Story of the Story, Day 11 - "Demon in Aisle 6"

In which a big store employee sees something otherworldly

For my ongoing “Story of the Story” series, I have been discussing the stories in my debut collection, Histories Within Us. Today, we’re talking about my story “Demon in Aisle 6.”

Image mashup from Pexels image sources

Demon in Aisle 6

Lucas is a gay teenager who just moved from Manhattan to Small Town™ USA. He has trouble fitting in until he meets Davis, a closeted gay kid, and they fall in love. But something terrible happens. Davis kills himself.

Lucas works late nights at a Wall Mart-like super store, and while mourning his dead lover he sees something horrible in Aisle 6 which he cannot explain: a demon creature — there is no other word for it — eating candy in the aisle.

What follows is Lucas’s exploration of what and how this demon came to be.

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In my senior year of college, my housemate, Richard, shot himself in the head. We weren’t lovers, only friends, but it devastated me. Like a zombie, I walked around in a daze for more than a year. And in that time, strange things happened. I consider myself a rationalist. I believe in science, not superstition. But things happened during that time I cannot explain.

The moment Rich died, I felt a strange spinning sensation, as if someone took my head and spun me around. But I was in class, and wouldn’t find out about his death until many hours later. His mother, too, reported feeling someone tapping on her arm at around the same time. But there was no one there.

Light bulbs around our house mysteriously flickered and blew out over the next few months. This had never happened before in the two years my other housemates lived there.

Photographs of me (this was back when we still used film photography) were weirdly double exposed. In more than one of them, there was a glowing figure near me that could not be accounted for by anything else in the room. (This freaked me the hell out so much I’m only consciously recounting it for the first time now, decades later.)

Like I said, I believe in science, not superstition, but these experiences were hard to ignore. I began to think that Rich’s energy lived on in some way. Perhaps a part of him affected me when he died. Perhaps a part of his energy tapped on his mother’s arm (this breaks my heart to think about.) Perhaps his energy hovered about our house for a while, causing the lights to flicker and wink out. Perhaps his soul clung to mine, unwilling to let go into the great beyond, and this is why photos of me during that time were weirdly double exposed.

Or maybe it’s all just coincidence.

“Demon in Aisle 6” is me working through some of those feelings of terror and loss. I wasn’t in love with Rich, but I loved him, even though we had only known each other for a few years. And I hope that, wherever his energy is now, he’s at peace.

You can read “Demon in Aisle 6” in my short story collection, Histories Within Us, which is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Kobo and Indie Bound, and elsewhere.