, fiction, memory and dreams intermingle.

The battery charges, she is cruel to her husband, to her sons and even to others, but her life is otherwise uneventful. And she maintains plausible deniability of course, whenever she is cruel. She may cook sausages for dinner and then she consistently hands the smallest sausage to her son and the softest to her husband. “What does this mean?” “What does what mean? You’re the paranoid one!”

Women don’t tell men everything they know. They certainly don’t tell them about magic. No, the men get to do their jobs, they get to paint the field, they set up the goals. They might even play a game of soccer, like good little slaves. But the women ultimately decide where the ball rolls.