There was no warning. There seemed to be no motive. Perhaps it was a poison skimming the mind, present in the blood. Perhaps it was some pent-up rage that fell upon her Other for little reason. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

“The demons are in the shed,” her Other told her. “The demons are trapped in the shed. I trapped them. Pour the gasoline. Pour it. Make a bonfire. Kill the demons. Kill them!” Red reptilian eyes, but the girl only saw that it would get worse if she didn’t.

So the girl took the cans of gasoline down to the shed, poured them on the wood. It was a little shed with nothing in it except the demons. Dirt all around. What harm could it do to burn it down, the girl reasoned. If it would calm her Other. If maybe she could have an evening of peace or something like it.

The smell was harsh as her Other’s voice, so she hurried for the match, to smell something different. The shed lit up brilliant, with a gasp, gush, and shallow scream. The flames traveled up to the roof in seconds. It was always brittle and dry and rotted. Diseased.

The scream of fire became a human scream, but by then it was too late. While her Other laughed and danced beside the girl and shrieked out, “He came back! He came back! But he was a demon! But he was a demon! So I gagged him! So I tied him up!”

The shed on fire. The shed extinguished, blackened, strewn with ash.

The girl’s stepfather is inside. The girl’s stepfather is not inside. Her Other put him there. Her Other did not put him there. If the girl doesn’t look inside, she can make the reality she wants to live in, the one that won’t make her scream. The one that won’t mean she spends time in a juvenile detention center. Becomes an old, old high-school dropout. Never stable. Even her Other and the demons become dull, predictable, fuzzy, lost behind a veil, and even that is a sort of loss.

Never able to recover because how could she recover from that?

Thinking: Perhaps the hot spring day, harbinger, had deranged both of them. If the world was a demon that wanted to kill everyone, what did it matter? Did her Other know something true, in her body? Did she burn him in the shed because she knew what was coming and she wasn’t the equal of it? To survive the death of the world? If she wanted to die, she could have chosen some other way.

Nocturnalia. Nocturnalia. Nocturnalia. The giant fish diving, diving deep, lingering in the depths beneath her. Waiting to devour her. Or had devoured her. Or would have.