Maggie’s Mom, Maggie, and a Demon

By Madison Jozefiak

I. Maggie’s Mom

The moldy sandwich in the office fridge is so revolting it’s fascinating. Blue-gray clumps fester on white bread with the texture of foam, stiffened ham curves over the edge of the bottom slice like an overgrown fingernail. A dozen huge flies hover around it. But how did flies get in the refrigerator? Maggie stares until the rancid smell reaches her nostrils, then gags and slams the door. 

She walks to the window. She hadn’t planned on calling Mom that day but now the phone is in her hand and she’s dialing. At the desk next to her own, Susan is probably still gushing about her boyfriend and their new kitten. If Maggie had to listen any longer, she would vomit into her spider plant. How can the others stomach such small talk about pets and vacations and significant others without wanting to punch themselves in the face? Her job is boring. Her life is so boring.

“Hello, sweetie,” Mom says, breathy and bright, like she’s been on a walk. “Everything okay?”

Maggie leans her head against the wall and grumbles about Susan. As usual, she tells Mom everything except for what she can’t bear to admit. That the others have each other. They belong, and she never has.

“Mags, you always do this,” Mom says. “Why don’t you try to get along with your coworkers?”

“What for?” Maggie bristles. 

“Susan sounds like a perfectly fine person. I’m sure she’s been waiting for a chance to chat.”

Maggie clutches the phone so tightly she thinks it might break and is disappointed when it doesn’t. “I hate it here. Don’t you get it? I’m miserable. I’m dying.”

“If that’s the case, you can always get another job,” Mom says. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. Things will work out.”

“No, they won’t. Every job is the same. They’re all like this one.” 

Maggie knew she shouldn’t have called. Her mother is fine being alone, living in a studio with three mutts and a squawking cockatoo. Her little life consists of shifts at the public library, dog walks to the river, and Sunday brunches with two other old women, her only friends in the world. What does she know about wanting more?

“I’m hanging up!” Maggie says heatedly. “I’ve got to go!”

“Okay Mags, but don’t worry so much. I love—”

Maggie ends the call and slides the phone into her pocket, feeling a flicker of guilt. Anyway, she’s hungry. She goes back to the fridge, forgetting about the moldy sandwich. This time when she opens the door, the flies drift into the kitchen and buzz in a circle around her.

At first, she stands paralyzed by shock. Then she notices a rising warmth: an unfamiliar, smoldering sort of thrill. Each bug is fingernail-sized and black as tar, with no trace of ordinary red or brown or bottle green anywhere on their insect bodies. Maggie tries to count them. Twenty, thirty, forty-five—they seem to be multiplying. Her head is whirling. Dave from strategy walks into the kitchen with a coffee mug and sees her through the swarm. Dave walks out. 

Maggie’s heart quickens and her fingers curl. The flies circle faster. She closes her eyes. For some reason they make her feel like she could do something crazy, like walking over to Susan’s cubicle and ripping out a fistful of her hair. The fire of potential blazes through to the ends of her fingertips, and Maggie lifts her arms high.

When her eyes open, the flies are gone, but the feeling is still there. She hears a low chuckle from behind her, a whisper in a guttural language she doesn’t know. She turns and sees only a bright square of sky framed by the window.    

II. Maggie

Maggie’s secret bench sits at the side of the office building, hidden from the entrance and bookended by overgrown shrubs. She comes here to drink the Fireball nips she keeps in her work bag. If anyone asked why she left the office, she’d say she went for a smoke break. Not that anyone ever asks. 

Now she’s sweltering in the summer heat and the burning feeling from before is racing up and down her arms. It circles in her stomach before sinking lower. Too bad she doesn’t really smoke. All she would have to do is touch the end of a cigarette for it to burst into flame. 

The guttural voice speaks often from behind her left shoulder. When she looks, no one is there. Maggie can’t understand his language—not yet—but she likes listening to the melody of its intonations and the rhythm of its syllables. They blend together into songs of cities burning, songs of daggers, the song that plays through a tuft of grass before a gravestone, and on the ripples in a glass of whiskey.   

Every day Maggie returns to the bench, and every day it gets colder. The sun retreats behind a dense cloud layer. Trees at the edge of the parking lot turn brown and crackly. She can almost understand him now. He is promising to be here forever. He is her sole companion in this place. Maggie reaches back and strokes a shaggy, invisible head. His words lay their meaning down before her, and for the first time she speaks the demon’s name.   

“When I woke up this morning, Tigger did the cutest thing,” Susan says the next day. “He meowed and put his little paw on my forehead.”

Maggie takes her coffee, which has gone cold, and dumps it in Susan’s lap. 

Susan says “Oh!” and flings up her hands. The “oh” look on Susan’s face is so comical Maggie can’t help but laugh. 

“Whoops,” she says, “It was a mistake.” But she’s still laughing.

The others report Maggie to human resources, and she is tasked to appear before the workplace violence committee. There’s no point sitting through such a farce. She takes her tchotchkes and the stringy spider plant from her desk and puts them in a cardboard box. Then she puts the cardboard box in the garbage. The black flies circle slowly around it. 

She’ll never set foot in an office again, and there will be no more wanting. No more hours of tedious work followed by nights alone in her small apartment. No more credit card debt. No more ill-fitting shoes or wrinkled shirts, no cheap and greasy Chinese takeout. From now on there will only be taking, and having, and freedom.    

As she’s leaving, Dave approaches from the opposite direction, carrying a stack of files.

“Out of the way!” Maggie shouts.  

Dave scrambles, he drops the files. She kicks one of them down the hallway. 

She goes to the parking lot and gets into her new car—except it’s not hers, strictly speaking. It’s a red Maserati convertible from a parking space reserved for the C-suite. The demon gave her the keys. They’ve got the top down on the freeway and his voice is in her ear, laughing with her, caressing the nape of her neck. Maggie has accepted a contract securing sixty years of his faithful service. The rest of her life is set in motion. 

Her phone rings with a call from Mom, and the demon snatches it away. She swats at him, demanding it back. Maggie’s been meaning to talk to Mom all day. Not that she would approve of what Maggie has done. But failing to update her with the latest details of her life would be unthinkable.    

The demon flicks the phone out of the car, and it disappears somewhere on the side of the freeway. Maggie swears and swerves violently, eliciting a peal of honking from the pickup in the adjacent lane. 

This is part of the deal, the demon says. 

Maggie makes her hands steady on the wheel and forces herself to look straight ahead. The choice has been made. It’s probably better this way, she tells herself. 

Later, they arrive at a motel with a rusty sign that has half the letters missing. He thrives in a place with insects, and she doesn’t mind them anymore. Maggie’s demon is invisible, but they find each other in the sheets. The curtains are red, and the light of the room is ruby, strawberry, blood. Merlot-colored when the moon shines in.     

III. The Demon 

City lights waver in a mile-wide river. Maggie and her demon flash by like ripples and reflections, covering the world in eight days. The dice. The scent of wealth. Glances, substances. Glasses clink, a finger is raised to summon another before the first is done. The touch of velvet, of muscle-toned skin; warm, soft, firm. The chill that bursts around her body diving into a turquoise pool on her own private island. Nothing is ever off-limits. Not the married mogul on the top floor of the world’s tallest building, nor the eighteen-year-old poetry student at the smallest bar in Portugal. 

“I’ll give you money,” the demon says, “from other people’s pockets.” They never run out. They leave scars over everything. He is her getaway driver on a light-speed motorcycle, wearing dark goggles and a subservient smile. Having everything leaves her wanting more. The love she receives makes her disdainful of the people providing it—so it’s on to the next city, and quickly, before dissatisfaction becomes too concentrated to ignore. 

Once, Maggie asks the demon to bring her mom to their sprawling mansion in the forest. It’s the first time he becomes angry with her. All the furniture—recliners, tables, priceless artwork stolen from museums—floats in the air and gets flung around like it’s caught in a tornado. 

Ask again and I’ll tear you to ribbons.

From then on, whenever she feels like asking for her mom Maggie asks for a jacuzzi in another room of the house instead. 

They will never run out of money, but she is running out of time. Veins and tendons grow more pronounced on the backs of her hands. Overnight, her face is ruthlessly lined.

It could not have been twenty years already—it could not have been fifty years. The demon restores her youth, but it keeps wearing off, like cough medication. Maggie says no, no, no when she looks in the mirror, she will no longer look in mirrors, they are liars who resent her for what she is capable of. 

And then. Time is up. Sixty years passed, the contract fulfilled. The others are coming for her now. They are coming with raised voices and angry feet, stomping up the steps of the mansion. They are banging at her door—at a door, she thinks. It doesn’t have to be hers. 

Maggie isn’t ready for the end. It happened in no time at all, in the time it takes to have a thought, to make a rash decision. She begs the demon to disappear with her again. He traces her face with light touches and speaks to her, but she understands only his words, not their meaning. The meaning of everlasting, she cannot comprehend. 

The mansion is burning. The others outside are screaming, victorious, they love the flames. The black flies are slowly circling. They are the smoke.

Maggie kneels before the demon. She wants to see her mom. It’s her last request. After hearing Mom’s breathy voice, after hugging her, breathing the scent of dogs, and coming away with filaments of their tan hair on her own clothes, Maggie wouldn’t care what happened next. But she’s forgotten something important.

Very well. One last request — before you’re mine. 

Maggie’s eyes glow with hope and disbelief. The smoke swirls around them, thicker and faster; the others’ screams fade away. Her body becomes weightless. Maggie has forgotten that time has passed for everyone, not just her. The demon carries her home, across thousands of miles, taking her to her mother’s grave. 

About the Author

Madison Jozefiak is a fiction writer from Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Colgate University in upstate New York with a degree in English and creative writing. Her short fiction also appears in Inscape Literary Journal, The Baltimore Review, Thin Air Magazine, and Willow Springs Magazine.