Alter

A primitive hand held alter, my only companion in the lonely darkness.  I reopen the portal.  Biting white light invades my eyes.  Cold two a.m. coffee hammers my weary taste buds.   My fingers fumble over symbols beckoning  the portal to spit a soulless recorded voice into my dry ears.  The voice ends, a slow beep, my heart pounds.  I beg, I rant, I try to explain why I should get the thing I desire most.  If mistakes are explained well, people will let you fix them.  Right?  I don’t know.  Talking too much, more coffee.  It is flat, muted, and seemingly dead, like the world feels in the cool dark air.  I throw the portal across the room, my angry shouts slam into concrete and are reduced to silence.  I have forgotten most of what I said, and I am still pacing.  Awake in the deep night and the complication of regret feeling like a stone fist stuck forever in my belly.  I offer fantasy dreams of redemption before the dead alter, with its glow holding my gaze.  In the next moment I am dislodged.  Sunlight licks my cheek.  Shadowy demons swim away from the warm yellow light as it crawls forth from distant horizons.

. . .

Copyright © 2018 Zachary W. Gilbert

Origin

The existence of demons is indeed, a visceral notion.  No zoo or museum houses the supernatural for the scientific mind to sample and define.  Consider for a moment, that perhaps demons are real.   A massive load of worry and anger from the injustice of favoritism, started as a hot neck, and an invisible lead straight jacket tugging on aching shoulders.  Then, as the lights danced in a tormented brain shadowing scars began to accumulate of the wall of the mind.  A creature was born of hurt, resentment, and hatred.  It seemed harmless at first, reaching out into the world with shadowy and sticky tentacles.  Warm black ink would run into the ear canals of any who would listen and incubate more demon spawn.

Humans may possibly be the parents to the unseen darkness of evil, as electrical brains hum and swirl events of hurt and anger.  Churning a massive centrifuge of thoughts and dark fantasies.  Unleashing darkness upon all that step near.  The blackened mist is not bound to it creator.  A human, deprived of life, leaves behind a footprint of warm glowing sunlight, and choking smoke.  Like living creatures they penetrate and saturate those left to life.  The creatures of emotion, live beyond the nest.

God saw it necessary to quell the veil of black, that evil creatures cast as they swim in the air between people.  A bright light, silent and hung on a cursed wooden monolith for a moment.   Light was lost for three hours, so that it could burn away darkness for an eternity.  Without light, demons will nest in the wounded brains of humanity.  Love and forgiveness is poison to evil.  It will writhe and scream under its dose, but eventually, it will die in the light.

Copyright © 2017 Zachary W. Gilbert