Aurora Magazine 2019

my tuchus, I settled down, got married, had kids, put the awful memories of demonic oppression behind me, and found happi - ness for a time. I’m still trying to decide whether I believe it happened or if I just hallucinated it all. I watched a documentary film on Netflix recently called The Nightmare, and it showed the very creature I described, at least the human form of it – a being of pure darkness who terrorizes his victims when they’re in the half- asleep, half-awake state. And I’ve recently seen a photo of what appears to be the head of a demon dog in the wedding photo of a man who had been struggling with lust and alcoholism at the time– its wide eyed, hungry face poking up over the man’s shoulder and peering right at the camera and into our souls…as if to let us know that it knows that we know that it knows we see it. These are real things you can look up. To me they are a form of confirmation. But my mama didn’t raise no fools. My wife’s been instructed to wake me up immediately if I start thrashing around in my sleep talking backwards or in a panic (which I have, often just saying “Wake me up! Wake me up!”). I have insisted we only use very sheer, see-thru curtains if we use them at all. Five years now without a very bad incident – five, long years…

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