Fiction Friday - The Problem With Demons

Hey, what do we have here? Some fiction, for a change! Not much, admittedly, but I used writing to get my mind off of stuff today, and it worked, at least for a little while. You might notice, if you follow what I've been writing, that this has nothing to do with any of my other posts. That might not be the problem with demons, but it is the problem with me; I start stories and then never finish them. My theory is that it's because I just haven't found a story I really want to tell yet. Yeah, that's the ticket. Anyway, read it, enjoy it, or don't... either way, let me know! Maybe there'll be more if it next week.

“That’s the problem with demons.”

             

            I say that a lot. You could say it’s my catchphrase. But what I never do is actually explain what the trouble with demons actually is. I never really wanted to pin it down for anyone else before, and I never had a reason to. It was enough that I knew… and knowledge is power, right? And one thing you should never do is share power… but I’ll get to that later.

             

            So, the problem with demons. It all started in a little neighborhood in Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen, between 34^th and 49^th, and from 8^th Avenue all the way down to the Hudson, a body of water so foul I’m convinced it’s a tributary of the River Styx.  Back in the day, the Kitchen was a real vile spot, full of shoddy, cheap housing and even cheaper people; druggies, rapists, the Mafia… you know, if the Mafia existed. You couldn’t cross the street without seeing one sin or another happening on either corner. Now? That hideous bitch Progress has cleaned it up a bit, filled with actors and artists and the like.

             

            Which means the Kitchen still cooks with sin, just sins of a different kind.

             

            Right smack in the middle of it all is a little bar called The Devil’s Cauldron. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place that takes the term “dive bar” to a whole new level; from the neon sign above the door that rarely has three of the letters in the bar’s name lit up at one time, to the stools that are missing legs, the pool table with strips missing out of the felt and a cracked eight ball, the jukebox that has over five hundred songs listed but only fifty that work, all the way down to the bathrooms that are covered in all the myriad forms of DNA that would make the bulb in a black light crack itself out of self-preservation, the Cauldron was a miserable place. Easy to see why it would be a wet dream for demons, why it was their favorite after-hours hangout.

            

            The Devil’s Cauldron in Hell’s Kitchen… you could say the problem with demons is that they like shit a little too on-the-nose. And they do. But that’s not the problem with demons, although it’s part of it.

            

            No, the problem with demons is that they’re way too tied up in the traditional, the old-fashioned. And that right there is what makes the problem with demons MY problem.

             
            Y’see, I’ve just never been an old-fashioned kinda demon.