Evil's Hag
a short story
Evil’s Hag
Daphne
She’d been tossed around by the demon again, Maru.
Nothing made her more pleased than the stench which would drip from her skin, pool by her feet, and clamor through her bones with an eek to Maru. It came specifically from her time with Him in the viscera shower.
He was an underlord; the one demon Maru had deigned to take for eternity’s slumber was a foulest smelling, bulbous, tempestuous man who she had once—upon Earth—found to be her enemy, until it aligned with her sadomasochistic pleasure seeking to take his side in hell.
Chortled, shouting, clawing pleas were all that could be heard within any chamber of the underworld, ever growing more tightly constricted were the walls, every day awoken like a dream within a dream from the last.
Maru believed it this day she would be freed, as she had for all days previous, and would continue to pine for that in the infinity of eras to come. The globules, veins, and streaking debris of those screaming women-made-children she’d watched eviscerated, while the demon lord took her over again—from behind and before—composed the viscera itself which rained over Maru as she scrubbed it deeply into all the cracks and crevasses of her gargantuan body, caressing it through each strand of her fraying, heat-scorched, blackened hair.
She was being groomed eternally into what she had chosen to become.
Once, upon her life on Earth, Maru had chosen to forsake the kindest woman who loved her like no other. That mother had only been a youth in her heart, most delicate of mind, making the mistake of trusting Maru to treat her with any due course of respect she believed any not destined for an eternity lying beside corruption would muster for a gentle woman like them.
Little had that poorly woman of heavenly make known. Her forgiveness was being tested by God through the creature Maru would choose to become in rebellion of the belief placed in her.
With her clubbed feet blackened from another trip to the antechamber, dangling from its trapped door into the frozen cosmic nothingness, Maru’s nether-bitten toes were inseparable. Each drizzle of innards to land there instead of the hair-clotted drain would be picked off by the uncuttable nails of her ever-bloating and stiffening hands.
It was more of flicking that she was capable of with those.
Once, right before her end on Earth, Maru realized that there was more to life than just what was before her eyes. It came when she saw that woman, who had passed well before their needed time because of Maru’s own callous disregard, and realized her own passing on was seen over by only them. It had been a test Maru failed to let them suffer so long, trapped in mental disability, leveraging every cruelty and privilege had to make it clear she would win over that woman’s pathetic need to speak with her once more.
They had shown up moments before Maru’s passing, a visage beyond that of inner vision; a specter seen and heard as if a violin on the wind. It had cut short and all was dark the moment Maru’s hopes burned brightest.
That woman, in their saddest and most desperate places of madness, had written stories to Maru—poems too—and spoke of wishing to see her in heaven one day; a story told over again of metaphor and earthbound reality; the woman’s hope was to hold and speak to Maru one last time to ease the suffering of their mind. Maru played it like a game in a world with no consequences. She’d seen the woman’s livelihood ravaged for their belief in her—she had seen them to suffer and lose everything including their child.
In the dark moments at the end of Maru’s life, she was meant to be allowed forward, or cast into the nothingness, or left to suffer the ongoing hatred of eternity she had earned by matter of that woman’s choice. They were an angel who was sent to save her soul.
To punish a being like that until they would stand beside God in casting you into the pit of your least desired position for an eternity suffered was a curse unlike any other. Maru had ensured that choice when she failed to honor a single one of her proposed values, words spoken in moments of trusting companionship, or understood virtues of righteousness through a most grueling period of that woman’s life where they had been begging for her help.
Maru tried to even the load of what she was doing to that woman by helping everyone else, with kindness to spare for all whom weren’t her, and failed to realize it a worsening of the curse she had placed upon only herself for the false idols of superficiality, superstition, egoic need to be the victor of her own cruel games, and an unwillingness to apologize or compromise when it wasn’t something which would pay her forward with worldly privilege.
One day in her Earth life, Maru reached a final point of no return. It was before she saw that coming. It was in fact signaled to the woman she was torturing in a dream. They had sent her a message which didn’t seem much different than those they’d sent before.
When Maru received it, she thought those words to be as mad as the rest of the ramblings the woman had produced.
She didn’t realize they had chosen to forsake Maru and been blessed with the forgiveness of heaven and God itself to do so. Maru failed to grasp that the woman’s hope and love, her belief and forgiveness would live on in their soul itself—for her own soul—and that Maru and her lifetime’s memories would be severed from the chain of soul going forward from the lifetime lived upon Earth in less than vain.
At her very end upon the Earth, Maru had spoken for a first time in years, pleading, “I’m sorry, Daph, I’m sorry. I want to come. I want to come now to heaven with you. Please come back.”
Daphne was gone, crying in heaven, but having made the choice which it was her job to make.
“You don’t fuck with kids, Maru. And you fucked with mine,” is what they had written in a story they wrote on that same day they’d cast the final message Maru would ever receive from her.
“You win. Enjoy your prize.
“I wasn’t playing a game.”
Things weren’t written; they were earned; and Maru failed. While that woman’s life had gone on to be sorrowful, lonesome, and of so much less than Maru’s on a superficial level. While her works were never seen or heard from by the masses, despite their eventual excellence. Maru had written stories which were easy to get seen and published—they were far lesser and without soul; romances of regurgitation and low-brow sexual pandering. Still, that woman had been with her daughter again on Earth and in heaven.
Maru didn’t know until her end on Earth, crying alone—realizing all those people she had gifted with so much instead of that woman who made her heart burn so brightly were only frauds using her back; all playing battles of manipulation against each other and winning against Maru forever for her plainness—that all would be paid back in the end and life itself was very meaningful.
It was the proving ground of soul. Something she had lost when she failed to stand for honor and truth, instead hiding in cowardice while that woman lost everything.
Hobbling from the viscera chambers, lamenting the length of each cycle gone on, crippled in mind by the shrinking size of the breathing flesh walls, she saw them all hanging there.
Maru spent the end of every cycle passing by friends who laughed beside her—and those parents whom she had acted in bad faith on behalf of; for ongoing practical support while torturing the disabled woman on Earth—hanged and flayed in each cycle of that underworld of her perpetual afterlife.
Finally, crawling back into the pool of her demise—silently praying to herself that it would be the last cycle—reliving those final moments of Maru’s life over again. She realized it: she’d never really been a person at all.
Maru had forsaken personhood to become the devil’s bride instead of a single kind voice to save a woman who loved her from losing her mind; and for pride.
She didn’t like being wrong; Maru would never admit that.
And she didn’t apologize to anyone.
