Her mother thought the demons weren’t just demons but retribution from God. Purposeful. Punishment. The girl, as she became a teenager, knew her mother was wrong, as she was wrong about so many things. Yet sometimes it helped to think of them the way her mother talked about religion.

Whenever the girl wrote the word demon in those days, as in these, she felt compelled to use her own blood. As protection. As penance. Circles in her room. Shapes she found in books.

But what if the whole world was becoming a demon?>>

- 5 -

Some of the others ask too many questions once they spy the journal. Especially Eric, a gangly wreck who’s newly arrived. Shock of the new. Thinks of homeless people as the kind of community they might be but aren’t always. As separate from where he came from. And your eyes hurt from squinting in the poor light. You rebuff the questions even as you hide the journal deeper in your ragged blankets, your sleeping bag.

Huddled up against the side of the tunnel, in some dirt that is out of the wind. When Eric has become silent. When Eric is defeated. When Eric is staring out of the tunnel toward the river. Then you try to sleep again. One hand on the baseball bat. The sound of snow falling is from the journal, not from the world, but it’s in your head regardless.

There is that cocoon of comfort in the journal. Some pages have the feel of summer. But others seem pulled out of the winter. The one that catches your eye cascades over two pages and captures the descent of a shooting star. Below, a creature made of darkness stares across a snowy plain at what may be the advancing claws and arms of some other monster entirely. All while splotches of snow fall, mixed with the stars. Scrawled in the margin, another sketch of the fox head in a deep-sea-diver’s helmet and words you can’t understand.

At some point, or on another day, Eric’s gone. People are gone. The tunnel lies abandoned. Except for the flotsam that is you. Losing track of time. Losing track of self. Do something practical to keep hold. Drive a stake into the ground. Not drift away into a dark pool. Resist a dive deep into the water. Commit to the now.