I double demon dare you..... Flash fiction by Karen Schindler

 Willy and I were sitting in the tree above them eating ice cream cones. They were talking about demons. We thought it was funny. Grown women prancing around in weird getups drawing with chalk on the concrete.

A twig under my shoe snapped and fell to the ground. It turned into a puff of smoke when it hit the chalk circle.

The scrawny one looked up at us with eyes that made my bowels twist. Then, she raised an arm with a bony finger outstretched at the end of it and we were on the grass.

“Choose.” She said.

“Whaddayamean choose?” Willy asked.  Willy had always been sort of a jackass. I’ve know him since kindergarten and he’s my pal, but still, he doesn’t know when to shut up.  “Choose.” She said again. I looked at the drawings around the circle and sat my butt down on a friendly looking dog. Willy just stood there with his thumbs in his belt loops trying to stare down the old biddy.

“Ah. You think you’re something do you?” She asked Willy. He smirked in reply. “I’ll choose for you then my son, shall I?”

In the next second Willy was inside the circle, surrounded by cold flame. An unseen force blew his hair and clothes around as if he was standing in a hurricane.  I tried to run, but a root that looked like a hand had come up out of the ground and wrapped around my ankle, anchoring me to the spot.

The old woman nodded at the others and they formed a loose circle around the center drawing, being careful to stay just outside of the throbbing edge line.

I’m not at all sure what happened next. I do know that I woke up some hours later shivering in the rain even though it was ninety degrees outside. When I got home my mother didn't even scold me.  She said, "my god"
and wrapped me in a blanket. Then she took me to the hospital. The cops think I’m lying, but the shrink says that he believes that what I’ve said happened happened. Or at least that I believe that it did.

They never found Willy. A piece of his sneaker, the tongue strangely enough, turned up in a lady’s flower bed in a town three miles away. She thought it was weird and called his mom since it had his name, address and gym period class information printed neatly in indelible marker on one side.

The docs say I’ll gain the weight back, but that they can’t do anything about my hair. It’s going to be odd to go into fourth grade with snow white hair. Mom says she can try some Miss Clairol on it, all I’d have to do is choose the color, but I think I’ll live with it this way for a while. I’m pretty sure that I’ve had my one good choosing for this year. Don’t want to push my luck.

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