The Devil’s Child — AngryAlbino
The Devil’s Child
A story so close to the truth, it might scare the devil out of you.
1) The Door
The day the Devil came to live in me, the sky over Durant wore a bruise. Nana’s beans simmered; Popo tuned the radio; thunder muttered like an old man in the next room. My older brother found Popo’s .22 revolver and a question big enough to aim.
“It’s not loaded,” he said, casual as passing salt. He spun the cylinder—soft metal purr—leveled it at my ribs, and squeezed.
Click.
Again—spin, aim, click. He grinned like a boy watching a dare sharpen.
Last spin. He whispered, “Bang.”
The gun obeyed.
Light cracked the kitchen. Heat bloomed in my side. In the half-second of blackout I felt something move toward me, like a draft discovering a broken pane. Then the world slammed back, swimming and hot, and blood ran warm into my palm.
If I can just get to a Bible, I thought, the kind of thought they program into you when you’re young.
But the hole in my ribs wasn’t a wound. It was a door. And something stepped through.
2) The Seed
Rain arrived like a verdict, hammering the farmhouse. A first responder in a long coat rolled me to my side, his hand full on the wound; pain went white behind my eyes and stayed there, hissing. The hospital smelled like antiseptic and damp wool. A surgeon told me later: hollow point, slipped between the ribs, grazed the spleen, spared the rest, tore itself apart. Fragments peppered the wall behind me.
One shard never left.
A week in intensive care taught me the language of machines. I drifted on morphine and thunder. Somewhere between the two, a new voice lay down in my chest like a man taking the cool side of the pillow.
Too late for books, it said, mild as shade. The door’s already open.
My brother visited once. He stood at the foot of the bed as if studying a broken engine.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not sorry. “I just had to know what it felt like.”
The shard under my skin warmed. The voice answered for me, dry and amused.
Now we both know.
3) Ink
When I came home, the fields shone with rain. The voice didn’t shout; it suggested—and my hand obeyed.
Draw.
Ink felt honest. I drew what my bones were whispering:
- A preacher’s hand clutching a Bible whose edges slumped and dripped like candle wax.
- A wooden cross sagging into itself, rivulets pooling on stone.
- A communion chalice bending, wine stringing itself into red ropes.
- A stained-glass window weeping color down the church wall like a slow bruise.
The pages looked like they’d been left too close to a furnace. My mother found them and carried them around the house like evidence.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked anyone within reach.
They dragged my portfolio to a psychologist. He peered over his glasses, kind as rain. “He’s creative,” he said. “He’s processing.”
She came home disappointed—she wanted an exorcist with a diploma. The church would do.
4) Fire
I found Rush’s Starman—a naked figure defying a crushing star—and drew it big, red, defiant. Left it on my bed. When I got home, my room was opened like a body in a clean white room. Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Moorcock, eight-tracks—gone.
“They burned your devil things,” my mother said, chin set. “At the church.”
The voice smiled in my chest. Something unlatched in me. I smashed my electric guitar against the wall, carved FUCK YOU GOD into the Sheetrock with the headstock, then stabbed the neck through so the body hung and swayed like a hanged man’s last opinion.
Next Sunday they dragged me to church. I refused to dress. Skin was my scandal. The pastor pressed soap-scented fingers to my forehead.
“I cast the devil out,” he said.
He’s busy, the voice murmured. But he thanks you for the invite.
They shook me until the room turned like a water wheel. I vomited into a trash can. They cheered like a demon had evacuated. The voice laughed, kind and cruel at once.
They have such faith in fluids.
After, they brought children to tour my room—small faces peeking at the gouged words, the hanging guitar, the absence of books.
“The Devil lives here,” one girl whispered, honest as thunder.
5) Names
School hallways carry rumors like heat. “Possessed boy.” “Demon kid.” I decided to own it. Rolled my eyes white, dropped my voice to the cellar, hissed: “I am Refisul.”
Some screamed, some ran, some stared. The voice in my ribs clapped softly.
Good. Dissonance suits you.
Nana found me drawing again. She set sweet tea by my hand and didn’t say devil or sin; she said, “You always did see a different world. Don’t let them take that.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked, glancing at the scar.
“It remembers,” I said.
She nodded, like memory had a temperature she could feel through skin.
6) The Choir’s First
The church called it oppression, infestation, rebellion—whatever word made them feel like locksmiths. My parents were not villains. They were the Choir’s first—indoctrinated, tuned, played until they could only sing one song: fear in a major key.
A visiting man in a bruise-colored tie came with little bottles and a red Bible gone to pink at the corners. He turned my bedroom into a polite battlefield, anointing my forehead with oil that smelled like pennies and old flowers. He spoke Latin like he was stacking bricks around a wild animal.
The Devil sat up in my chest to listen.
Words make nice cages, he said. But I don’t live in rooms. I live in doors.
The man pressed his palm to my scar and shouted an old name that made the light tremble. For a moment, pressure climbed my throat like a knot. Pride kept it there. The Devil leaned forward—not a roar, not a shriek, just the weight of a hot-breathed animal at the edge of the bed.
You did not make this door, he told the man, not with my mouth but with the air. You only found it open.
The bottles went back in the case. The red Bible snapped shut. The lock clicked.
At supper my mother asked, “Feel any better?”
“I feel the same,” I said. “Just more expensive.”
7) Hunger
I grew older in the ordinary way—bad love, better love, then love that held. Music found me like a stray recognizes the one person who won’t kick it. I hammered rage into rhythm. I learned dissonance that tasted like truth. On good nights the crowd became a cathedral and my throat a bell and the Devil lay quiet as a sleeping dog at my ribs.
“Can I be both?” I asked him once after a show—holy and haunted, I meant.
You already are, he said.
“Without hurting people?”
He took his time. He doesn’t lie—one of his stranger mercies.
You have and you will, he said. But hurt is not the only thing you make.
“What else?”
Songs that let other wounded things breathe. Stories that put a hand on a shoulder in the dark. A daughter who laughs because you taught her laughter is safe in a house that used to be shouting.
8) Vision
Here’s where the images change. The drawings were only the first symptoms. After the exorcisms and the burnings, after the tours and the names, the pictures began to move—not on paper, but inside whatever the bullet opened.
I dreamed a choir singing bright and clean, and as they held a note their faces softened, not like wax but like bread left too long in warm hands. Mouths stretched into grief-ovals; notes slid downward as if pulled by strings.
I dreamed pews growing tired of holding people and settling, plank by plank, until the congregation found themselves ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then swallowed to the waist in a slow blackness like tar. No screams. Only the rustle of hymnals closing.
I dreamed a steeple taking a long bow to a heat you couldn’t see, the bells inside drooling bronze into threads that never hit the floor—threads that hung and hummed like nerves.
And the dream that woke me sitting up with my hand on the scar: a procession through a brass-and-steam city, mourners’ veils bending like candles in August. The coffin’s lid was a gear, teeth wet. The smoke rose and then fell, liquefying and drawing itself back to earth.
“Who died?” I asked the Devil.
Ideas, he said. Mostly the ones that would have made you smaller.
9) Daughter
Time did its quiet work, or I did mine. My daughter’s laugh fixed things no prayer could. She touched the scar with the grave attention of a child cataloging the world.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Only when nobody believes me,” I said before I could think.
“I do,” she said, and kissed it.
The Devil went still in a way I had never felt—reverent, as if someone had entered a room he considered his and laid a hand on the table like a blessing.
Be careful, he said. Some tendernesses are older than me.
“Whose side are you on?” I asked, smiling.
The side of doors, he said. Yours, when you remember to own it.
10) Return
Years later I stood again in Nana and Popo’s kitchen. The pasture had gone to saplings; the porch complained under my boots. The wall where the bullet had sprayed was mended, innocent as a lie. I could still feel the shape of it.
Leaving, I paused on the threshold. Rain was nearby; the air tasted metallic, the way it does when the sky inhales before a shout.
“Are you ever going to leave?” I asked the Devil, gentle as a joke.
I don’t leave doors, he said. I honor them.
He let me feel—just for a breath—the other life I might’ve had: no hole, no whisper, quiet like a lake you aren’t allowed to throw a rock into. He took it away before I could want it badly enough to break.
Not this world, he said. But adjacent. It’s good to know it exists.
11) Ledger
There should be a clean lesson here. There isn’t. My parents died as choir people—faithful, frightened, fiercely certain. When my mother passed, grief didn’t arrive in the shape I’d seen in movies. What I felt was the air change—a pressure lifting from rooms—and a strange, private mercy: nobody could shake me by the head and claim they were saving me anymore.
“I didn’t grieve her the way I was supposed to,” I told the ceiling fan.
You grieved the child they were told to fear, the Devil said. The ledger is complicated.
“Are you me?” I asked again.
No. He never hesitates on that. I’m what rushed through when men left you open and called it righteousness. I am the animal in the house that learned your name and lay down when you asked nicely.
“What is your name?” I asked.
He tilted my face toward the mirror. My mouth made a sound like a bell finally melting. Not English, not Latin, not anything the pastor could frame. I thought of that boy in the hall rolling his eyes white and hissing backward syllables to make girls scream—Refisul—and knew how close I’d been to the truth without touching it.
12) The Door Stays
The shard remains, a grain of metal lodged where the bullet let him in. It is not a metaphor. It is a key wedged in a lock that can’t turn all the way and won’t pull free.
They tried to drive him out with shame, with bile, with fire, with hands, with Latin. All they taught me was the shape of the door.
Now, on nights when the house is honest and the dark is long, I lay a palm over the scar.
“Not tonight,” I say.
From the other side of my ribs, he answers—polite as a guest, certain as weather.
As you wish.
I sleep and dream the city again: the choir with soft faces singing a new, lower note; the pews resting their tired backs; the steeple bowing to something warmer than fear; the procession turning toward a crossroads. The coffin this time is small and bright. The plate on its gear-lid reads:
Ideas That Would Have Made You Smaller.
We bury it without sermon. We salt the ground. We walk away.
Rain comes, not to punish, not to cleanse, but because the sky has business with the earth. The porch breathes. The night leans in, waiting for the next story.
Under my ribs, behind the old round keyhole, the Devil hums. Not triumphant, not defeated. Home.
Song: Devil’s Child — AngryAlbino • AngryAlbino.com