I Store My Demons Next to the Pickled Beets

I Store My Demons Next to the Pickled Beets

Ball Jar Demon

The demon lasted a good month, emitting low moans and sandpaper coughs into her ear, before Celia found an old Ball jar in the cellar, plucked the being off the cutting board with a pair of chopsticks where it had writhed since its summoning, screwed it in tightly without any empathy, and slotted it between the crunchy peanut butter and the wax beans.  

This one, her first, lasted longer than she expected. She’d heard stories of demons scuttling away into nothing within hours. She was so busy in the kitchen these days. Her own house in disrepair. Social calls gone unanswered. Those weekly visits to her mother’s house to read cheap detective novels out loud while the old woman sipped nettle tea under a cotton counterpane. The frail hand in hers, a confused gathering of bones and time. But business pulled at Celia. So much so that when death had pulled at her mother, she’d barely had space to attend to what her mother left behind in that house. Stacks of cardboard boxes and dusty closets. All those canning supplies, unused.

She’d meant to bake a simple cursed cake for her boss. Necessary for the recipe: a tiny piece of her flesh. Crafting curses was a subtle art what with all the complicated branches of dark chemistry that split off from skin as part of a recipe. She must have added too much skin. Now she was monitoring this accident of personal mismeasurement. 

Each day, Celia would slide the canned goods aside and the demon’s face would be pressed against the wall of the jar, gasping and blue. The tongue distended like a rock band’s logo. The eyes rheumy and desperate. (Did demons breathe? Surely not. Oxygen couldn’t have been a requirement for something so unholy.) She only checked in on it. Never poked the jar or asked it questions. Her mother once off-handedly said that asking demons questions drove holes through your soul. 

But the demon grew less antagonistic to its prison. Less energetic and furious. On the fourth day, it slumped in a corner and lackadaisically slapped the Ball jar. The sound was like a small branch brushing up against a window in a rainstorm. Celia closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment. 

The demon was a mistake, of course, but one that could be dealt with. Had the portion of flesh been a hearty Shylockian amount, the house would’ve gone up in flames, her whole neighborhood a fuming sulphureous pit of black nacre and glistening pitted onyx. Instead, what she created was a measly demon. Ragged and weak. Nothing to be pitied or excited about. She re-made the cursed cake. Then got on with a poisonous jellyroll her friend requested for an HOA soirée. 

It never tried to communicate with her. Instead it glared at her when it had the energy. After two weeks, she knew it needed no oxygen, but there must’ve been something she was depriving it of, a necessary substance. Part of her wanted to make the same mistake a second time. Create a partner for this imprisoned imp. 

One morning, when she opened the cabinet and moved the wax beans aside, the Ball jar rolled out and fell between her hands onto the kitchen floor. The glass shattered and the metal lid rang in an annular dance. She jumped back. The demon was unmoving, its body a deep cerulean and flaking. The claws faded to nubbins and the face drooped. The tail wilted off and the smell was like a paperback book that has been left on the dashboard of a car in the hot summer sun. Grass and vanilla. She inhaled violently as if she’d heard a terrible secret. 

She bent down and cradled the demon in her hands. She brushed a thumb across its chest. She smelled the demon again and thought of the first trip to the library with her mother as a seven-year-old. The vaulted ceilings. The hush of librarians shelving hardback books wrapped in mylar jackets. The protracted and protected silence, the fragile yet enduring shell of imagination she’d exuded while inhaling that smell. She brought the demon closer. No low moans or scratchy coughs. It was now a gone thing. 

The lignin of the decaying book pages faded in her nose, as did those tender-folded times as a child. And as she begged for the demon to return to life, she wondered if she’d been wrong, all wrong, about what it was she’d created.