DEMON

Every morning for months Sally strolls the park adjacent to her apartment building, weaving among the tall trees, speaking to no one. A safe place, with all the open air.   

From the shadow beneath a nearby leafy sycamore, a languid voice crawls: “Hello, Sally.”

Her pulse jumps.

A bulldog with an amputated front leg hobbles into the sun. Josh follows.

The wavy gray hair, once cropped around his face, falls inches longer, and combed back, flips at the nap of his neck. Sandals, loose jeans, collared shirt. His standard attire, she remembers. (How long has it been? A year?) A midnight blue bandana pulls snug over his nose, mouth and chin, bandito style. Oversized aviator shades hide his eyes, a deep coffee hue she knows.

His face covering is so complete, she wonders briefly if she could be mistaken, perhaps this isn’t Josh at all. Some imposter, a thief, wearing Josh’s hair and clothes. A madman with a bulldog who learned her name. Just that morning, the news reported a robbery at the local Starbucks. The officer called to the scene asked for a description. “Two guys in jeans wearing dark masks,” the proprietor said, shaking his head. “Like everyone else.”

An arid breeze rattles the overhead leaves and whips Sally’s sundress against her thighs. Months in isolation have left her unable to begin a conversation. Please go ahead and unmute yourself. How many times had she heard that inane phrase these months online? Can you hear me? Hello? Unmute yourself.

Even if she could, what would she say?

Behind her, neon plastic-weave fencing surrounds the park’s kiddie playground. The basketball hoops are gone, though the stark black poles remain. The undoing happened during one of Sally’s walks, and like so much else lately, brought with it a discouraged sigh.

“Things have changed,” Josh says.

“Yes,” Sally says.

They are standing on opposite sides of a wide footpath. A small, elderly woman approaches. She wears a mask like Sally’s: sleek, black, suffocating in the day’s heat. A scraggly mutt at her side sniffs Josh’s feet and the two saunter on. The bulldog observes, nonplussed.

“Is he...new?” Sally says. It would be like Josh to take in a crippled dog, solely to garner lively praise from others. How good-hearted he is! How selfless!

Cynical, she chides herself. Change, no matter how unlikely, is always possible. Life these past months is proof.

“Rocky,” he says. He strokes the dog with the bottom of a foot.

He tells Sally his mother is trapped in a nursing facility in the Dakota hills. No visitors allowed, none. He planned to drive there and sneak in, he says. His mother, after all. Sally knows he says this to convince himself it is the right thing to do. To convince her he has a conscience. But it’s a marathon haul to North Dakota, he adds. And now—he gives the dog another foot swipe—he has Rocky. 

Teen boys, each carrying a box of pizza, race along the path. They are mask-less, like nearly everyone in the park under twenty. Sally unconsciously holds her breath to avoid any deadly exhales as they pass by.

A younger boy pulling up the rear, beefy and breathing heavily, pauses in front of Josh and extends a hand toward Rocky. The beast growls, an imposing force even with just three legs, and the kid runs on.

“How’s Rosa?” Sally says finally.

I’ll never forget this, Josh told Sally, studying her body the morning he left Sally after five intense months to be with Rosa in LA, Rosa who (a few years shy of Sally’s forty) giggled like a pleased child, Josh said. Rosa, who was never sad, Rosa who skipped. That was before the airborne demon arrived. Before the hiding began.

“Back in Vancouver. She’s a citizen there.” Josh picks up a blackened tennis ball near the tree and lobs it a couple meters into an expanse of grass. “We planned to get out together, but shit, they sent me back at the border.”

And Rosa, good girl, skipped on.

Rocky hobbles to a metal post and lifts his leg. A remarkable act of balance. “Keep six feet distance”, the sign implores. Twin stick figures wear masks and stand on either end of a horizontal arrow.

Sally’s chi healer, she discovered last month, is a rebel non-masker.

“Believe you are strong,” he told her with a stunning display of shining teeth, “That is all you need.”

His calm, exposed face unhinged her.

“But people are dying from this thing,” she said.

“The weak are always dying, Sally,” he said. “Do not fear.”

But Sally does. She fears something immediate and visceral: her sanity beginning to wobble. In the blurred, run-on hours she seeks out Beethoven for comfort. Slammed with numerous ailments, deafness being just one, he managed to keep going until age 56. “I am never alone when I am alone,” Beethoven said. Unable to sleep, Sally sits at her piano with a vodka on ice and begins again and again the tormented opening of the Pathétique … DA! da DA da DA dah... channeling, fortissimo, his un-aloneness.

“Have you lost your mind?” a neighbor more than once screamed and pounded on Sally’s apartment door. “It’s fucking after midnight.”        

Rocky crosses the footpath and sinks at Sally’s feet with a satisfied grunt. He licks her toes. Maybe she should pass on Beethoven—I am alone when I am alone, she decides—and get a dog.

Harsh laughter wafts from the slope beyond the once-basketball courts. The pizza boys. Theirs is a wild freedom, Sally thinks as Josh takes a step closer, his six-foot frame approaching the danger zone. Above the park along wide branches, crows quietly assemble, anticipating the feast of leftovers.

Josh removes his shades. The dark, lazy eyes watch her, hold her. But something in them is not right. Sally senses a feverish heat. She tightens her breath.

“Sally....”

She surveys his lithe body, wonders if he still shaves evenings rather than mornings, whether gray stubble bristles against the inside of that cloth. She wants to ask why he’s sought her out, what he expects from her now, after Rosa. But she knows. He takes another step. Then another. The subtle scent of tobacco, the mint soap. Sally tries to imagine his full face and is at a loss, she can’t, no, her mind finds only his mouth, remembers only his lips, how their touch excited her skin, how they devoured her body. A heavy sweep of hair falls to his forehead. He leans in, reaches out. In the trees crows flap about, impatient, as the boys’ laughter soars.